Crypto-Bashing Prime Minister Argues The Laws Of Mathematics Don't Apply In Australia (independent.co.uk)

An anonymous reader quotes the Independent:Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said the laws of mathematics come second to the law of the land in a row over privacy and encryption... When challenged by a technology journalist over whether it was possible to tackle the problem of criminals using encryption -- given that platform providers claim they are currently unable to break into the messages even if required to do so by law -- the Prime Minister raised eyebrows as he made his reply. "Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia," he said... "The important thing is to recognise the challenge and call on the companies for assistance. I am sure they know morally they should... They have to face up to their responsibility."
Facebook has already issued a statement saying that they "appreciate the important work law enforcement does, and we understand the need to carry out investigations. That's why we already have a protocol in place to respond to any requests we can.

"At the same time, weakening encrypted systems for them would mean weakening it for everyone."

Comments

Idiots everywhere...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't take this anymore...

Re:Idiots everywhere...

[flopsquad]

Can't take this anymore...

Hard realization: If there was a brief blip on humanity's timeline where science and rationality held the tiniest advantage in our collective esteem over base tribalism, fearmongering, and ignorance-as-a-worldview, it came and went while we were busy mistaking it for a new era of reason.

Re: Idiots everywhere...

[Tangential]

It shall soon be illegal to speak in person without government authorities present to ensure nothing illegal is being discussed.

The government rep wouldn't have to be present if they could just convince people to carry small, wirelessly connected computing devices in their pockets that contain cameras and microphones. If people were to start doing that, then the government would be pretty much be able to monitor anything it wants anytime it wants.

Luckily, I doubt there's much chance of getting folks to carry such a device around with them at all times....

Re:Idiots everywhere...

[Plus1Entropy]

This is great news actually, because it means that this moron is not the PM of Australia. After all, to become PM you must be the leader of the party with the largest representation in parliament. If the laws of Mathematics don't apply, well... how can you say that one number is larger than another?

Re:Idiots everywhere...

[Ol Olsoc]

Unfortunately, for most of humanity, including basically all politicians and their fans, that is completely true. Only a small part of the human race qualifies as rational and these people do not seek power.

Next up? We need to have a vote on Ohm's law! All resistance must be eliminated!

obey gravity...it's the law

[turkeydance]

old old joke. couldn't top Turnbull's though.

Re:obey gravity...it's the law

[sheramil]

"I know dis defies da law of gravity... but I never studied law!" - Bugs Bunny

Mr Turnbull has. What is with politicians today making nonsensical statements like this? I would have thought to get to the position of Prime Minister - or President - you'd at least have to have had some experience in thinking before opening your yap.

Re:obey gravity...it's the law

[Anonymous Coward]

Douglas Adams might have something to share on the topic:

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Re:obey gravity...it's the law

[sg_oneill]

It makes me uncomfortable to say it, but he's prefereable to 99% of the others. I suspect that statement, made in the UK to a UK paper, was made to impress politicians in the UK that he's being tough and standing up to the cyber-terrorists.

Whatever Turnbull may be as a person, is pretty much redundant as he's completely incapable of standing up to the regressives in his party. He's so frightened of being rolled by the catholic far right in the party (Tony abbot, etc) he's sold everything he stood for down the river and just does whatever the ultra conservartives tell him to do, even s that behavior further sinks his reputation down the toilet of public opinion.

And the stupefying thing is, he's still getting knived by the far right anyway. He gains nothing by continuing to inflict unpopular and authoritarian far right nonsense on the population.

Re:obey gravity...it's the law

[denzacar]

Oh come on... Think bigger.

Why not just order that the criminals are no longer protected by the law of gravity?
So they'll just float away, up into space. Or down, them being in Australia and all.

Then, they could get rid of those pesky laws of thermodynamics and finally allow Australia to harness the power of all those perpetual motion machines people keep inventing.

Re:obey gravity...it's the law

[Anne Thwacks]

I've no idea how you can calculate taxes without mathematics

Then I guarantee you will never get to be a tax advisor to a politician.

Re:obey gravity...it's the law

[Kjella]

I think you're setting up a false impression that "uncrackable" is the standard most people have had or are looking for.

Most people consider:

• their home private, even though it can be invaded and searched by the police.
• a safe private, even though it can be seized and drilled open by the police.
• letters private, even though they can be opened and read by the police.
• packages private, even though they can be opened and inspected by the police.
• phone calls private, even though they can be wiretapped by the police.

