http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/22...ogged-one-year
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

UK phone calls to be logged for one year

Civil liberty groups and opposition parties express outrage
Ian Williams, vnunet.com 01 Oct 2007
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Information about every call from the UK's mobile phones and landlines will have to be logged by operators for one year under an extension to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

The Home Office has stressed that only information about the calls and texts, including the location in the case of mobile calls, will be logged and not the content.

The information will be made available to 652 public bodies, including the Food Standards Agency, district and county councils and the Gaming Board, on request to a senior police official.

Tony McNulty, the UK's minister for security and counter-terrorism, explained in an interview with BBC Radio 4 that the data will be made available on three distinct levels.

"Say some old lady has got difficulties with someone who's repaired the gas in her house and has a mobile phone [number] for somebody who's clearly dodgy. The local authorities can just get the subscriber information next to that number," he said.

"The second level of data is not simply the subscriber, but the calls made by that phone.

"And the third level, which is purely for the security forces and police, is not just the subscriber information and the calls made, but the calls coming in and location data about where the calls are made from."

The new regulations have come under heavy fire from opposition parties and civil liberties groups.

"Once again this government has been caught red handed creating new surveillance state powers with no meaningful public or parliamentary debate," said Nick Clegg, home affairs spokesman for the Liberal Democrats.

A spokesman for civil liberties group Liberty said: "A recent poll suggests that 75 per cent believe we live in a surveillance society. It's high time the authorities did something to win back our trust."

A Home Office spokesman defended the move, maintaining that it followed a directive from the European Union.

''We are not intruding into people's private lives," he said. "Imposing requirements on phone service providers to retain data is part of the difficult balance between protecting people from terrorism and serious crime, and respecting human rights."

The new law was signed off by Home Secretary Jacqui Smith in July.



Only 652 public bodies will have access to that information ! With such a small number, I'm sure that it's unlikely for any abuse or (Heaven forbid!) misuse of such information to take place.

Wait, there's more!

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post...jail-time.html
Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

UK can now demand data decryption on penalty of jail time

By Ken Fisher | Published: October 01, 2007 - 10:20PM CT

New laws going into effect today in the United Kingdom make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

Part 3, Section 49 of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) includes provisions for the decryption requirements, which are applied differently based on the kind of investigation underway. As we reported last year, the five-year imprisonment penalty is reserved for cases involving anti-terrorism efforts. All other failures to comply can be met with a maximum two-year sentence.

The law can only be applied to data residing in the UK, hosted on UK servers, or stored on devices located within the UK. The law does not authorize the UK government to intercept encrypted materials in transit on the Internet via the UK and to attempt to have them decrypted under the auspices of the jail time penalty.
The keys to the (United) Kingdom

The law has been criticized for the power its gives investigators, which is seen as dangerously broad. Authorities tracking the movement of terrorist funds could demand the encryption keys used by a financial institution, for instance, thereby laying bare that bank's files on everything from financial transactions to user data.

Cambridge University security expert Richard Clayton said in May of 2006 that such laws would only encourage businesses to house their cryptography operations out of the reach of UK investigators, potentially harming the country's economy. "The controversy here [lies in] seizing keys, not in forcing people to decrypt. The power to seize encryption keys is spooking big business," Clayton said.

"The notion that international bankers would be wary of bringing master keys into UK if they could be seized as part of legitimate police operations, or by a corrupt chief constable, has quite a lot of traction," he added. "With the appropriate paperwork, keys can be seized. If you're an international banker you'll plonk your headquarters in Zurich."

The law also allows authorities to compel individuals targeted in such investigation to keep silent about their role in decrypting data. Though this will be handled on a case-by-case basis, it's another worrisome facet of a law that has been widely criticized for years. While RIPA was originally passed in 2000, the provisions detailing the handover of cryptographic keys and/or the force decryption of protected content has not been tapped by the UK Home Office—the division of the British government which oversees national security, the justice system, immigration, and the police forces of England and Wales. As we reported last year, the Home Office was slowly building its case to activate Part 3, Section 49.

The Home Office has steadfastly proclaimed that the law is aimed at catching terrorists, pedophiles, and hardened criminals—all parties which the UK government contends are rather adept at using encryption to cover up their activities.

Yet the law, in a strange way, almost gives criminals an "out," in that those caught potentially committing serious crimes may opt to refuse to decrypt incriminating data. A pedophile with a 2GB collection of encrypted kiddie porn may find it easier to do two years in the slammer than expose what he's been up to.



I don't know about you guys, but I get really turned off by the fact that there's been a deluge of such laws all over the world in the last few years, leading more and more towards reducing the privacy and rights of people, and creating environments more and more similar to police states.