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Imagine that you are afraid of a knock on the door.
Imagine that the knock could be the police, coming in secret to
interrogate you. Imagine that they can demand you decrypt files for
them, and demand you tell them your code keys, even to get evidence to
use against you. In effect, they can force you to testify against
yourself, and it is a crime to refuse.
Imagine that for these offenses you are effectively considered guilty
unless you can prove your innocence: mere failure to comply is the
crime. If you do not have the key they demand, you will be imprisoned
unless you can prove it.
Imagine that they can behave arbitrarily, because their actions are
secret. They do not need to get a court's authorization to demand
your testimony. And if you tell anyone -- your friends and associates,
a news reporter, even in most circumstances an open courtroom -- that
you have been forced to testify, they will imprison you just for
telling.
Imagine that the only judicial control over these actions is a special
secret court, with no jury, where decisions are made by judges chosen
for their sympathy to the prosecution. Imagine that they can hear
evidence from the prosecutors in secret, so you do not even have a
chance to deny it.
Unfortunately, there is no need for imagination. This is a real
proposal -- not in China or Iraq, as you might expect, but in Britain.
It was proposed as part of the draft Electronic Communications bill
(http://www.fipr.org/polarch/draftbill99/index.html), but has been
withdrawn from there, probably to be reintroduced shortly in a
separate "Regulation of Investigatory Powers" bill. (Proposals to
extend government power are often secreted in bills with
opposite-sounding names.) The country that gave the world the concept
of the rights of citizens, of protection from abuse of government
power, of the right to remain silent and not be compelled to testify
against yourself, is tearing up the concept and throwing it away.
The rot in the British legal system began under the previous
Conservative government, which passed an "anti-terrorist" law saying
that -- for certain crimes -- if you refuse to answer questions, that can
be held against you. Thus the first stone was thrown at the right to
remain silent.
As a supposed protection against abuse, this law said that courts must
not convict based on silence alone; they must have some other basis as
well. But the same law established that an official accusation of
membership in a prohibited organization can also be held against you.
This, too, is not sufficient by itself -- which only means that the two
together are needed for a conviction. If you are accused of belonging
to a prohibited organization, and you refuse to answer police
questions, you go to prison.
Of course, every law that undermines the rights of citizens has an
"urgent" justification. For this law, the justification was IRA
terrorism; but the cure is far worse than the disease. A century from
now, IRA bombing will be just a chapter of history, but the painful
effects of the "cure" will still be felt.
The "New Labor" government of Prime Minister Blair which replaced the
Conservative government is eager to extend this policy to other areas.
I was not greatly surprised to learn that the same government also
plans to eliminate the right to a jury in criminal trials (see The
Guardian, November 20 1999, page 1). These policies would gladden the
heart of an Argentine general.
When you speak with British officials about the issue, they insist
that you can trust them to use their power wisely for the good of all.
Of course, that is absurd. Britain must hold to the tradition of
British law, and respect the rights of citizens to a fair trial and
non-self-incrimination.
When you try to discuss the details, they respond with pettifoggery;
for example, they pretend that the plan would not really consider you
guilty until proven innocent, because the official forms that demand
your code keys and your silence are officially considered the proof of
guilt. That in practice this is indistinguishable from requiring
proof of innocence requires more perspicuity than they will admit to.
If you live in Britain, what can you do?
Take political action now. Tell all the political parties that
this issue is of great concern to you, and invite each to be the one
you will vote for to prevent such laws. Look at www.stand.org.uk for
further advice.
Write to your MP, the e-Minister Patricia Hewitt (e.minister@dti.gov.uk),
the Home Secretary, and the newspapers, stating your firm opposition
to these measures.
Talk with your Internet Service Provider's management about the
importance of this issue.
Start using encrypted mail, using the GNU Privacy Guard or another
suitable encryption program, and use it as widely as possible and with
as many people as possible. The more people are using encryption, the
harder it will be for governments to stamp it out. The GNU Privacy
Guard is Free Software (you are free to redistribute and change it),
and is available on www.gnupg.org.
Once you have read an encrypted message, if you don't need to save
it, get rid of it. Don't just delete the file; copy several other
files of junk into the file, one by one, so that the old bits cannot
be recovered. (The GNU Privacy Guard will soon provide a convenient
command for doing this.)
