[Ir-l] [IR-L]: Re: RIP and PGP

[Paul Mobbs]

Hi all,

A response! Good.

I won't bother responding to the tech talk about PGP because that would be
long and boring (well, except that there is a weakness in the way PGP
generates its primes, and yes I do understand the maths involved, and
Windows 2000's disk encryption is not strong enough to resist
State/security service attck, and in any case all disk encryption systems
have to trade off security for efficiency and so use inherently weaker
encryption algorithms).

But I think people are still missing the point that I was trying to make.

Privacy for privacy's sake is a vaccuous argument. Privacy needs purpose. I
do use PGP, but only to encrypt data on my system, such as address lists,
where I feel I have an obligation to protect the identities/addresses of
people I work with.

The important issue is in relation to how we break the intended aim of both
the Terrorism Bill and the RIP Bill. I think people are missing the issue
that the proposed legislation does not make new theoretical offences. It's
purely giving powers for intrusion into people's lives, and what new
criminal penalties there are relate to people who don't go along with this
principle. That's not being widely reported in the media. People have
always been of the opinion that there is an ofence of 'terrorism'. There is
not, and under the new legislation thwere will not be. Both Bills give
powers over a persons ordinary civil rights to intrusively investigate them
using a perceived 'repugnance' in their intended acts.

The only way you can challenge such a repressive act is to openly resist
it. If one or two people do that, nil effect. But if many people as a
network do that then you might get somewhere. This is the importance of
being open and accountable when taking action that might infringe the new
laws. It's only by being open that you can create a situation where you can
generate the public and media consciousness about the issue.

That might well involve handing out copies of PGP to people who want them
in mainline stations, or sending lots of encrypted mails to Jack Straw. But
we have to pursue the wider agenda on this. The Terrorism Bill and the RIP
Bill are linked - they're two halves of the system NCIS and MI5 need to
justify more restrictive and intrusive surveillance of ordinary
campaigners. The agenda for this is not primarily because of the direct
action movement. The agenda is motivated by the increasing willingness of
people to lend support to single issue groups in preference to the party
political structure. This gives them power, and therefore they have to be
'watched'. For example, who has more power with the public and media these
days, an average trades union or Greenpeace?

It's also only by planning open and accountable actions that we can
engineer situations where we can fight back with the only tool we have over
Parliament - the European Convention on Human Rights. If people hide and
try and obfuscate their work from public view that helps the opposition
prove their case. If we are open and approachable that gives us power to
deliberately exploit the contradictions between the Convention and the two
Bills. We can then, with public support, challenge the (soon to be?) Acts
of Parliaments under the procedures in the Human Rights Act 1998. It only
takes a win in one good case to invalidate all the procedures in the
RIP/Terrorism Bill, using the 'incompatibility' procedures for enacted
legislation in the Human Rights Act, to throw the whole system into chaos.

Finally, a large aspect of both the RIP Bill and Terrorism Bill is
intimidation of the more mainstream members of the campaigning community
into toeing the line. I believe it's been deliberately drafted in this way.
We have to do the same to those promoting these repressive measures. And
the only way I believe we can do that is be open and in-your-face about
doing it. This is because although people singularly may not be willing to
stick their necks out on these issues, if they are part of a large,
identifiable group they will. In my view encryption doesn't form part of
that process.

We have to stop promoting this a purely a privacy-motivated issue and
actually approach it from the power-politics angle. That means deliberately
seeking to go after the repressive measure by staging broad-based actions
that infringe them. In my view groups like RTS or Reclaim the Streets will
have no choice in the matter because they will meet the definitions of the
terrorism and RIP Bills, even if they are not actually 'proscribed' by the
government. that why we need to ensure that when the state takes on these
or similar groups they have a support network of people willing to takes to
the streets, airwaves and cyberspace in their support.



P.





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THE FREE RANGE ACTIVISM NETWORK
Facilitators -
  Paul Mobbs - mobbsey at gn.ac.org, tel./fax 01295 261864
  Tim Shaw - timshaw at gn.apc.org, tel./fax 01558 685353
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