Toolkit will "guarantee" data confidentiality
As the Home Office prepares to publish a draft code of practice for part three of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act due in June, a small band of privacy advocates are rushing to develop a tool capable of undermining it.
The RIP Act proposes to give the government the right to demand the plain text and/or encryption keys for any "information protected by encryption".
Last week, Peter Fairbrother, head of the design team at m-o-o-t, an "open-design, open-source cryptography project", said that the toolkit is "undergoing a fundamental design review" to make it ready for release on the same day RIP three is announced.
The team said that m-o-o-t has been built "to allow UK citizens to communicate and to store information without worrying about it", but that it will also defeat the FBI"s Carnivore system as well as laws put forward by Australia, New Zealand and the Council of Europe.