Today’s Register has an article about the UK Internet Service Providers Association written evidence to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on the Draft Investigatory Powers Bill.
I don’t wish to comment on that evidence here, Adrian Kennard has already provided much useful comment on the failings of the Draft Bill. My purpose in this post to highlight the absurdity of the Parliamentary Committee’s request that the ISPA evidence be withdrawn from it’s Website. The Register article ends with this update:
ISPA contacted The Register after the publication of this story to inform us: “ISPA was requested to remove the written evidence it submitted to the Joint Committee on the Investigatory Powers Bill from the ISPA website by the Joint Committee. Their guidance states that submissions become the property of the Committee and should not be published elsewhere until the Committee has done so itself.”
As of now (14.30 on 7 January) that evidence is still on the ISPA Website. Even if removed, it will still, of course, be available from a huge range of sources such as search engine caches (apologies for the google reference, but it is the obvious one). Or you could get it here.
The point is, once such a document has been published electronically on the net, no-one, but no-one, can put the genie back in the bottle and unpublish it.
The officials supporting the Joint Parliamentary Committee should know that. And if they don’t then I would submit that they are not technically competent enough to be supporting the Committee.