Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
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Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#2For those that would like more reading here is the explanatory bill: https://bit.ly/2NR4tTh
Three important things to note technical assistance requests, technical assistance notice and technical capability notice.
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#3It seems like they are just making it more explicit that companies must cooperate with the police. Isn't it already the case anyway if there is an appropriate court order?
At least they are not suggesting to compromise or limit encryption in any way.
What I fail to understand is how all this would help fighting crime. Criminals and terrorists can easily use end-to-end encryption for the communication. There is plenty of software for that and it's really easy to do nowadays.
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#4The article mentions that Australia has no bill of rights which, whilst technically true, doesn't mean we don't have equivalent protections. Some are enshrined in our constitution whilst others are parts of common law and other legislation.
The conclusion they draw from that is right however; a lot of laws can be introduced to our parliament that might not get off the ground elsewhere. It's why we've fervently fought against many other, similar laws that would impinge on our rights and freedoms in the past. I spent a good part of my youth fighting against the Clean Feed legislation (it was a great big Internet filter for Australia, a terrible idea) which was thankfully defeated before it got off the ground.
We'll have to do the same for this.
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#5I cannot read that article in Firefox. Ironic
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#6It seems like they are just making it more explicit that companies must cooperate with the police. Isn't it already the case anyway if there is an appropriate court order? At least they are not suggesting to compromise or limit encryption in any way. What I fail to understand is how all this would help fighting crime. Criminals and terrorists can easily use end-to-end encryption for the communication. There is plenty…
>At least they are not suggesting to compromise or limit encryption in any way.
No, instead they're compromising trust in signed updates from vendors. That's far worse.
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#7Digital Rights Watch has more information and a submission system to help people write their feedback to the government: https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2018/08/19/defend-encrypti...
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#8The article mentions that Australia has no bill of rights which, whilst technically true, doesn't mean we don't have equivalent protections. Some are enshrined in our constitution whilst others are parts of common law and other legislation. The conclusion they draw from that is right however; a lot of laws can be introduced to our parliament that might not get off the ground elsewhere. It's why we've fervently fought…
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Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#9It seems like they are just making it more explicit that companies must cooperate with the police. Isn't it already the case anyway if there is an appropriate court order? At least they are not suggesting to compromise or limit encryption in any way. What I fail to understand is how all this would help fighting crime. Criminals and terrorists can easily use end-to-end encryption for the communication. There is plenty…
Unfortunately it gives them the legal capability to require your startup/IT company/multinational to put development time in at their request to enable your software to give them the access they want.
For example-
get chats in real time
log IP addresses and pass them to gov
open containers stored on your infrastructure
get into the phone or device you have sold to a client previously
These are not interpretations of the legislation- these are the use cases they wrote it to solve.
As ex LEO I get it but the burden on organisations is going to bad for business, not to mention the insecure solutions that are going to get drummed up/coded on the fly to comply with these requests- security nightmare.
There is some reasonable paranoia that this might be a Trojan to enable access in the US. Can't pass legislation in the US? Easy, get your vassal state (AU) to pass it, then ask them to investigate your target and then force people to comply with your vassals state's request.
"yeh I know you can't do that in Texas but you can in Western Australia and we, the US, has a treaty with Australia so you're just going to hand over that data. We'll deliver it to the Aussies for you"
I may be paranoid, but I'm not the only one seeing this angle on it.
Big conspiracies- count me out. Gov is lazy and disorganised. Little conspiracies between gov-buddies ? Absolutely.
Re: Australia Wants to Take Government Surveillance to the Next Level
#10> The government has been quick to claim that this is not a back door, and the bill prohibits requests to companies to create “systemic” weaknesses.
Claiming that you're not backdooring something doesn't stop it from being a backdoor.