The gov­ern­ment is look­ing to force peo­ple to hand over encryp­tion keys — in the name of fight­ing ter­ror­ism and crime of course.

Geeklawyer has men­tioned many times before his the­ory of gov­ern­ments as infor­ma­tion junkies. Infor­ma­tion is action. Infor­ma­tion is a com­fort blan­ket. But above all else Infor­ma­tion is con­trol. The more you know the more you can believe you can do.

Telling a junkie that he can’t have what he wants and needs, what he desires most at any price is fraught with dan­ger: get between an infor­ma­tion crack addict and his rocks and you are likely to be on the receiv­ing end of aggres­sion and vio­lence. Author­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ments are the same, they just wear nicer suits.

When it was intro­duced in 2000 the Reg­u­la­tion of Inves­ti­ga­tory Pow­ers Act, RIPA, was panned as a dra­con­ian and author­i­tar­ian mea­sure with­out jus­ti­fi­ca­tion or need. This was, of course, in the days of cud­dly Tony Bliar when the Dear Leader was thought to be mostly harm­less and def­i­nitely well mean­ing: ah sweet golden days of milk and delusion.

Encryp­tion is com­mer­cially prag­matic: if you run a web­site it’s best if client credit details are encrypted. On a per­sonal level it’s also desir­able: the best way to ensure ne’er do wells who’ve stolen your lap­top don’t mis­use your data is by encrypt­ing the hard-drive. And of course it’s the right of the cit­i­zen to keep his secrets secret from the state.

That idea is a shock­ing anath­ema to the Dear Leader. The Dear Leader loves you like a stern and fair par­ent. But it’s a tough love and you owe him a duty of unques­tion­ing obe­di­ence; you must let him look around your bed­room; you must let him read your diary and emails to make sure you are behav­ing and that your friends are ‘the right sort’. It’s all a basic parental duty and right and as a duti­ful child you must help him in this or be justly punished.

So why would you want to keep secrets from the Dear Leader? Only the guilty do that: the pae­dophiles, the ter­ror­ists, the drug deal­ers, the ani­mal rights extrem­ists, and worst of all the Ene­mies of Free­dom; the dis­trib­u­tors of dishar­mony, dis­con­tent and defama­tions of the Dear Leader.

Under sec­tion 3 of RIPA, when it finally is put into force, you will be required to pro­vide either your decryp­tion keys or a decrypted ver­sion of the infor­ma­tion. You don’t have to have com­mit­ted a crime or to have been arrested or be sub­ject to an order by a court. If the encrypted infor­ma­tion falls into the hands of the state you can be com­pelled to dis­close it to them. It will be for you to prove that you don’t have the key: guilt will be assumed and you will have to prove your­self innocent.

Geeklawyer is intend­ing to make a non­sense of this under a scheme which he hopes will become pop­u­lar. He will pro­vide encrypted files that you can down­load but which you will not have the keys to. Nei­ther will Geeklawyer since he will destroy the keys imme­di­ately after the file is cre­ated. Pro­tes­tors will be enti­tled to record their par­tic­i­pa­tion in the scheme and fill their data direc­to­ries with his encrypted files. If chal­lenged to pro­duce the keys Geeklawyer will explain to the state why this is impos­si­ble for the pro­tes­tor, or Geeklawyer, to do. In his view this is a rea­son­able excuse that should enti­tle the pro­tes­tor to a good defence. And of course only the pro­tes­tor will know if there are any files that did not come from Geeklawyer.

Geeklawyer will need to develop a script to gen­er­ate such file so this will not appear on the site imme­di­ately but it will happen.