First report: Important developments and substantive issues, March-July 2016 2016, para. 31
Paragraph- Paragraph text
- Statements such as these suggest one of four options: (a) the Minister is being badly briefed; (b) the Minister is being briefed by people who do not understand how encryption really works; (c) the Minister does not understand the brief; or (d) the Minister is deliberately misrepresenting the situation to the House of Lords. The Special Rapporteur does not wish to believe that this is a case of deliberate misrepresentation and therefore appeals to the Noble Lord and all his fellow members of the House of Lords to get on top of a few simple facts. Perhaps if the members of the House of Lords were to understand the arguments presented by the Government of the Netherlands on 4 January 2016, they would then understand why attempts to legislate weakened encryption into being are a bad idea and particularly daft in practice. They would understand that, far from being "entirely sensible", such proposals are entirely nonsensical. They would also understand why statements such as "Law enforcement and the intelligence agencies must retain the ability to require telecommunications operators to remove encryption in limited circumstances" are illusory and a far cry from reality. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies in most cases emphatically do not have the ability to require telecommunications operators to remove encryption - or else they may require them to do so until they are blue in the face - for the simple reason that in most cases the telecommunications operators do not have that ability in the first place. If the Parliament of the United Kingdom were to be misguided enough to approve such a particularly nonsensical piece of legislation, it would only require a very small effort for an individual to download any number of encryption algorithms/encrypted communications programmes produced outside either the United Kingdom or the United States, but freely available on the Internet, and then use such programmes to communicate with others intent on causing harm inside the United Kingdom. There is nothing a telecommunications operator can do in such circumstances and nothing more a signals intelligence agency can do than try to crack the code.
- Legal status
- Non-negotiated soft law
- Body
- Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy
- Document type
- Special Procedures' report
- Means of adoption
- N.A.
- Topic(s)
- Governance & Rule of Law
- Person(s) affected
- N.A.
- Year
- 2016
- Paragraph type
- Other
- Paragraph number
- 31
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