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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."
Ever!
are also being used by people who mean us harm. Shall we shut them all down?
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
Hi Mr. Dutton,
You're drunk again. Please go back to your hell hole with Pauline.
Thank you.
IIRC, the Bouncy Castle crypto package , developed to get around the 90's US export controls on strong ciphers, originates from Down Under. Funny their govt is now expecting developers to install Magic Good-Guys-Only Backdoors into their software so the Five-Eyes Panopticon can snoop as wanted.
only outlaws will have it? cease fire stand down,, there's moms & babys in every town..
Anyone remember when it was illegal in the US to export encryption technology? This really needs to stop. From a bird's eye perspective, governments are trying to throw out the baby with the bath water. Or, is it all about $$$? I just want to live in peace please.
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.
because it's not gonna happen...
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.........
I have often remarked that no nation would ever really tolerate free speech. Here we have government offering an excuse to eliminate free speech completely. Frankly there are numerous issues mixed in with this. Criminal activity is now so common that we simply can not detain, arrest or imprison more people. There are already problems concerning which laws get enforced and against whom they are enforced. if we had high quality investigation of all our people the nation would collapse due to the vast number of people who would be in the justice system. For example how many people have cheated on their income tax or made false statements to insurance companies? How about hunters or fishermen who cheat a bit on size or number of animals taken? Frankly most small businesses also commit crimes. For example even some McDonald's chain stores alter time cards to make certain no worker can get full time status. That is criminal fraud but who knows of a single case of such a store being padlocked? Arrest and prosecution has a lot to do with who you are.
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
Sure, if you ignore the fact that most terrorists attacks are being done by native-born citizens or people not from countries on Trump's ban list but instead were radicalized years after immigrating.
Does the Australian government know that even if they could compel companies like Apple access to their systems, they won't get access to what their users send especially if users are using end-to-end encryption.
And then there's the issue of once they get access to one thing, another app would soon appear that would thwart their suvelliance
Short summary of the issues
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
We had similar encrypted channels already in IRC, where some clients provided facilities to encrypt a query with a shared key on both ends.
Currently, with the centralized messenger services running through the infrastructure of big companies, there is a big attack vector on the privacy of communication: Go directly to the provider of the infrastructure. If the encryption runs totally on the client side piggy-backing on the "official" infrastructure, a big single point of failure is removed, although it is still easy to determine when and with whom you communicate.
This post is a joke right? American-born, non-Muslims kill more people in a year in mass shootings than all Muslim terrorist attacks combined.
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.........
Ah, a crusade idiot. You do realize that Islamic nations started their jihad against Europe four hundred years before the crusades, including conquering Spain and the first crusade was the result of the Byzantine emperor asking for assistance against invading Turks who were Muslim.
Try learning some history before spouting your anti-Christian talking points.
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.
Compare and contrast the number of terrorists from Iran (on "The List") vs. the number of terrorists from Our Friend And Ally, Saudi Arabia (not on The List) and Pakistan (also not). The List just gives Trump supports an illusion of Doing Something; never mind that it is useless and indeed counter-productive.
Most of the crazies have been home-grown (and many have been converts).
This is usually because people are bored out of their fucking mind, same with black bloc and antifa types who go around destroying shit. They always blame it on something like democracy or capitalism, but it's really just people looking for a cause because they've never accomplished anything in life.
Some people within ISIS have even commented that the native Arabs are less fundamentalist than the westerners who moved there. For example, the natives are known to smoke and drink on occasion, whereas the westerners are always purist adherents to the Quran.
The first world has so few social problems that this may be something we'll have to get used to going forward.
This post is a joke right? American-born, non-Muslims kill more people in a year in mass shootings than all Muslim terrorist attacks combined.
This is a joke right? You know that ISIS were killing faster than statisticians count.
Indeed. Let this be a warning to current Australian society.
What the actual fuck is wrong with these gods-be-damned politicians that they don't understand the simple FACT that if you put a gods-be-damned 'backdoor' into ANY encryption algorithm, that your DESTROY it's ability to keep sensitive data out of the hands of the very people you're trying to 'protect' against!? Does the entire gods-be-damned WORLD have lead in it's drinking water? THIS is the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say "People are getting DUMBER". Don't these politicians have techical advisors who are (hopefully!) competent and intelligent, telling them precisely what I said above (and a million times already)?
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.
Hey look guys, found the defeatist NSA shill!
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.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
It wasn't an act of terrorism, but it may have been an attempt at genocide with bioweapons...
I'm not sure I see the distinction. If I mail you an envelope full of anthrax, that's terror, right? But if my ultimate goal is to kill everyone "like you", it's now an attempt at genocide but not terror? Why are terrorism and genocide attempts mutually exclusive?
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Timeline of Irish National Liberation Army actions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Incident No.
Injury 47,541
Shooting incident 36,923
Armed robbery 22,539
People charged with paramilitary offences 19,605
Bombing and attempted bombing 16,209
Arson 2,225
Good luck legislating math.
