New York Times 5/3/99: "New U.K. Key Escrow Policy Awaits Comments"

[PLEASE SAVE MY EARTH! <waste@zor.hut.fi>]

http://www.nytimes.com/techweb/TW_New_U_K_Key_Escrow_Policy_Awaits_Comments.html

March 5, 1999

New U.K. Key Escrow Policy Awaits Comments
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Filed at 5:26 p.m. EST
By Madeleine Acey for TechWeb, CMPnet

LONDON -- The British IT community and civil-liberties groups broadly
welcomed a government report on key escrow released Friday.
But they said they were furious they were only given three weeks to respond.
The Department of Trade and Industry's policy -- which proposed licensing
of encryption providers that would require them to hold copies of users'
encryption keys for law-enforcement access to electronic communications --
had been lambasted by IT companies, e-commerce groups, privacy campaigners,
and even the national Post Office.

Prime Minister Tony Blair asked a select group of major IT companies at a
secret meeting at No. 10 Downing Street on Thursday to come up with
alternatives to key escrow, indicating the government had decided to ditch
the policy.

Although the industry would be consulted over the next three weeks, key
escrow was "not dead and buried at all," said U.K. Telecom Minister Michael
Wills Friday morning. "Of course, it is still an option, and we'll have to
see what else comes up," he said.

"We have listened to industry -- they have persuaded us that it might not
be the best way forward," Wills said.

The government was, therefore, now consulting on the basis that key escrow
or recovery would not be a requirement for licensing of encryption
providers, he said.

A National Criminal Intelligence Service spokesman said the police
organization was pleased law enforcement had been considered, but said he
was disappointed some of the proposals about key escrow have not been
adopted yet. Caspar Bowden, director of the Foundation for Information
Policy Research, said he planned to file a formal complaint about the
breach of Cabinet Office guidelines, which set a minimum requirement of
eight weeks on consultation documents.

"[Three weeks was] nowhere near long enough," said Roger Till, director of
e centre UK -- an e-commerce industry association representing 15,000
businesses. "We hoped there would be an ongoing process of consultation."
E centre UK approached the National Criminal Intelligence Service last
month to open a dialog between opposing parties.

Till added e centre had already proposed an alternative to key escrow
involving the extension of existing powers to intercept communications.
"Whatever the licensing regime is, criminals are not going to use it," he
said. "There are lots of ways to obtain encryption. In the States, they've
started to move away from key escrow because it's difficult to manage, it's
costly, and it's not really going to solve the problem," Till said.
"The good guys would do it and the bad guys wouldn't; it wouldn't work,"
said a Sun Microsystems spokesman. "It would have caused Britain some
problems in the e-commerce space."

The U.K. situation mirrored that of the United States five years ago, said
Simon Davies, spokesman for Privacy International. "This government has
learned from the U.S. to camouflage its policy in verbal contortions," he
said. "I think the U.K. government is being used as a lubricant to help
justify preferred U.S. policy."

(c) 1999 CMP Media Inc.