The story title mentions Australia but this is relevant to all the 5eye nations, as they're obviously pre-briefing the media on what the agenda will be and this is the first time that we're getting detail on what they'll be proposing (the UK proposals were vague)<p>What they seem to be talking around is implementing an app-level CALEA-like capability.<p>What I think how they think it would work: companies would be made to build lawful targeted intercept capability into their apps, in the same way telephony and other equipment is today. The app developer receives a warrant for an identifier and they're required to split off that traffic and change the keys, or encrypt it twice (the sender/recipient key and an intercept key - one per warrant (this happens with some net and tele warrants now)).<p>We all know the downsides of this approach, but it isn't technically impossible. What would be impossible is enforcing it, as it is more a regulatory hurdle. It is more possible today because of vertically integrated walled gardens being used for most app distribution - and backed by two of the largest companies in the world who may be susceptible to a compromise (especially as there is the large tax issues hanging over both their heads).<p>On a scale of how bad things can get - I think warranted targeted surveillance is better than device backdoors which is better than metadata retention which is better than the mass surveillance we have today (leading to cable splitting and DPI, or situations like Lavabit)<p>I don't see how, even if you're ok with warranted targeted surveillance, how a compromise is made here that doesn't lead to a wack-a-mole game where legitimate users are inconvenienced while the 'bad guys' are pushed onto alternate Android distributions and unofficial apps.<p>I also don't see how a CALEA-like capability is kept secure and safe - especially with apps (we saw the NSA use CALEA intercept to surveil political targets). Clapper et al always vaguely answer "key escrow" to this question without spelling out how that would work.<p>With subsequents backdowns in the scope of what these governments are wanting to do (and this latest proposal is again is a minor backdown) we might be reaching the finite conclusive point where comms do go dark and the new reality is that despite all of the tech we have law enforcement mostly relies on human intelligence and they'll have to scale back up for that. 3,500 terror suspects in the UK, 4,000 employees at MI5 - and notably in the recent attacks there were HUMINT warnings.