There's an interesting way of interpreting the definitions here. See (4)(b) in the parent comment, where it says "a person who provides a public telecommunicat

There's an interesting way of interpreting the definitions here. See (4)(b) in the parent comment, where it says "a person who provides a public telecommunications service"? The definition of "public telecommunications service" is found in s2(1) of RIPA. Selected elements are cut'n'pasted below: "public telecommunications service" means any telecommunications service which is offered or provided to, or to a substantial section of, the public in any one or more parts of the United Kingdom"; "telecommunications service" means any service that consists in the provision of access to, and of facilities for making use of, any telecommunication system (whether or not one provided by the person providing the service) [amended by this new Bill to include] "any case where a service consists in or includes facilitating the creation, management or storage of communications transmitted, or that may be transmitted, by means of such a system" "telecommunication system" means any system (including the apparatus comprised in it) which exists (whether wholly or partly in the United Kingdom or elsewhere) for the purpose of facilitating the transmission of communications by any means involving the use of electrical or electro-magnetic energy. IANAL, but the inclusion "or elsewhere" in that last paragraph suggests to me that it doesn't matter where the system is based. I'm imagining that the use case scenario for this would be where the UK authorities have identified a terrorist suspect who they think might be communicating with his fellow terrorists via an SSL-enabled website (for the sake of argument, let's call it PuffinParty.com) that's based overseas, with no offices, employees or other presence in the UK. The terrorist suspect's laptop has rock-solid security, preventing endpoint interception and/or a MITM attack. Let's say PuffinParty.com, like most websites, offers its services to anyone with a valid credit card - i.e. it offers a service to the public in the United Kingdom. That makes it a "public telecommunications service". Let's say PuffinParty.com users can send private messages to one another. That makes it a "telecommunications service" and its back-end is a "telecommunications system". So, it looks like this law would allow the UK authorities to serve an interception warrant on PuffinParty.com's CEO. If the CEO ignores the warrant, the Secretary of State could seek an injunction. If the CEO ignored the injunction, that could presumably result in him being held in "contempt of court", leading to the issuance of a warrant for his arrest, which could be exercised the next time they visit or pass through the UK? Like I said, IANAL.