Truth: Expect a post-election Australian anti-encryption bill

12


This article was originally published for Delimiter Members only. In late September 2016, Delimiter ceased publishing new articles. Because of a number of operational and other factors associated with this decision, we subsequently withdrew membership articles from publication. If you would like to see a copy of this article, please contact Delimiter directly with your request. Requests by Delimiter Members will be granted. We will consider all other requests on their merits.


12 COMMENTS

  1. So, when compared to the USA, Australians will have a fraction of the legal protections from their own government. This would never get past the USAs Supreme Court and should never be implemented in any country that calls itself free. It’s completely outrageous.
    They’re getting seriously scary, especially considering their own (three LNP MPS, two of them now Front Benchers involved in almost certainly illegal) actions in the injustice against a Peter Slipper, a sitting member of parliament and Speaker of the House. If someone outside parliament had engaged in their actions it could be treated as seditious.
    These are not people to be trusted with ever more power.

  2. I wonder if the company I work for would like an non encrypted VPN to Australia. A lot of data that we would not like our competitors to get their hands on flows over that. Between countries, cities, to people mobile or working from home. If it’s consumer only, how can they tell the difference between someone connecting to a US VPN for example for work purposes rather than to hide what they are doing?

  3. The best way to innovate is to steal the ideas developed elsewhere. A clever strategy to facilitate that. The exceptions will be critical – ehealth, banking, … Bad luck if you have an online porn habit that you want to keep secret.

  4. Um. No more https? That will be fun. And what will LibCo do about Ixquick and DuckDuckGo?

    And what about the WPA2 on the router WAN?

    (Actually it’s all my fault. I’m the person who paid good money to get the Gammadyne Clyton email client which uses SMTPS natively. Sorry.)

  5. Will politicians have to stop using their encrypted messaging apps, I presume they’ll be exempt?

  6. Politicians love to think they can somehow control cryptographic technology, but the fact is that once that genie is out of the bottle, it’s out and no amount of rhetoric will put it back in.

    Commercial software vendors operating in Australia may be pressured to add a backdoor or weakness and the same applies to communications providers which also supply some type of security measure, but FOSS cryptographic projects won’t be weakened just because the Australian government wants it. They haven’t bent over for the USA and the UK and they won’t do so here either.

    This includes my favourite, the GNU Privacy Guard (GPG), which adheres to the IETF standard for OpenPGP messages (RFC 4880). If the Australian Government wanted to influence that they could have nominated someone to engage in the review process for RFC 4880 which has been running for nearly a year now and they haven’t.

    I am, however, a little surprised that Delimiter and other non-MSM or even just non-Murdoch news outlets don’t provide GPG keys for whistleblowers and other sources to submit information. It’s been nearly 4 years since the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment and the first CryptoParty and coming up on 3 years since Snowden’s leaks began. Not to mention the first year of mandatory, nation-wide data retention (which is why my email is hosted in the same country where principal GPG development occurs: Germany). Surely the deployment of the AFP for political ends during an election underscores the need for exactly this kind of thing.

Comments are closed.