Not only are criminals misusing technology to have conversations that the Australian Government can't listen to, they're also taking clever physical countermeasures like having conversations in person -- sometimes completely out of earshot of their own devices!<p>If we as a society (quite reasonably) conclude that our government should have access to criminals' communications, allowing <i>savvy</i> criminals to make use of "non-electronic backdoors" is obviously out of the question.<p>Anyone want to propose an enforcement mechanism? Maybe listening devices implanted in everyone, or just everywhere in our homes?
These kind of concerns, laws and regulation often remind me of a 1983 joke by the Belgium comedian 'Urbanus':<p>Urbanus vertelt dat zijn buurman boer is en dat hij rond rijdt met zijn tractor en een vieselijk geel poeder spuit op zijn akker. Kwaad interpelleert hij hem.
Urbanus: “Maar voor wat is dat nu allemaal weer nodig ?”
Boerke: “Dat is poeder tegen de olifanten.”
Urbanus: “Maar hier zitten toch geen olifanten in ’t Pajottenland ?”
Boerke: “Goe poeier hé jongen!”<p>Translated:<p>Urbanus says that his neighbor is a farmer and that he drives around with his tractor and sprays an awful yellow powder in his field. He interrogates him badly.
Urbanus: "But for what is all that necessary now?"
Farmer: "That is powder against the elephants."
Urbanus: "But there are no elephants here in the Pajottenland?"
Farmer: "Yes boy, good powder!"
Most western democracies pride themselves on “having governments of laws, not men”. Australia has a rather more transactional view of freedom and very limited judicial review.<p>Just this weekend it was announced that people with welfare debts would be blocked from flying overseas. That might be fair, but blocking people from travelling seems to be at the whim of civil servants and politicians. There wasn’t much of an uproar, since the ends justify the means, and no one likes cheats, despite this amounting to extrajudicial punishment.<p>The minister proposing this encryption crackdown has used his vast discretionary powers to do immigration favours for the politically connected, with impunity, while ignoring arguably more deserving cases.<p>The land of roos, barbies and golden beaches has a rather well-developed authoritarian streak behind its carefully constructed facade.
This is a follow-on news story as people slowly try and digest the content of the new bill.<p>One of the main issues with this is it's being tried to push through as quickly and quietly as possible.<p>The original draft bill was open for public submissions for less than a month (Aug 15 - Sept 10).<p>* <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20180814010356/https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/consultations/Documents/the-assistance-access-bill-2018.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20180814010356/https://www.homeaf...</a><p>The draft was 176 pages of legislation and quite complex in it's language so required a lot of time to comprehend - which is quite difficult to do effectively in a 3 week time period.<p>Quite a few large organisations put forward submissions (a couple of them are linked here):<p>* <a href="https://internet.org.au/news/209-submission-internet-australia-s-submission-on-draft-assistance-and-access-bill" rel="nofollow">https://internet.org.au/news/209-submission-internet-austral...</a><p>Submissions included a few internet bodies, EFF and privacy organisations, major ISPs and Telcos, the Law Council, Human Rights Commission, device makers (Apple/Sumsung/Google) as well as others.<p>The bill was then submitted into parliament 10 days later.<p>There is no way possible that they have reviewed and considered all public submissions in 10 days. The government also stated that they had "widely consulted industry" to which the major IPSs denied.<p>It's basically a shambles.<p>What the cynic in me thinks is this is basically being made in collaboration with the five-eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States).<p>As agencies in those 5 countries share information, the spyware/encryption keys/backdoors gained will be openly shared amongst all.<p>I think they all believe Australia is the easiest place to try and get the legislation through.
This is the problem with non-technical lawyers making technical laws. It's like when the Attorney General was pushing for metadata retention but couldn't even explain what metadata was.
This morning I opened Hacker News and two threads sat next to one another. This thread I'm commenting on now and another thread titled "Police forcing me to install Jingwang spyware app, how to minimize impact?" (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060543" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18060543</a>)<p>How poignant, and yet startling. Australia is seemingly following in the footsteps of China, a country famed for their strict censorship laws, oppressive and authoritarian nature and far-reaching surveillance powers.
Maybe we need this. Let's face it, within a day of this backdoor being released it will be leaked/hacked/exploited in some way, which will cause a national outcry that could go global. Maybe we need a test case to show the rest of the world how badly these uneducated, ridiculous and reckless laws will be.
