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Australia To Compel Technology Firms To Provide Access To Encrypted Missives (reuters.com)
Australia on Friday proposed new laws to compel companies such as U.S. social media giant Facebook and device manufacturer Apple to provide security agencies access to encrypted messages. From a report: The measures will be the first in an expected wave of global legislation as pressure mounts on technology companies to provide such access after several terror suspects used encrypted applications ahead of attacks. Australia, a staunch U.S. ally, is on heightened alert for attacks by home-grown radicals since 2014 and authorities have said they have thwarted several plots, although Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said law enforcement needed more help. "We need to ensure the internet is not used as a dark place for bad people to hide their criminal activities from the law," Turnbull told reporters in Sydney. "The reality is, however, that these encrypted messaging applications and voice applications are being used obviously by all of us, but they're also being used by people who seek to do us harm."
Exactly. Or a simple book cipher, or steganography. It's just too laughably easy for REAL terrorist types to communicate in perfect secrecy. What measures like this are about is for Law Enforcement(TM) types to trivially easily spy on the general populace.
Terrorists don't spout their plans all over Twitter's mail like a Trump family member. It won't make any difference to them.
If they backdoor encryption, they backdoor their own security. Putin's boys must be laughing their cocks off at these idiots. All of those backdoors would soon be in their hands, and with it control of Australia. Do they really think only *they* the 'good' guys will use the backdoors they put in?
Do they also want to leave some of the border unguarded?
Why not move their elections online and be done with it?
Bad example...the Crusades were a reaction to the Muslims overtaking the "Holy Land"...and not letting Christians in....it was a defensive move back in the day.
Once again, the Muslims were the initial aggressors.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Yes and no, while an ISP can trivially block certain traffic they wouldn't be able to block encryption as a whole so easily. It would be a never ending game of cat and mouse as ISPs struggle to figure out every possible way to obfusicate encryption.,Not only does it not solve the problem, it's a huge expense to the ISPs to maintain if it becomes their legal obligation to do so, and if they're not required to maintain the law then it's simply ineffective to begin with. Even using a whitelist of "approved traffic" wouldn't fix this as there's simply too many ways to wrap unapproved traffic, and a blacklist is equally easy to circumvent.
There's no true solution outside of manually monitoring every single piece of traffic for new ways of getting around the law, and as we all know: criminals don't care that your law exists and will get around it.
It wasn't until I read this that it occurred to me that handing out smallpox infected blankets was an act of terrorism.
It wasn't an act of terrorism, but it may have been an attempt at genocide with bioweapons...but it's not clear whether it was an intentional use of bioweaponry or not.
It was neither an act of terrorism nor an attempted genocide because it didn't happen. The entire story is a fraud, perpetrated by a former "ethnic studies" professor named Ward Churchill.
The High Plains Smallpox Epidemic of 1837 was caused by personal contact with infected passengers from the riverboat St. Peter's, owned by a fur trading company. The epidemic on the High Plains centered around Fort Clark which, despite the name, was not a military installation. It was a privately owned fur trading post. The boss of Fort Clark was Francis Chardon, a fur trader. His personal diary survived to this day, one of numerous eyewitness accounts preserved from the time.
Not only were infected blankets not distributed, but correspondence from Joshua Pilcher, the Indian Bureau's sub-agent to the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Ponca at Fort Kiowa, just south of Fort Clark, to Mr. Chardon describes one particular problem interfering with attempts to contain the epidemic that is curiously relevant to today. A smallpox vaccine existed in 1837, but Mr. Pilcher noted "it is a verry delicate experiment among those wild Indians, because death from any other cause, while under the influence of Vaccination would be attributed to that + no other cause[.]"
Sound familiar?
In 2006, Ward Churchill was found guilty of seven counts of research misconduct by the University of Colorado Ethics Committee. He was fired in 2007. He promptly filed suit, and won a jury trial for wrongful dismissal. The jury followed the instructions to the letter in coming to their conclusion, but recognized Churchill for the lying shitheel he was and awarded him precisely $1.00. (One juror denied any such motivation in a public interview.) A judge vacated the jury verdict on the grounds that the (state) university enjoys quasi-judicial immunity. The Colorado Court of Appeals upheld that decision. The Colorado Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal and in 2013 agreed with both the first judge and the Court of Appeals that the university was immune to suit in these circumstances. The US Supreme Court declined to get involved.
It took 19 years from when Churchill first published his fraudulent bullshit in 1994 to the time when the judicial system finished with the case. It could easily take four or five generations for his lie to finally exit the public consciousness. This despite the fact that humanity currently has the fastest, most ubiquitous communications systems in the history of the species.
"A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on." —Mark Twain[1]
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[1] Except Samuel Clemens never wrote that. He was first credited with saying it in 1919, though he had died in 1910. The earliest known version of the sentiment in English was written by Jonathan Swift in 1710. His version was, "Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it;".