Slashdot Mirror
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."
If there's no place for terrorists to hide then there's no place for *anyone* to hide, and that is unacceptable considering how valuable it is to hide from oppression or the abusers of the system used to ensure there are no hiding spots, those who operate the system are disproportionately advantaged and with access comes the capability of concealing themselves, censoring, framing content and concealing context, etc.
This idea is ridiculous and imbalanced off the bat.
Twinstiq, game news
I repeat:
Jean has a big moustache.
Aunt Marie is doing well.
I repeat:
Aunt Marie is doing well.
These where the message from Radio Free Internet.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
You know, when we have radical Presbyterians running around, driving trucks through crowds on holidays, gunning down co-workers on Xmas party days, and bombing outside of concerts and just generally shooting and blowing up groups of innocent people....we can start worrying about those damned jihadist Christians then....but, until then, why don't we try to address the problems folks at hand now, eh?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Quit letting people from terrorist prone countries or parts of the world into YOUR country...where they refuse to assimilate and become pots of festering terrorist ideology waiting to unleash itself into the host country.
Someone should have told the Aboriginals & Native Americans that a long time ago
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The obvious response of technology firms is to structure their encryption so that it becomes impossible for them to decrypt the content because they don't have the keys themselves. The security guys at pretty much every such company would prefer to build such systems anyway. They generally don't because doing so adds some additional layers of complexity. It's simpler and more cost-effective to instead build a key management system that is secure against compromise even by internal attackers, relying on the typical tools (secure hardware, affirmative control, responsibility splitting, etc.).
But... it's not *that* much harder to build a system in which no one but the parties communicating have the keys. Compared to the legal and administrative costs involved in having to deal with an unending stream of government requests for data (which governments almost always expect companies to comply with at their own expense, as a cost of doing business), it's a no-brainer. Much cheaper to build the more complicated decentralized security model, enabling the company to respond to government requests with "Can't. Here's our security design. You can see that we have no access to the decryption keys."
Of course, the obvious response of legislators is then to mandate government-accessible backdoors. That, however, creates an entirely new public perception of the request, making it a very different game, politically.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Quit letting people from terrorist prone countries or parts of the world into YOUR country...where they refuse to assimilate and become pots of festering terrorist ideology waiting to unleash itself into the host country.
Someone should have told the Aboriginals & Native Americans that a long time ago
It wasn't until I read this that it occurred to me that handing out smallpox infected blankets was an act of terrorism.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Give them time. We've been warned for decades now that the full-on Police State is coming, and now I'm starting to think that's what's going to happen. Then all the terrorists in the world will throw a big party, because they will have won.
Apropos of nothing, I see why Humans can never be immortal: After you put up with a hundred years of the continual BULLSHIT that your own species perpetrates on itself, you just don't want to see any more and WISH to die.
I've heard that terrorists consume dihydrogen monoxide. We really need to ban this horrible substance once and for all!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Encryption, the best tool to detect ignorance on politicians.
We should all be using it to give politicians with stupid proposals the boot.
I looked up the numbers and terrorists kill about 28,000 people a year worldwide. And most of them are likely Muslims that the terrorists don't think are in the "right" sect.
From the linked article: "More than 55% of all attacks took place in five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nigeria), and 74% of all deaths due to terrorist attacks took place in five countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Syria, and Pakistan)."
Terrorism in countries like the US or Australia is actually vanishingly low. It's touted as a horrible threat by politicians to take away rights and to get themselves more power, but you're more likely to die in a car accident than from a terrorist. (There are 37,000 road accident deaths in the US per year and 1.3 million worldwide - Source.)
If people want to ban all Muslims because of the tiny risk of terrorism, why aren't we banning all motor vehicles to combat the higher risk of automobile-related deaths?
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Good luck legislating math.
When mathematicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "logically inconsistent with published proofs, and those proofs are the basis of EVERYTHING".
When scientists say something is impossible, they usually mean "inconsistent with published models, and those models are good enough to take us to the moon and back".
When politicians say something is impossible, they usually mean "the current legislature will say no, but that can be changed".
When politicians hear "secure encryption with back doors is impossible", they hear "impossible" in legislative terms when it's really at least in scientific terms, and very close to mathematical terms.
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.