If you need to save an encrypted message, use steganography to hide
it inside one or more image files, so that it is impossible for anyone
to be sure that encrypted data is present. You can use steganography
for transmitting messages as well.
Anyone, even you, could be a target of this law. Don't assume that
you are safe just because you are "not a criminal"; almost everyone
breaks some laws, but even if you do not, you could still be
suspected. Your friends and correspondents are likely to be next
after you.
So arrange innocent-sounding "code phrases" with them now, things like
"Agnes has a bad cold" (but don't use this one!), as a way you can
inform them that you were interrogated by the secret police, without
giving the police a way to detect that you did so.
You never know what might lead the secret police to your door. Take
the necessary precautions now, because the only thing worse than
fearing the knock on the door is being oblivious to the danger.
Copyright 1999 Richard Stallman
Verbatim copying and redistribution of this entire article is permitted
in any medium provided this notice is preserved.
Richard Stallman is the founder of the Free Software
Foundation, the author of the GNU General Public License
(GPL), and the original developer of such notable software as
gcc and Emacs.
Ian G. Batten comments:
I spent quite some time with RMS ten years ago, and I have a high regard
for his intellect and insights. I also have been campaigning within the UK
on this topic.
Richard makes a few conflations that should be corrected. The Prevention
of Terrorism act is, as someone points out, temporary legislation that has
to be renewed annually, and will almost certainly pass into history with
the troubles (we hope). Certainly the provisions allowing exclusion from
the mainland are unsustainable. The appalling measures to allow inferences
to be drawn from silence were not related to the PoTA, but were introduced
in a crime bill for use against _all_ suspects. The current government's
proposals to end the rights of jury trials are also extremely disturbing,
but are in fact not a new principle: there are already crimes for which no
right of jury trial exists. The extension to imprisonable crimes is new,
but it is unlikely the measure will make law in its current form. The
government has also mooted passing permanent legislation which alters the
PoTA provisions and makes some of them permanent: I am not clear about the
status of that effort. The worst aspect of the distortions of the law
caused by the troubles are Diplock Courts, which allow judges to sit alone
on cases that would _always_ be jury trials on the mainland. The
nationalist community, particularly, is rightly suspicious of that.
I'd take significant issue, by the way, with Richard's claim that the
``cure is far worse than the disease'' in the case of the IRA terrorism.
The tragedy of the PoTA is in fact that it didn't provide any sort of cure.
Its powers, however, can be seen to be proportionate to killing on the
scale of the mainland bombing campaigns of the seventies and eighties.
America has never experienced that (the World Trade Centre and the Oklahoma
bombings were carried out in isolation) and I would suggest that if fatal
bombings because routine in the USA people would be far less critical of
measures, no matter how misguided, taken in an attempt to prevent them.
That's not to defend them, but to set them in a context.
However, Richard cuts to the core of the issue surrounding the forthcoming
Interception of Communications Act update (which is, I believe, where this
issue has found its squalid home). It means, for example, that I could be
compelled under force of law to disclose my private key because mail sent
_to_ me by ``suspects'' was under scrutiny, and that a disclosure by me to
another party that mail sent to me was being read would be itself illegal.
This is socially corrosive, morally wrong and technically ludicrous. It's
ludicrous because duress phrases and perfect forward secrecy protocols
allow the bad guys to know the situation or prevent it mattering, while for
the man in the street things are not so good. Laws which attack the
innocent while providing no threat to the guilty are not merely morally
repugnant, they are practically useless as well.
However, it's unhelpful to talk of a `British Secret Police'. Hyperbole
like that doesn't assist those of us in the UK opposed to these measures in
opposing them, any more than muttering about ZOG assists your case in the
US --- no matter how right your argument may be. There is no likelihood of
a secret police taking people into a Kafkaesque nightmare. There is,
however, every chance of innocent bystanders having their privacy assaulted
and, most importantly, little chance of actual criminals being detected.
Richard Stallman responds:
Ian Batten was kind enough to mail me his response to my article. He
argues that Americans might accept repressive measures more readily if we
were more afraid of terrorism. That could well be true, since the US has
employed such measures domestically in the past. It only shows that
Americans can be just as foolish as anyone else. We must educate America,
as well as Britain, to reject tyranny when it is offered as a solution to
the problem du jour.
I stand by the use of the term "secret police". While the proposal does
not involve a special and separate police force, any police force that
interrogates people in secret is entirely qualified for the term.
