UK gov says new Home Sec will have powers to ban end-to-end encryption

[steve2470]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/14/gov_says_new_home_sec_iwilli_have_powers_to_ban_endtoend_encryption/?mt=1468494499944

During a committee stage debate in the House of Lords yesterday, the government revealed it intends that the Investigatory Powers Bill will provide any Secretary of State with the ability to force communication service providers (CSPs) to remove or disable end-to-end encryption.

Earl Howe, a Minister of State for Defence and the government's Deputy Leader in the House of Lords, gave the first explicit admission that the new legislation would provide the government with the ability to force CSPs to “develop and maintain a technical capability to remove encryption that has been applied to communications or data”.

This power, if applied, would be imposed upon domestic CSPs by the new Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, who was formerly the secretary of state for Energy and Climate Change. Rudd is now only the fifth woman to hold one of the great offices of state in the UK. As she was only appointed on Wednesday evening, she has yet to offer her thoughts on the matter.

Present at the House of Lords debate, the Liberal Democrat member Lord Strasburger complained that “the implication of what [the government] is saying is that no one may develop end-to-end encryption. One feature of end-to-end encryption is that the provider cannot break it; encryption is private between the users at both ends. He seems to be implying that providers can use only encryption which can be broken and therefore cannot be end to end, so the next version of the Apple iPhone would in theory become illegal. I think that there is quite a lot of work to be done on this.”