RIPA Amendments Published

The Home Office has published a draft Statutory Instrument that will add a new section 1A to the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 to establish monetary penalties for "unintentional interception" without lawful authority. This follows a brief consultation last autumn. Fortunately the operator of a network does have lawful authority to intercept for purposes connected with the operation of the network under section 3(3), so those activities aren't affected.

However they don't seem to have addressed the questions of definition that were raised by both JANET and LINX in our responses to that consultation. There are plenty of legitimate actions (e.g. connecting to any broadcast network!) that result in the content of other people's network communications being "made available", and so fulfil the definition of "interception" in section 2(2). In the past these have clearly been lawful, as there was no intent to intercept, but deleting the word "intentionally" seems to bring them into scope of the new section. No doubt the Interception of Communications Commissioner will have more sense than to actually impose a penalty for plugging into an ethernet socket, but it's depressing when the law departs further from reality.

Furthermore draft SIs can't be amended, they can only be passed or not passed, so it seems likely that the problems will be set into law within the next few months.

The good news for us is that the new penalties only apply to public networks not private ones so, as a private network, JANET and its connected organisations should be unaffected.