[sh1989]

Section 189(4)(c) of the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill places "obligations relating to the removal of electronic protection applied by a relevant operator to any communications or data".

A relevant operator includes telecommunications services, defined in s193(11) as "any service that consists in the provision of access to, and of facilities for making use of, any telecommunication system (whether or not one provided by the person providing the service)"

This has been slightly changed, now that the IP bill is no longer a draft: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2015-20...

The above draft is now re-written as:

s217(4)(c): "obligations relating to the removal by a relevant operator of electronic protection applied by or on behalf of that operator to any communications or data".

There's an appeals process, but the gist is that they're not outright banning backdoors. But if they come knocking, you better find a way to remove any protection that's there. Which is rather chilling.

[andy_ppp]

If the government goes to a judge and gets a court order to access information this is what I consider reasonable and in fact a good thing!

It seems to suggest that technical feasibility and cost needs to be taken into account as well. If it's technically impossible due to Spider Oak style end to end encryption or for example the new iPhones (6+6s) having some very advanced encryption features I'm not certain that there is a requirement to insert a backdoor.

If the security services were monitoring a person who was genuinely planning to kill people and they asked you to put in a limited back door?

Most services remember do not have encrypted backend systems and it'll probably always be this way.

Mass surveillance is the complete opposite of this and is a totally unreasonable intrusion.

[ConfuciusSay02]

Except if you put in the back door it's not limited to that one person planning to kill people. It would be for everyone, in which case it is potentially mass surveillance.

Not to mention that the "someone planning to kill a bunch of people" scenario never actually happens. Typically these tools are used when prosecuting regular people for regular crimes, or looking for information after an attack has already happened (San Bernadino). Nobody has yet been able to point to a case of consequence where this type of surveillance was ever used for someone actively planning an attack.

[andy_ppp]

I like that you pointed out it never prevents the attack, always worth remembering. Does finding connections from an attack work either?