[Cryptography] United kingdom investigatory powers bill.

[Jeremy French]

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I've been following the progress of this reasonably closely. It is the British attempt to legalize mass surveillance.

There was a committee today about it where the home secretary Theresa May (the bills sponsor) was being questioned.

This is a segment about end to end encryption

Q: But what if someone is using end-to-end encryption?

A: May says companies would be expected to take “reasonable steps” to provide the information required.


So far so good. If you don't have a key there is nothing you can reasonably do. But then it goes down hill.

Q: So you are not asking companies to provide “keys” to information, or a backdoor in.

A: No, says May. It is just about ensuring that, if companies are required to supply information, they supply it. The government would not need to have the “key” itself.


So the only ground given is that the key won't be given to the government. This still sounds like encryption that a communication provider supplies should not be inaccessible to that provider. Which I guess would mean email provides in the UK would have to block pgp emails, for example.

 Theresa May often sounds like she doesn't quite know what she is talking about. But her advisers do, I'm pretty sure this stumbling round technical terms is just evading hard answers. Once the bill is passed the home office will suddenly become very clear.

Transcript from here http://www.theguardian.com/politics/blog/live/2016/jan/13/cameron-and-corbyn-at-pmqs-politics-live its not the official one so could be wrong.

Jeremy
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