UK RIPA Pt 3

[Florian Weimer]

* Peter Fairbrother:

> I forgot to mention that Pt.3 also includes coercive demands for
> access keys - so for instance if Mr Bill Gates came to the UK, and if
> there was some existing question about Microsoft's behaviour in some
> perhaps current EU legal matter, Mr Gates could be required to give up
> the keys to the Microsoft internal US servers. Or go to jail.

Well, if Mr Gates is a witness and not a suspect, such coercive
measures are well within the legal framework of most countries.  As a
witness, you must testify.  It simply does not matter if the
information you are asked to provide is encrypted, or is stored in a
database and needs significant preprocessing to obtain.  It would be
quite surprising if this was any different in the UK.

So it's purely the self-incrimination part that is questionable from a
legal POV.  I think this bears repeating because we face a similar
discussion in Germany regarding covert data seizure using
technological measures, and the discussion focuses almost entirely on
the technological measures.  But the legal obstacle is just the
covertness.

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