Curbing our right to online freedom

Like the draconian 'RIP' laws introduced last year, the new cyber-crime unit may restrict freedom of speech, writes Neil McIntosh, deputy editor of Guardian Online

Neil McIntosh
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday April 18 2001 16.01 BST

Today's unveiling of a £25m cyber crime-busting unit, the national hi-tech crime unit (NHTCU), looks to be good news. The UK police forces have, until now, had only an ad hoc approach to the problems of crime on the internet. This new initiative means, for the first time, that there is a coordinated effort against major internet crime, including child pornography and cyber-terrorism.

Breakthroughs against the supposed new class of "cyber-criminals" have, until now, been as the result of old-fashioned detective work - or just plain good luck - rather than because of any great technical awareness on the part of the police. Raids on one paedophile's home would uncover images and details which would lead to others in a ring; this is how the Wonderland Club, a worldwide internet paedophile ring, was smashed earlier this year.

Within the new unit, for the first time, resources will be concentrated on understanding how these crimes are committed. Police might manage to get beyond simple reaction to online crimes which surface in the offline world by chance, and move to hunt them down in their native habitat, where online criminals believe that the internet gives them anonymity they cannot enjoy away from their computer terminals.

But there are dangers in all this. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) act, which came into force last year, was written on the basis that Britain's security forces, including the police and MI5, needed some special help with the net. It assumed they would not have the ability to work out what crimes were being committed online without extra powers - powers they would not enjoy in the physical world, and powers which US authorities apparently do not need.

The RIP act is a draconian piece of legislation, as regular readers of Guardian Online will know. Now, nothing you write in an email, or attach to an email, or do on the internet, can ever be assumed to be private.

Furthermore, those unfortunates charged under it - the RIP victims - must, for a start, prove themselves and their online communications innocent, reversing the burden of proof and forcing the accused to prove what they were doing is above board.

The way they are to prove this innocence is to hand over the keys to any encrypted information that they have sent or stored. Should they forget the key, they could go to jail for two years - opening up the possibility that, eventually, drug barons and porn peddlers will routinely encrypt anything incriminating. That way, they can choose to "forget" the key and take two years in jail, rather than open up the files and face far longer in the clink.

The list of horrors included in the RIP bill goes on and on: a sledgehammer law designed to support security services at the expense of civil liberties which are taken for granted in most of the western world. Tim Berners-Lee, the British inventor of the world-wide web, has said the RIP bill would have been rejected "in a second" in the US. Britain does not join the best company with its RIP bill - other places to have similar laws include Russia and Malaysia.

Most countries, however, see that protecting encryption from government demands might pay dividends in increased e-commerce, and that attempting to clamp down on its use would be pointless. Ireland has passed a law making it illegal for the government to access encryption keys, while France and Germany have both rejected controls on citizen's use of encryption technology.

Of course one supports the work of the police. Online crime erodes confidence in the medium and, even more importantly than that, causes real pain, suffering and loss in the physical world. And it should, really, be good news that the police is doing more to protect us online.

But, because of RIP, forgive me if my reaction to this morning's trumpeting is a little muted: I've never been a victim of online crime, don't know anyone who has been, yet we are all victims of those new laws.

Email
neil.mcintosh@guardian.co.uk

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