Labour came to power promising to be the party of the digital revolution, with commitments to connect schools and libraries to the Internet, put the nation's museums and galleries online, promote electronic commerce for British business and simplify regulation of the telecommunications industry to ensure fast, low-cost access for all.
It didn't quite work out as planned. When Patricia Hewitt arrived at the DTI in July as the latest "minister for all things e", she inherited a long-delayed and highly controversial electronic commerce bill, a raft of promises to modernise the way government itself uses information and communications technologies and a confused and increasingly ineffective system for telecoms regulation. And she can't even spend all her time on the Internet, as she is also minister for small firms. Things, it seems, have resolutely failed to get better.
Hewitt, 50, may have been given the job precisely because she is one of the few Labour MPs capable of taking it on. She is certainly the most prominent "e-minister" yet appointed and, apart from John Battle, the first holder of the post, she has the most experience of actually using computers and the Internet.
She has already set her priorities. First, she wants to get the costs of access down by changing the way telecommunications companies operate, forcing BT to open up the "local loop" the wires from the local exchange into every subscriber's house. Second, she wants to create a regulatory framework that will encourage the growth of electronic commerce in Britain. Finally, she wants to make sure that the government uses the technology and that it delivers the promises made in the Modernising Government white paper.
The most pressing thing in her red box is obviously the Electronic Communications Bill, published in draft form in July. The consultation period on the bill ended on 8 October, and it will be one of the major pieces of legislation in this year's Queen's Speech.
The draft bill has four sections. Section one outlines a voluntary framework for licensing providers of encryption services, the programs that let people send secret messages over the net; section two gives electronic signatures legal weight; section three, the most contentious, contains proposals to ensure that law enforcement agencies can gain access to encrypted communications; and section four deals with changes needed to telecommunications legislation.
Although she was not involved in writing the draft bill, Hewitt will still have to deal with its many critics. In particular, she will have to reconcile the vastly different wishes of the Home Office, which is generally believed to be behind proposals to make failure to decrypt a document a criminal offence, and the DTI, which is much more concerned with steps to recognise digital signatures on documents, license e-commerce providers and create a workable regulatory system. She will also have to pacify the trade and industry select committee, whose scathing criticism of the government's policy and the draft bill was published in July.
Only a couple of months into the job she addressed an audience of computer scientists, civil liberties campaigners (many of whom probably recalled her work for the National Council for Civil Liberties) at the "Scrambling for Safety" conference.
She managed to impress even the most hardened opponents of the bill and defended the principle that she claims underpins the government's approach to the Internet. "We don't accept that cyberspace is some wild west frontier where law enforcement and the sheriff should keep out," she said. "We've adopted a principle of co-regulation: government sets the policies, and industry delivers the solutions."
Part of the problem is getting policies across, especially when the Internet itself allows confused messages, disinformation and mistakes to propagate. For example, Hewitt is irritated that some people don't seem to be clear about exactly what is being proposed: "We made the decision in government months ago that mandatory key escrow [forcing people to give law enforcement agencies access to their decryption keys] would not be part of the Electronic Communications Bill and it isn't part of it. I think some of the comments on the draft bill misunderstood that."
However, not all controversies are so easily resolved. The way the draft bill is written seems to say that if the police ask you to decrypt a coded message then you will be committing an offence unless you can prove to them that you don't hold the necessary computer keys. This would create an assumption of guilt if anyone failed to decrypt a message when asked to do so.
Hewitt denies that this will happen: "We've had several comments about whether or not part three [of the bill] reverses the burden of proof," she acknowledges. "I think the most important thing for me to say is that we will ensure that the bill, when it is introduced, is fully compliant with the Human Rights Act and the European Human Rights Convention. We are the government that enacted the Human Rights Act and we're not going to start introducing laws ourselves that are in breach of human rights standards. That applies to this law just as it does to every other."
The last Conservative government was heavily criticised for pushing out its proposals to create a legislative framework for e-commerce just before the May 1997 general election, giving those affected little opportunity to comment on them. Hewitt hopes to avoid this happening in future and has set up a government/industry forum, bringing together officials and ministers from the Home Office, DTI and law enforcement agencies with industry representatives.
"The aim," she says, "is to ensure that we understand each other's business and that the industry understands the enormous problem for law enforcement, which is a problem for all of us, of strong encryption being used by money launderers, paedophile rings and other criminals. But at the same time the law enforcement agencies have to understand the industry perspective - and the extraordinary rate at which the technology is changing and what it's actually practical to do about it."
Her three years working for Andersen Consulting taught her a lot about computers and their use. She admits to being"a very comfortable user", but does not claim more. "I'm certainly not a technological wizard - I've never programmed anything in my life. Like most people my age I still have trouble programming the video. But when I went to Andersen Consulting in 1994 it was an eye-opener for me, because it was the first time I had worked in a networked environment using an intranet, which in their case is connecting over 50,000 people across 55 countries. So I understand the power of networks."
She was also "pretty horrified" by the level of IT provision for MPs when she was elected in 1997. When she became economic secretary to the Treasury she had another shock: "I walked into my new office, thrilled to bits at having been appointed - but there wasn't a computer." This is not a problem at the DTI. "I have two computers and the minute I arrived they equipped me with a laptop and an e-mail address so I could work when I was in Australia during the holidays."
A large part of her work is putting the 60 recommendations from September's report from the Cabinet Office Performance and Innovation Unit, e-commerce@its.best. co.uk, into operation. She is, she admits, starting from a low base: "We have real problems for ministers who want to work electronically in that the civil servants depend on paper, and although officials work electronically on the Government Secure Intranet, once the material comes into the private office it's printed out and given to ministers in files. They want to see your signature on a piece of paper."
Her solution is to move more and more of her work on to the network. "I can do it wherever I am, I can do it at a time that suits me and I can do it faster. Instead of this nonsense of me writing often illegible comments on a piece of paper and my private office having to transcribe those, I can put them - and I often do - straight into an e-mail that will then go from my private office to the appropriate officials."
Her PPS, the Cambridge MP Anne Campbell, will be an asset in this, as she is herself an experienced computer user. Often described as "Britain's most wired MP", Campbell was the first MP with her own website, back in 1995.
The cross-departmental nature of Hewitt's role is highlighted by another of the problems she has to deal with. Under the latest European Union Directive on Data Protection, personal data cannot be transferred to countries that do not have adequate legislation to protect it from misuse. This includes the United States, where industry self-regulation is the preferred approach. Negotiations between the US Department of Commerce and the EU have stalled, and a trade war may be about to break out.
