Refusal can earn a maximum five-year jail term sentence.

Part III of RIPA was in the original Act but was not activated. The Home Office said last year that it had not implemented the provision because encryption had not been as popular as quickly as it had predicted. It launched a consultation which culminated in Part III being made active on 1st October.

What if the key has been forgotten, surely it is not good advice to right the key down, can someone really be prosecuted and jailed for a lapse of memory? Section 49 of Part III of RIPA compels a person, when served with a notice, to either hand over an encryption key or render the requested material intelligible by authorities.

Anyone who refuses to decrypt material could face five years in jail if the investigation relates to terrorism or national security, or up to two years in jail in other cases The measures in Part III are intended to ensure that the ability of public authorities to protect the public and the effectiveness of their other statutory powers are not undermined by the use of technologies to protect electronic information," said the Home Office.

Trotting out the usual bogeymen, terrorists and paedophiles, the Home Office has justified their decision but security experts and civil liberties campaigners are stating that the legislation is both ineffective and authoritarian.

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