The definition of terrorism Google gives me is, "the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims." This definition doesn't preclude genocide. Even your M-W definition doesn't make coercion a necessary component.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
"We need to ensure the Internet is not used as a dark place for bad people to hide their criminal activities from the law"
vs.
"We need to ensure the Internet is not used as a dark place for government organizations to abuse and violate citizens privacy by those who are above the law"
>Someone should have told the Aboriginals & Native Americans that a long time ago
I don't think you know what "letting" means.
...and only criminals will have privacy.
All the more reason to use open source software that doesn't rely on third party corporate keyholders. Seriously, anyone really concerned about secure communication is not going to rely on a consumer oriented mass-market service run by a profit-making company. They'll use a custom one-time pad for encryption and some steganographic technique to send the encrypted message through an unconnected communication or not use the public Internet at all.
In Australia, every year, cops kill more people than terrorists do.
Dialectician. Archology.
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Show me on the 1st Amendment bobblehead where the moderator touched you...
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.
Stop spreading lies. Or at least post proof.
So are roads. And toilets. Especially toilets.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Present day modern cryptography already can be secure "forever" (i.e. unless somebody finds a fundamental weakness in the cipher itself, brute-forcing will not ever be possible). That war has long been lost by the government creeps that feel threatened by anything they cannot control. All they can do now is a lot of damage.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Here is the correct link: http://www.reuters.com/article...
I think you're confusing the Inquisition with the Crusades.
Regardless....all the other religions have civilized and aren't in the business of widespread killing of those not of their particular brand of religion...except for the stone age Muslims.
It is they who need to come into the 21st century and learn to live and tolerate others.
Many of the other religions aren't perfect, but they're a darn site better and SAFER than the present day muslims.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
And today present date....who should you fear violence from more...the IRA or whomever, or the muslim jihadists?
I"m not afraid of many Irish groups coming to my shores and flying planes into buildings or shooting up Xmas parties....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Giving blankets infected with smallpox to people located in the United States obviously satisfies part A and C. [Attempted murder is a violation of United States law.] One could argue that it was intended to intimidate the civilian population to whom the blankets were given and so satisfies part B item i.
That was a LONG time ago and different situation...the lands of the world were all up for grabs.
They're talking about Aboriginal and Native American populations. The lands weren't vacant and up for grabs. They had existing nations with unique cultures, trade routes, economic structure, social structure, political structure, and military.
The lands were already populated. In both cases the native people were less able to defend themselves and consequently lost a war against invaders. One of the spoils of war is writing the history books. In both of these cases the invaders said the land was not owned by anyone else so they claimed it for themselves.
Now we have decided who has what land and civilizations formed....and now we have people just blowing up and shooting people, and slashing them...for theological reasons.
That has been the case for several thousand years. These brief periods of mild peace are the rare exception in world history, not the rule.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
No he just made a promise to Trump.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
What about all the people who are citizens of western countries and were brainwashed by online videos and radical clerics into committing acts of terror?
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.
All those lands have been passed around from conquering civilization to conquering civilization. Why would some Englander have cared whether some tribe came in and rolled through Judea? Oh... right. They're Holy Lands. They're Christian, so of course, they'll go to war.. for God.
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]
----
[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;".
"We need to ensure the world is not a dark place where bad people become authority figures to abuse the law,"
Fixed.
However, if you spent some quality time with your local militia group, your skin would crawl. I personally know several people that grew up in some of the pseudo-christian groups, and hhttps://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10864545&cid=54811229#ave personal experience the terror and fear they generated in the towns near their compounds in Idaho, Montana, Utah, etc. Also see the stats at https://www.splcenter.org/2010... - those are just the tip of the iceberg, the ones that gain national attention.
I didn't want to reach too far back into the past, but the Klan comes to mind. http://bit.ly/2tcvOJo
Extremism respects no flavor or religion.
I'm aware that Ward Churchill has fraudulently claimed that the 1837 outbreak was caused by an attempt at genocide by the US military using plague blankets. However, that was not the only incident. In fact there is hard evidence of intentional genocide using plague blankets as bioweapons against the native Americans by the British military.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
-----BEGIN TERRORIST CIPHER-----
A1D8B658 47D95C1D D2C56F6F DC39F3BA 0B35A581 784EC213 80A4CD51 E5722B6C
885786F4 B1137F31 D1BE63AF 476CC253 A1189926 B920AB01 7C2FDB67 02E12DB0
5F9C08B8 1FE8310D B1EC05B6 DE2F3017 C5B05543 E0898D31 FACA7122 8E95222C
25B698BA C3B6B912 E29FE1F3 9732783A C0A8A711 9515014B DD1F5639 B912D62E
8151B97F 4C14A2A7 3A8EB969 8648B905 206F525A 236705CC B77CBC38 69538CD0
79E2026A 2AAA26F9 A292223B 68C17CE0
-----END TERRORIST CIPHER-----
You are right, manufacturers will be forced to comply. I wrote to Brandis about this in 2015, it set the stage for what is happening now and was predictable. Not only is the state not interested in protecting her citizens, it is quite clear that monitoring the civilian population is a priority over everything else.
