Blair’s 90 day detainment bill is defeated!
Finally, a piece of good news on “anti-terror” laws: the proposed British law that would have allowed detaining terrorist suspects for 90 days has been defeated in the British Parliament. Notably, 49 Labour MP’s voted against Blair’s bill, despite intense pressure from the Labour party’s leadership. The Parliament instead passed an alternative bill to allow the police to detain terrorist suspects for 28 days (up from the previous 14 days).
Why, you may ask, is this a piece of good news? Because holding a suspect for 90 days would have effectively allowed the authorities to hand a 6 month prison sentence to anyone they did not like, with no judge or jury, and no chance of appeal (due to crowded prisons and parole, 6 month sentences in Britain typically result in only 3 months in a jail cell). What’s more, as far as I could make out from the Parliament debate, the bill’s proponents couldn’t make a single cogent argument in their bill’s favor, beyond “it’s a good idea because we say so”. In fact, some of the arguments to support the bill were outright wrong. Home Secretary Charles Clarke and Assistant Commissioner at the Metropolitan Police Charles Hayman claimed that 90 days are needed to decrypt messages encrypted with “256-bit triple-DES or similar techniques”. Which of couse is absolute bullshit on a number of levels, because (1) 3DES is in fact a 112-bit encryption algorithm; (2) if they meant “256-bit AES”, then they would need 90 years, not 90 days, to crack the encryption; (3) and in any case, by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers act, refusing to surrender encryption keys to the police is already a criminal offence in the UK, so there is absolutely no need for an extra 90 days of detainment…
The only plausible explanation I can come up with for the 90 day detainment proposal is that the UK police currently don’t have enough resources to properly investigate all the suspects they are detaining, so they want to set up a longer queue. Except instead of being honest and asking the Parliament for more money, they had decided to lie and introduce an “anti-terror” bill that would have set back civil rights for decades, even when the current terror threat has passed; and of course Blair, Clarke & Co. jumped on the anti-terror bandwagon.
(see the /. discussion for more info)