What are the Home Office to do?

The civil defenders of this great nation are consulting on what to do about protecting the public in the new age of Internet communications. They are deeply concerned about the use of Skype amongst terrorists, seriously organised criminals, and those putting their bins out early.

It's an issue. The good old fashioned PSTN is a nice black box in which records of who called whom sit around waiting for the police to come and find them when needed. Cue long list of criminals caught using this capability; first up Mr.Huntley. The Internet, however, is not a black box, and you're perfectly free to use applications - like Skype - that use encryption and can also hide the call destination. They are cross-border, and a new app can emerge and see wide adoption almost overnight, which is challenging. Just as an aside, methinks the security services doth protest too much about Skype encryption - "Terrorists can use Skype and we promise we cannot listen to it, scouts honour, what a pain it is for us yes deary me *cough* *cough*".

Despite my little quip about the bins at the start of this post, I think the intention behind this desire for new capability is entirely reasonable and legitimate. Here are a few statements I believe to be true:

• Existing record-keeping in the PSTN is very useful in some investigations
• The move to Internet communications will remove that capability by default
• The Police are basically on our side, and that if there is a reasonable and proportionate way for them to extend these powers onto the Internet then they should be considered

However, there are a number of potential problems as well:

• Can the balance be found between usefulness and invasiveness? Communication is embedded in the websites we visit, games we play, apps we use, and may be hard to extract, or hard to extract without great invasion of privacy
• Is it technically feasible to extend monitoring to everything from Facebook to World of Warcraft?
• What effect will this monitoring have on the users and designers of the applications? E.g. will we see increased use of encryption and obfuscation techniques?
• Will this capability end up being used for trivialities; how will the boundaries be set and enforced?

Every problem is an opportunity, but perhaps the questions above will provide some 'insoluble opportunities'. Perhaps not. The important thing at the moment is that the debate needs to be a sensible one, and the Home Office are listening. There will no doubt be efforts made at BCS to produce a response to this consultation. So in light of that, what do you think they need to hear?