Consultation on the draft code of practice for the Investigation of Protected Electronic Information
We are seeking comments on the code, to see if anything more, or anything different, should be included before it is put to Parliament for approval.
The closing date for the consultation was August 30. However, due to a high number of people asking if they can submit a late response the deadline was extended by two weeks until the 13 September. We are currently working through the responses we have already received and we will publish a summary of the responses when this is complete.
About Part III
Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 established powers to impose a requirement upon a person to put protected electronic information into an intelligible form or to disclose a key which will enable the data to be put into an intelligible form.
Those provisions have not yet been implemented because the development and adoption of encryption and other information protection technologies has been slower than was anticipated when the Act was passed.
The Government has, however, kept under review the need to implement the provisions in Part III, by taking account of the extent to which protection of electronic data has frustrated law enforcement and obstructed the delivery of justice to victims.
Over the last two to three years, investigators have begun encountering encrypted and protected data with increasing frequency. This, and the rapidly growing availability of encryption products including the advent of encryption products as integrated security features in standard operating systems, has led the Government to judge that it is now timely to implement the provisions of Part III.
This consultation follows an illustrative draft of the code which was made available when the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Bill was before Parliament, comments on the earlier draft code have been taken into account in the revised draft of the code, which has been substantially rewritten.
The consultation closes on 13 September 2006.
Date: Tue Jun 06 13:55:40 BST 2006
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