I hope nobody expected every single copied document to be analysed and refreshed for this agreement. A lot of existing documents will be copied into a new deal as they exist today.
If it's too long to be read, then are all those details really necessary?
It just like contracts, most privacy policies, etc that are written in gibberish, are extremely verbose, yet everyone is afraid to simplify it because "there must be a reason why legal documents are not written in plain English". Sometimes there is no good reason.
In other words if it's so insignificant as not to be discussed it shouldn't be included at all. Any processes should have been written at a high level with a call out to the specific specialist organisations who implement them.
I think that's entirely the point. Make it so long no-one will read it = get away with putting anything you like in there.
My take is that those details are intentionally left in as is to ensure that the status quo remains exactly the same, thus ensuring that updating a piece of legislation has no unintended consequences.
I mean, if the legislation remains the exact same, even citing the exact same software as reference, then there is no doubt regarding where jurisprudence stands.
Found in https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
contains the same SHA-1 requirement, so the story seems to be that:
1) EU Law requires out-of-date encryption algorithms
2) The new agreement mirrors EU Law
3) From 1 Jan, the UK will be able to enact regulatory divergence, and use SHA-256 (or whatever) instead.
Since this is for sharing the data internationally, no, changing it on one side doesn't make sense.
In reality it will be nodded through in the UK by 400 people who have barely skimmed it.
It can easily be debated as "do we have any issues with the technical details of the international exchange of forensic information or should we continue with what we have right now?"
A good example is to compare US law on digital signatures Vs EU law. The latter mandates PKIX and the former just says words to the effect of any digital equivalent of a signature. So you can imagine which is simpler and more flexible.
Imagine they had only specified “must be encrypted”. Now France is going with S/MIME with SHA1 but the UK with SHA-256. The French system didn’t anticipate this and the can’t decrypt it. Meanwhile Germany is using PGP and nobody can read anything.
Long way to say: strong specs improve interoperability.
The US has FIPS enforced at federal level. FIPS tells you not only what ciphers are allowed, but also how you're going to compile your SSL libraries and in which environment. It's typically way behind practical recommendations in real world.
Tell me again how it's more simple and flexible?
The agreement itself does have provision to evolve over time though. See https://davidallengreen.com/2020/12/this-agreement-is-not-th...
The European Commission's website suggests that the temporary approval will last until 28 February 2021.
And/or there wasn't any versioning applied to the email technology section, so subsequent updates to the recommended-email-clients package haven't yet been pulled into the document.
(this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek; but conceivably some of the techniques that contract reviewers use are not-too-dissimilar to code review. Perhaps it really all is completely manual based on physical documents, but hopefully not..)
The median UK salary is around £30,000.
MPs who become part of the government often do fairly well out of it, obviously more so the more senior the government position(s) they hold, and there are a lot more members of the government than most people realise. But rank and file MPs often get a pretty raw deal compared to the kinds of alternative options anyone with the attributes to be a good MP would probably have.
https://5050parliament.co.uk/get-elected/
Maybe we'd be better off if MPs had to study and practise as much as an NHS consultant has to before they can run the country?
"Isn't that high" is not with reference to the median, but with reference to their pre-existing career prospects.
The salary of MPs is not sufficient, by a long way, to attract almost any one from other competing careers.
(I don’t have a solution, every option I’ve heard comes with downsides)