And that will be the end of trust in Australia. When communicating with an Australian (or someone visiting there) you will have to assume that your conversations are not secure and are being recorded unencrypted. Also if you are in one of the 5 eyes nations your conversation will also be shared with your own government.
Dutton annoyed that Turnbull and cabinet "went dark" and he couldn't find out (through his friends in law enforcement; remember hes an ex-detective) who was talking to who during the leadership spill and thus lost his bid to be Prime Minister?
The problem Australia has at all levels of governance is that those who we elect to represent us, represent the party before they represent the electorate. In addition to that, most of our elected representatives (House or Representatives and the Senate) are lacking in that essential item called a backbone. To find the truth of this, go talk to your representative at each level and try to get them to make public statements about subjects that are important to you.<p>As far as the major political parties are concerned, their obvious differences are really minor and their hidden similarities are major. In the last few years, we have had our federal politicians vote bipartisanly for various legislation that was ostensibly aimed at preventing terrorism and yet, this country already had extensive legislation that covered those particular matters (all of it under criminal offences).<p>One idea that has been discussed at various time in private is for each piece of legislation to be explained to each electorate and have a response return to parliament. So, instead of each representative voting on party lines, he/she would have to submit from their electorate the number of yes's, the number of no's and the number of abstentions.<p>For any legislation to actually pass, the total number of yes votes from all electorates would have to be more than the total of no votes added to the total of abstentions. This would mean that for any legislation to be passed, the representative would have to work very hard to convince his/her electorate that they would need to vote yes for the proposal. The benefits of each legislation would have to be carefully articulated before getting traction.<p>In addition, we could require that all legislation contain a sunset clause of say five years, after which the legislation would be null and void. For any extension, it would need to go back to the electorates again.<p>One benefit of such a scheme, is the slow-down of new legislation and another would be that old legislation that no longer held the attention would fade away.<p>I know, I know, this is a pipe dream and will never happen. But such a scheme would have the benefit that political parties would in all likelihood diminish.
China is already doing this in Xinjiang for locals and apparantly also (some?) tourists:<p>* <a href="https://mashable.com/2017/07/21/china-spyware-xinjiang/?europe=true#bhfWvgzYzOqs" rel="nofollow">https://mashable.com/2017/07/21/china-spyware-xinjiang/?euro...</a><p>* <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_border_police_installed_software_on_my/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_bo...</a>
It seems like this is the followup plan to the more or less failed attempts to defeat encryption directly by weakening it or by various key escrow schemes. That it, it seems like the actions of a government worried that if they do not step in and take power here, they risk leaving a power void that will get filled by someone else, such as a large tech company or a foreign government. Has insisting that crypto remain undefeatable fast-forwarded us to the rubber-hose cryptanalysis stage?
Richard Alston come back: bad semi-sentient AI has overreached and we need another simulacrum.<p>Would Stephen Conroy have walked into this mess? I rather suspect he would, after all he wanted to have a giant rubber 'NEKKID WUMMAN' stamp to apply to any URL he didn't like.
Would Apple, Google, Facebook, et al. actually comply with this? Australia is such a small market for them that they could conceivably just refuse and pull their products. Apple in particular has a history of refusing to compromise on encryption.
If my reading of the explanatory document was correct, the proposed legislation goes beyond telecommunications providers.<p>Software developers, both within Australia and overseas, can be compelled under threat of 10 years imprisonment, to build and/or insert into their software any mechanism required by the government agencies to enable access to communications.<p>So, the developers of any secure software would now be under threat of extradition to Australia and jail time unless they compromise their own app.<p>Unfortunately, in the absence of massive pressure, Labor will do nothing but add a few useless amendments, and pass it.
Rich counties, companies, and other groups track you based on connections and data across thousands of servers and sites. Poor/lazy counties etc just force an app on you.
Someone should advise these officials that the concerns people have are with doubts in law enforcement maintaining full integrity in appropriate use, and that a criminal third party could use these backdoors to hack into peoples' devices.<p>Then remind them that they should also be obliged to have these backdoors on their own phones, and if they are concerned about doing so perhaps this is not a thing to push on everyone else...
I believe this proposed law is the same one that was discussed previously: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17756020" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17756020</a>