I see little sincerity in the Australian Government on this issue and judging from previous legislations this proposed one will contain as many flaws as the one I wrote about in 2015. We will have to wait and see what emerges in the proposed legislation.
Here is the 2015 letter:
Dear Honourable Minister,
First, my apologies that the available time and gravity of this Bill has not allowed me to write a proper paper based piece of mail that addresses you in a more appropriate manner.
I write to regarding the concerns that I have after reading Part One of "Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015 as an Information Technology professional with roughly thirty years of experience, including experience as a Security Technologist, Technology Architect and Business Analyst. This Bill should not be passed at all and if introduced in its current form will expose Australia and her population to economic damage.
The most pressing of my concerns is the Bill introduces and inadvertently provides a significant vector for Australian citizens to be defrauded by organised crime in an automated manner. Additionally there are no protections for Australian Citizens who are subject to abuse of access to this data and no opportunity for relief through complaint mechanism such as the Privacy Commissioner or the Telecommunications Ombudsman.
No fraud protection measures are in place and the Bill casually exposes all Australians to a wide range of vectors for fraud such as banking, superannuation, insurance and, more serious threats such as identity theft and harassment This will first cost taxpayers a fortune, then again as a consumer, then again in economic fraud. Australians are being asked to pay for the systems that will be used as a vector for crime because criminal do not care about violating such systems to access the opportunities to raid Australians of their net worth.
From a business perspective, implementation of these type of systems poses significant technical challenges to business to comply with section 187AA the Bill to make it function. Any business who tries to implement such a system will be asked to pay for imposing severe capacity limitations on their infrastructure to grow their business whilst capturing the data tabled. A lot of mostly useless data will be generated for law enforcement. At a miserly 4 internet accesses per person per day such a system, nationally, would be required to record 7.3^10 accesses to retain 2 years data. I suspect that people will do more that 4 browser updates in a day.
The chilling effect of this is that many existing viable small businesses operating in and proposed for Australia that create a modern economy, will not be viable on Australian soil. The economic benefits of electronic commerce will progressively go to to other countries. Even a cursory examination of Sections 187AA.3A,3B suggest that any computing infrastructure can be subject to the Minister's scrutiny, subjected to a Communications Access Controller, the distraction of the machination of an Implementation plan and the unknown risk associated with non-compliance. The government will be responsible for driving away the very kind of business opportunities a 21st century Australia needs for economic growth.
The type and capacity of infrastructure to do the required data capture will be quite onerous and unaffordable for some businesses, even if they could access the expertise to implement it. Having created similar types of systems in my work for the worlds largest corporate businesses my assessment is the data collection requirements under this Bill are much more, now that I understand the propos
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
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.
We would, but given America is one of the biggest military powers in the world, we don't your boy Trump is going to let us ban you yanks from our shores. Meanwhile we are currently important plane-loads of Irish to do jobs Australians are simply too educated to want to do, so we can't exactly ban them either.
But you're probably right. In an ideal world we would ban Americans and Irish from our shores to help protect us from countries that are literal breeding grounds for terrorists.
"Then the soldiers and colonists conquered fair and square"
That doesn't jibe with history
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
" instead primitive tribes that modern day society has glorified and romanticized in order to make white people feel bad about what they did"
It doesn't matter whether they were primitive or not and the conquering nations absolutely should feel bad - they committed terrible crimes despite their lofty ideals & religious truths. In short, thieving & murdering hypocrites.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Stop spreading lies. Or at least post proof.
You're replying to the wrong comment
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
And here's proof
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
So you support children going to jail to serve the rest of their fathers sentence as well? Should the father die before getting parole?
The suggestions are not mutually exclusive.
Seems to be only the extremes with you.
Either the old nations were primitives that deserved to be destroyed and conquered, or the invaders should be punished to the furthest generations.
Most people pick somewhere in the middle. For most of us that means recognizing the acts of the past were harmful in several ways, try to find some ways to correct the wrongs (like making an effort to treat people fairly and not discriminate), then move on with life trying to do the best you can. Then hopefully we won't screw up the world too badly for our children.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Of course the natives are less fundamentalist then people who have moved to "get in touch" with their religion.
Only the most hardcore people would move because of any ideology.
My Transformation Website
Kindle Books http://www.catprog.org/rev
Interactive CYOA http://www.catprog.org/st
Fuck em. They missed their chance.
Now stop whining over it ya pansy!
like the South over losing the Civil War? When are they going to "assimilate" into America?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
The muslims were basically committing genocide against the people currently living in those lands
Again, they would not have given a shit if it wasn't the sacredness of the lands and their religion that told them they had to defend it. Was rousing the peasants and sending them two thousand miles away something they did if, say, the poor folks in India were getting massacred?
"Then the soldiers and colonists conquered fair and square"
That doesn't jibe with history
No? I seem to recall that disease did a pretty good job (it did most of the heavy work, really), and tribe by tribe, the natives were forced to give up their land.
Sorry, by "fair and square" I didn't mean to imply that the US lived up to treaties and agreements, which it most certainly did not.