By Felicity Ussher, 5 March 1999 15:25
NEWS The UK Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) and Home Office today released a joint consultation paper on electronic commerce, which allows companies to set up unlicensed services to encrypt and digitally sign data without storing their keys with a third party. Although law enforcers will not have their powers extended under the proposed laws, they will be allowed to decrypt coded messages under existing laws. The document, 'Building Confidence in Electronic Commerce', also details plans to update laws to ensure that courts recognise digital signatures as proof that an email has been sent from a certain person and not tampered with during transmission. Officials claim their proposals will make the UK the best electronic trading environment in the world by 2002. Although the document does not want confidentiality services to store their decryption keys with a third party, the DTI made it clear that key escrow is not dead and buried. "Industry has persuaded us that key escrow may not be the best option. But it is still an option. We will have to see what the response is to the consultation paper," one official said today. A special task force of civil servants and selected businesses, chaired by David Hendon, has been set up to provide alternatives to key escrow. Industry and the task force have just three weeks to comment on the government's proposals - which are due to be finalised in the ecommerce bill after Easter.
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