Encrypt your web stuff and risk a two or five year prison sentence.

There's new legislation well on it's way through Parliament that could mean going to prison if you encrypt your web communications and can't tell the cops the encryption key - even if it's only because you've lost or forgotten it. You're guilty until you can prove you really have forgotten it.

And, if you're dragged away in the middle of the night to divulge the encryption key, come home and tell somebody why you were dragged away, you could end up in clink for five years.

Every server will need to have some electronics gubbins plugged into it so that every piece of web traffic can be monitored. Somebody please, please tell me I've been dreaming. The birthplace of parliamentary democracy ? Pull the other one.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000

Answers

I can see people organising 24 hour vigils to send e-mails with just 'F off Nazi state' in them until they stop.

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000

Maybe the regular police can't monitor every bite, but there are agencies that already can. Saw a report a few weeks about a place located in England, and I think, run by a bunch of Americans that claim to be able to monitor just about everything on the net. Supposedly they get some kind of alert when email with certain key words goes through. So, yes, Softie, if you include words such as "bomb" in your mail they can catch it and monitor you more closely.

And yes, I promptly emailed a bunch of my friends with "bomb" in the my message. ;-)))

Pardon me a mo' someone's knocking on my door....

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000

Don't know if anybody's interested but I wrote an article on this last week. It's a bit business related but I covers some of the areas which seem completely unnaceptable, including the 'guilty until proven innocent' clause for encryption.

It's at http://www.itnetworkms.com/eb.asp?b=49&a=6078&i=1079594

Alternatively there's an organisation called Stand that's dedicated to fighting this bill. I think they're at www.stand.org

This bill violates many of our civil and human rights, but there's pretty much nothing we can do about it, as it's been fast-tracked through parliament and has already had its third reading. So its pretty much a watch what you're doing from now on. They can now track anyone's activities for pretty much any reason they want.

Wolfie Smith

-- Anonymous, June 05, 2000