The Federation of Electronic Industries has warned the Government
that the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) bill faces
serious technical hurdles if the government presses ahead with
legislation.
David BicknellTom Wills-Sandford, the FEI's Director of Information and
Communications Technology last week told Computer Weekly
that, irrespective of the civil liberties issues now being debated,
the IT industry has yet to find a technical solution to monitor
Internet traffic.
Although the FEI has previously warned the Home Office that
technical hurdles persist, they had not taken the message on board
in the wake of industry concerns over costs to Internet service
providers, and worries over civil liberties issues.
Wills-Sandford's warning follows the failure of the latest
public consultation meeting, Scrambling for Safety, to bridge the
widening gap between Home Office legislators and campaigners. At
the event, Home Office minister Charles Clarke refused to budge
over concerns regarding a defendant's ability to "prove" that they
did not have access to a decryption key if requested by law
enforcement officials.
Wills-Sandford insisted that the FEI did not consider it
impossible to be able to monitor Internet traffic, but simply that
the computer industry has yet to find a way to achieve it. "It is
one thing sitting at the end of a network monitoring communications
when there is one route where a message could travel. It is
something else sitting in the middle of a network when you don't
know the route a message can take. It is like sitting in a middle
of a snowstorm," he said.
The Home Office is believed to have commissioned a report from
consultants to verify the industry's concerns. However, the report
is expected to be classified, and so if the industry is to be able
to read the report when it is published, a declassified version
will be needed.
The UK Government may also find it difficult to persuade US
communications specialists such as Nortel and Cisco to make
producing specific interception capabilities for the UK a priority
when the US have rejected it.