Encryption tears holes in RIP Country Watch: Britain12/7/2000; 1:59:36 PM

'A group of cryptographers think they have found a way to defeat the RIP Act, by making it impossible to hand over the keys to encrypted information. 'The section of the act that has caused so much controversy in the UK gives the government the right to the plain text of, or key to, enciphered information. However, if a person has used an ephemeral key, they never know what the key is and so cannot pass it on to a third-party, and it is this vulnerability that the group wishes to exploit.... 'Fairbrother, quoted in IT paper Computer Weakly, said: "It is technically impossible to have an effective law, because of the state of cryptography. RIP says you have to give a key but you can use an ephemeral key - where you never knew what the key was."'

You can look at the website for the technology, but I didn't find it helpful. The claims being made for the technology are bold, but I can't get enough info from the website to know how feasible what they are talking about is. Still, this should be interesting to watch.