Analysis of Part III of the (draft) Electronics Communications Act 1999

Failure to comply with a notice

There are many genuine reasons not to be able to comply with a Section 10 notice that go far beyond the statutory defences.

The hard disk with the keys on may have died. In the Real World not everyone has a backup that works when you need it.

There may never have been a key at all, or the passphrase may have been forgotten. This may be hard to put over:

Richard Clayton
Telling all our friends about it "well in the past" might help influence the jury :)

In fact, to that end I'd like to publicly state that I am extremely keen on password cracking competitions and my memory is very poor. To that end I have several hundred encrypted files on my hard disk that I am completely unable to inspect....

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