The first law, to be drafted by the Department of Trade and Industry, will not compel users to hand over copies of the software keys used to encrypt electronic data. But the second one, from the Home Office, will enable intelligence and law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant for access to information necessary to decrypt the contents of communications or stored data. Failure to comply would be a criminal offence. But plans to allow search warrants to be extended to the total contents of everyone's computer files and e-mail, however private, have raised worries. It's like invading the mind.
Legal experts predict technical difficulties ahead for the new laws' drafters.
If the only suspected evidence of a crime is the unknown contents of encrypted computer files, then forcing a user to unlock them by handing over their codes would, controversially, remove the right to silence. They will be useless against some telephone systems already in use. In particular, the telephone version of his system, PGP Phone, which allows Net users to hold securely scrambled telephone conversations online, could never be unscrambled retrospectively. According to Cambridge University security specialist Ross Anderson, the restrictions have meant that gas meters made by a Birmingham company and using an American encryption system to validate prepayments cannot yet legally be exported to member states. In Britain and the US, export controls have often been used to prevent code systems being exported unless the electronic intelligence agencies, GCHQ and NSA, were able to read the codes.