Not revealing your password, a criminal offense in UK

The British police is getting the right to demmand the password to your encrypted data, the penalty for refusing to reveal your password carries a jail sentence.

The Part III of the Ripa Act (UK) will come into force 1st October:
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2193876/government-ripa-part-iii

Forgetting it is not a valid excuse as you will have to prove you have forgotten it, not the other way around, and if after revealing all your private data the police decides in fact you had nothing illegal encrypted, there will be no compensation. Welcome to Big Brother Britain.

 

Good to hear. Its about time we took the gloves off when dealing with terrorists.
They can inspect my data anytime without paying compensation.

 

You probably don't know much about terrorists and "taking off the gloves", in my country of origin where the terrorists are far much more numerous and powerful than in the UK, the police usually tortures them with electric cathodes, beatings, raping the female militants, and threats to kill their families. I am not making this up, all this is well documented in the annual Amnesty International report.

This system has been working excellent for the last 40 years and 100% of the terrorists always sign confessions with all the details, hard disk encryption it is irrelevant once you have a signed confession with all the details.

But wee UK believes that terrorists will prefer to betray the cause they are ready to die for and their comrades rather than facing prison, which is rubbish. If you are going to fight terrorism you do it the right way.

I am all for legalisation of torture of terrorists and their families, but the Ripa Act will help in nothing.

 

So, searching through private data = A Bad Thing
State sanctioned torture = A Good Thing?

Just trying to understand...

 

A friend of mine came up with a cute idea. Set your password to something like "ICommittedCriminalOffenceXXXXXXonDDDD"... then use the right not to self-incriminate to hand over the password. It raised a smile, but I am unsure how effective it would be.

The problem with giving sweeping powers to inspect data is the fact that the data is inspected by people. People who have power tend to abuse it.

... until you, or a member of your family are falsely accused of being a terrorist, in which case I assume you would sign anything to make the pain stop... I just hope you were being sarcastic in your post



[NB. This is a personal post and not the view of my employer]