Another parliamentary committee in the UK asks the government to clarify its proposed legislation on encryption

An UK parliamentary committee set up in order to review the the draft Investigatory Powers Bill (known as ‘’Snooper’s charter’) has published its report on this governmental proposed legislation. The report contains a separate section on encryption, in which the committee notes that the draft law needs to be amended in order to clarify the fact that public authorities cannot require encryption keys to be compromised or backdoors to be installed into systems. The committee also asks the government to make it clear that providers ‘offering end-to-end encrypted communication or other un-decryptable communication services will not be expected to provide decrypted copies of those communications if it is not practicable for them to do so’. Concerns are also expressed in the report with regard to the provisions for targeted interception and equipment interference, which the committee considers to be too broad; it therefore recommends  that the draft bill is ‘amended so that targeted interception and targeted equipment interference warrants cannot be used as a way to issue thematic warrants concerning a very large number of people’.