I think it’s true that declining to hand over a password in a criminal investigation is itself a criminal act in the UK. That said, I don’t know how often this actually occurs.
As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.
You need to be able to hand over encryption keys too.
Claiming to not know them is also not allowed, whether you actually know them or not.
I am reasonably convinced that if you wipe the key slots on an encrypted drive but leave encrypted blocks around, they might be able to argue that you are obligates to store all the block keys for such an occasion. So using any kind of multi-tier encryption in the UK might be a massive liability unless you permanently store all the material required to derive any key that is used to encrypt anything.
This also probably has impact on TLS now that I think about it.
Now, real world criminal cases are likely to proceed differently than how they proceed in the mind of a programmer interpreting the law as a program. But, I am not too convinced such a farcical thing wouldn't happen, the UK government and police have engaged in much dumber things.
Now that I think about it, storing randomness on a disk could probably be used to incriminate you in case that disk was seized. Since the police wouldn't be able to tell if it wasn't encrypted data.
Not yet, but for a long time nobody spent years in court because they were particularly rude to nobody in particular on the internet, and then it happened, and the law was there all along.
As an outsider, it seems to me (big talk on the Internet! Amazeballs) that UK laws are written to be illiberal and gradually watered down to an acceptable degree. I think that happened with RIPA and later with the whole nazi saluting dog mess. Whether they can survive the rise of free speech double talkers like Farage remains to be seen. But the Blair/Brown years made it clear that even supposedly intelligent middle of the road leadership is capable of imposing surprisingly illiberal legislation. I don’t much care for the Tories but I don’t think they have much interest in my personal life.