More than a year ago, I wrote a post about the terrifying announcement of the forthcoming Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) in the United Kingdom. RIPA went into effect few days ago and it’s even worst than expected.

RIPA make it a crime to refuse to decrypt almost any encrypted data requested by authorities as part of a criminal or terror investigation. Individuals who are believed to have the cryptographic keys necessary for such decryption will face up to 5 years in prison for failing to comply with police or military orders to hand over either the cryptographic keys, or the data in a decrypted form.

The new law is frightening but also stupid, luckily.

The law can only be applied to data residing in the UK, hosted on UK servers, or stored on devices located within the UK. The law does not authorize the UK government to intercept encrypted materials in transit on the Internet via the UK […].

So to protect your data from RIPA, you still have two possible strategies:

1. If you have enough technical skills, hide your encrypted stuff using tools like TrueCrypt or steganography, this will prevent any accusation to own encrypted material.
2. Move your encrypted data outside UK.

As I said before, the UK government is going to deprive honest and law-abiding citizens of their liberties while criminals can carry on theirs businesses as usual, with just a little software upgrade.

Do you password-protect Word, Excel and PDF documents? Do you use password managers like Keepass or Roboform? Do you carry an encrypted USB drives in your pocket? If your answer is yes, I hope you are not a UK resident …

Laws as RIPA are another good reason to use Clipperz online password manager as a digital vault for your confidential data. Clipperz is anonymous, web-based and follow a strict zero-knowledge methodology. And it’s free too. And not based in the UK!

Maybe it’s time to move to Clipperz the content of that Excel file with all your passwords …