The UK’s RIP Bill lumbers towards law this week after its third and final reading in the House of Lords. Some major concessions have been won, but it will still make the UK the only country with Government reasonable bounds. The government has also pointedly refused to close a large loophole through which extra hurdles to key-access can be circumvented. A person who no longer has possession of the coded text would obviously be unable to decrypt and hand over plaintext. This, argues Access to Keys.ISPs will be pleased to have won a statutory 20m to cover the installation of the ‘black-box’ interception units the Home Office wants in all British ISPs, but the UK’s consumers are still going to have to hope their ISP will have the courage to squeal loudly if the government reneges on recent assurances to keep scale of interception within Caspar Bowden of the Foundation for Information Policy Research, constitutes an indirect means to seize a key without special authorisation. The government repeatedly refused to pass an amendment requiring that the authorities should provide the ciphertext where necessary, unless the explicit intention was to demand a key.Jack Straw also refused to hold the decryption powers in abeyance for up to three years in order to wait and see if other countries enacted GAK laws. This, says Bowden, was an ‘unfortunate reversion to the blinkered obstinacy that had characterised RIP’s passage through the Commons’. Many will be breathing a sigh of relief over the government’s U-turns on reversing the  burden-of-proof on key possession, and access to web-page logs without a warrant: these, indeed, had been the main targets of criticism. But Bowden warned that the amended Bill was still ‘atrociously ill-conceived’, and predicted that the residual GAK powers would prove an unenforceable humanrights quagmire. ‘It’s Zombie legislation - although clinically dead with macabre wounds, it still lumbers on menacing both individual privacy and commercial confidence,’ he said. For full Hansard of RIP: The Final Debate, see www.fipr.org./rip/lords3rdreading.htm