How your privacy could soon RIP

By Simon Davies

City: Peers block e-snooping Bill

THIS week, the House of Lords will vote on a Bill
designed to create a regime of surveillance for the
entire internet. Fuelled by fears of rampant anarchy,
pornography and a digital black economy, the
Government is pressing ahead with measures of
intrusion into cyberspace without parallel anywhere
outside Russia.

The legislation, known as the Regulation of
Investigatory Powers (RIP) Bill, authorises government
agencies to snoop, often without warrant, on the e-mail
and internet activities of everyone with an internet
connection. "Black boxes" will connect internet service
providers directly to the HQ of MI5. 

The security services will be provided with new powers
to use this machinery to monitor British domestic
internet activities. People are up in arms. True, the
internet can be a scary place - particularly for those
who can't remember when the telephone and the
printing press induced similar anxieties. Some people
in government are also scared of the internet. 

They believe criminality and tax evasion will flourish in
cyberspace. Having spent much of the past decade
trying unsuccessfully to figure out ways of controlling
the medium, government has struck upon a novel idea:
make sure everyone using the internet knows they are
being watched.

But although Britain already has the highest level of
conventional mail and phone interception, per capita,
than anywhere in the Western world, at least those
intrusions are regarded as extraordinary. The real
problem with the RIP Bill is that it builds surveillance
into the core of the internet, and thus destabilises the
very foundation of the medium.

An unprecedented alliance has formed an ad-hoc
coalition of opposition to the Bill. Yesterday, more than
50 organisations ranging from the Countryside Alliance
to Unison signed an open letter demanding the
withdrawal of the Bill. They warn that the measures are
heavy-handed and ill-considered, and will lead to loss of
confidence in e-commerce, unacceptable costs to
business and to the British economy, confusion and
uncertainty at numerous levels of business activity, and
an onerous imposition on the rights of individuals.

The Bill permits surveillance of the internet "for the
purpose of assessing or collecting any tax, duty, levy
or other imposition, contribution or charge payable to a
government department". Would the authorities ever
use these powers? On the basis of the past record of
the Inland Revenue, it is likely that they will. 

It was recently revealed that they have approached
supermarkets to obtain loyalty card files. They say the
information is useful to determine whether a person's
spending pattern matches the way of life implied by his
tax return. Consider, also, the requirement in the Bill for
computer users and companies to hand over on
demand their "decryption" keys to the Government. 

It sounds mundane, but this simple requirement in the
legislation is likely to drive businesses off-shore.
Encryption (the mathematics of scrambling data so it is
unintelligible to business rivals) sits at the heart of the
functioning of modern business, and it forms the core of
the trust in the e-commerce and banking industries.

Enter government, with its size 12 boots, demanding
that businesses hand over these priceless items.
Bemused investors and venture capital leaders have
warned that the requirement compromises the core
security of business. And that means investment in
new British projects in e-commerce will fall off sharply.

Sensing a potential economic disaster, the British
Chambers of Commerce recently commissioned some
academic colleagues and me to conduct an
assessment of the economic impact of the Bill. We
concluded that it would create an economic Chernobyl
amounting to a cost to the British economy of £46
billion over five years. 

Instead of causing an uproar, business groups have
been quiet, choosing to pursue discreet meetings with
ministers rather than dropping depth charges. The
reason, perhaps, can be traced to a civil servant from
the DTI, Nigel Hickson. In a scene worthy of Yes,
Minister, the Government placed Hickson "on loan" to
the CBI, from where he started to co-ordinate the
business response to the Bill. Scary stuff.

In the face of increased opposition from non-business
groups, Jack Straw entered the fray. He talked up the
potential for the Bill to tackle crime on the internet, and
launched a spirited attack on our economic report. Mr
Straw's intervention is significant. It indicates that the
driving force behind the Bill is substantial, and the air of
desperation within sections of government to get the
legislation through has blinded the Home Office to
commercial and human rights sensitivities. 

It is already clear that the Government is starting to
split on RIP, with Stephen Byers publicly lobbying
Straw to reconsider. This is one of the few Bills in
recent memory that threaten the interests of commerce
and human rights. The Lords should act in everyone's
interest, and throw it out.

Simon Davies is director of Privacy International and
visiting fellow in the Department of Information Systems
at the London School of Economics

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Cheers,
Bob.


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