UK Police & Encryption

Police have told Tony Blair that they need sweeping new powers to counter the terrorist threat, including the right to detain a suspect for up to three months without charge instead of the current 14 days....

They also want to make it a criminal offence for suspects to refuse to cooperate in giving the police full access to computer files by refusing to disclose their encryption keys.

It's certainly possible that password-guessing programs are more successful with three months to guess. But the Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIP) Act, which went into effect in 2000, already allows the police to jail people who don't surrender encryption keys:

If intercepted communications are encrypted (encoded and made secret), the act will force the individual to surrender the keys (pin numbers which allow users to decipher encoded data), on pain of jail sentences of up to two years.

[via Schneier on Security]