Government Stumbles Along The E- Path To Commerce

Third Scrambling for Safety Conference sees impending e-commerce bill deflated

With the deadline for consultations rapidly approaching on 1 April, the third edition of the Scrambling for Safety Conference saw the Government turn out in force to defend and defuse the controversies surrounding the e-commerce bill, from the ridiculously short consultation period to the issue of law-enforcement access to encrypted data. Aside from a few clichés, however, explanations were thin on the ground and no reply was given to investigative reporter Duncan Campbell's denouncement of wider intelligence issues at stake in the key escrow debate.

The Under Secretary for Communications and Information Industries of the Department of Trade and Industry, Michael Wills, could only take a couple of questions from the audience at the Scrambling for Safety III Conference before having to run back to Parliament. Which was probably a good thing (for him), seeing that his address was little more than a condensed lesson in the history of communications and a collection of the usual commonplaces used to validate the e-commerce bill. All in all, the kind of show we have come to expect from politicians. And as in all good shows, comedy played an integral part. When, at one point, Wills began to ask: "Would you prefer the bill to pass next year or..." he was not given the time to finish: a near total show of hands indicated that this sounded like a good idea.

This display of democratic participation, however, did not go down well with the under secretary. Wills said the consensus expressed at the conference was not in line with the view expressed by the majority. "(We need the views) of all, not only the expert opinions expressed here", the under secretary concluded.

What the view of the majority was, and where it came from, was not revealed by Wills, but an insight was presented by Stephen Pride of the DTI, who said that following the spread of the Net from a small group of "experts" to the population at large, most people had not even heard and would not be concerned with encryption.

Interestingly, the under secretary also picked up on this notion of the Net's foundations being laid by a small group of idealist enthusiasts and grounded in openness, decentralisation, freedom, etc. All admirable concepts, Wills said, but now, as more people join and the Net "erupts into the real world", some form of control is needed.

Concrete Development

But, in concrete terms, what will this entail? Beyond New Labour's hype of the e-commerce bill as the tool that will lead Britain to the cutting edge of electronic transactions in the 21st Century, the bill offers little content and much confusion at present. The conference, which was organised by Privacy International and the Foundation for Information Policy Research in collaboration with Computer Weekly, highlighted the many questions and doubts raised by the bill, while the government, for its part, seemed to imply that the bill, to be passed in May, would be thin in content and leave itself open to subsequent amendments.

"This is not the last word on the Internet", Wills said. And this must have brought a new sigh of relief to the business sector, which is calling for a light, crisp bill and an ongoing debate with the government, as outlined by Roger Till of e-Centre UK.

According to Till, the 1 April deadline "is a joke", while the consultation period has been "too short". The questions of electronic signatures, licensing and liability all need a longer and more thorough examination. The same point was picked up by Peter Sommer of the LSE who said "consultation was not as thorough as it could have been". Sommer went on to say "encryption should be included on a criminal justice or home office bill" and separated from the DTI's document. Why all the rush then?

The shadow of an intelligence agenda

A veteran in the effort to unmask the hidden activities of intelligence agencies, Duncan Campbell gave a high-density factual presentation which placed the key escrow issue in the wider context of an international strategy aimed at providing access to all forms of telecommunications. In his self-defined "chronicle of wasted time", Campbell argued that it was misleading to stop at the issue of key escrow and went on to identify the ENFOPOL agenda as a more comprehensive cause for concern. Nor is the affair solely a European strategy. Besides the deep connections that link Europe to the United States in this field, other surveillance networks are being implemented across the globe by competing nations. Campbell placed the number of satellites being used for data collection purposes at 100 and illustrated the interception of sea-cable communications and the use of automatic interfaces to monitor where and to who calls are made.

On a national level, the issue of interception warrants in the UK has risen sharply over the nineties. While between the late fifties and the early nineties (excluding a peak between 1984-87) the annual average was contained between 200 and 600, over 1800 warrants were issued in 1995.

For their part, the two dapper civil servants from the Home Office did not reply to any of the points made by Campbell by saying they were only there to discuss the e-commerce bill. While dispelling some "common myths" on snooping and the invasion of privacy, the Home Office failed to provide, amid all the talk of terrorism and paedophilia, any tangible description of what will take the place of key escrow, as requested by law enforcement agencies.

At the end of the day, what remains is the schizophrenic desire of the British government to avidly promote e-commerce while catering to the law enforcement sector. For the time being, nothing has really been decided.