That the general public has access to truly unbreakable encryption (except for the $5 wrench) is a new situation that's fundamentally different from the past few centuries. Did people really ask for it? Or did it more or less just happen, robbing law enforcement, military intelligence etc. of powerful tools to fight crime, terror and enemy states? Look at all the people who saw Snowden and more or less said "duh, that's what the NSA should be doing you traitor". There are a lot of people that want to revive the Clipper chip and backdoor everyone's phones.

That said, I think globalism will throw a monkey wrench in their efforts. Would Americans trust a backdoor made by Apple? Maybe. Would Russia, China, Germany or the rest of the world? Hell no, not as long as all the keys are on US soil, one NSL or NSA black ops job and it's all compromised. And no handing the keys directly to the government, that's too open for abuse. It would have to be to my local ISP or telco, with the government asking permission through a warrant. But as long as I could use some inner crypto without repercussions, what's the point? They decrypt it, find my PGP message and... nothing. They'd also have to outlaw everything else.

That could be one route though, say that if you use these law enforcement compliant devices there is a system and a process for retrieving the key. Everything else, you either hand over the key or go to jail. I think you're kinda missing the point of what he said, if you've built a system relying on some form of "willful ignorance" of what the key is, they can always make a law to force you to change the way the system works. Like, either comply or shut down - those are your options, like they did with Lavabit. They can't compel you to the impossible, but they can compel you to cease doing whatever they don't like.

Ancestor found for Malcolm Turnbull

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

A quick search shows that Malcolm Turnbull has Royal Blood and he is a direct descendant, all the way through male heirs, of King Canute.

What? Want citation? Just give me 30 minutes and then check Wikipedia.

The PM is an idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Malcolm Turnball (or Chairman Mal as we call him) is an ex lawyer from a privileged background who lucked into dropping a few bucks into some 1990's "computer thingy that my financial advisor assures me is a good investment" and riding in the wave of the first tech boom, to the tune of about 300 million dollars.

He honestly considers himself the smartest person in the room.

He's a fucking lawyer who won life's big lottery.

I'm sure you guys have similar stories about your politicians.

The sooner this imbecile is gone from politics, the better.

'Law'?

[yndrd1984]

It's disappointing to me that we still use the word 'law' to refer to entirely different things:

1. Things humans make up that they then want other human beings to follow.
2. Things humans make up after observing something in order to describe it.

Descriptive laws and prescriptive laws are exact opposites, both chronologically and causally.

Re:'Law'?

[houghi]

That is language for you. Language between humans is always unpricise. Some attempts have been done to correct this and all have failed.

Context is everything and words will have different meaning at different moments. e.g. hacker or 'bad'.

Think of it as the computer language Perl, but more confusing.

sacrifices without actually addressing problem

[z3alot]

Aside from eliminating privacy for everyone, can measures like this be expected to actually fight terror or crime at all? Encryption is essentially a solved problem; a coordinated terror group needs only do a little work to make its own app using strong end to end encryption in the backend. Insisting that popular messaging apps be insecure simply robs the common citizen from privacy protection tools without addressing the problem which is claimed to be tackled.

Re:sacrifices without actually addressing problem

[sit1963nz]

Terrorism is the excuse, not the reason
The reason is so those in power can snoop on the population and control the population.

A quick read about "numbers stations" shows how information can be broadcast but the recipients can not be traced.

A conversation with the Brits about how the IRA were able to operate for decades without computers and encryption would also be enlightening.

And of course people have something to hide, a high flying lawyer who like to dress in women clothes at night, a gay footballer who is not "out", a politician who visits prostitutes, a bored housewife on Tinder, a family whose children may have different fathers, an abused wife who has a secret bank account, there are thousands of legitimate reasons for privacy and security.
If any of these people became an activist, the dirt the government gathers will allow them control.

Re:sacrifices without actually addressing problem

[shilly]

It's a terrible phrase. It purposely obscures the fact that there are legitimate reasons to hide things. It is a perfect encapsulation of everything that is wrong with authoritarian populist politics.

I for one

[DivineKnight]

I for one look forward to Australia's War on Mathematics.

transcript of Turnbull's press conference

[caviare]

https://www.malcolmturnbull.co...

Re:If, by his own admission, he is not....

[mark-t]

If he didn't disagree with the math, then he would know that there is no possible way to do that without compromising the security of things that *should* legitimately be encrypted, such as electronic bank transactions, for example. If back doors exist, they will be just as usable by people with nefarious intentions as they would be by those who may mean, however sincerely, to protect us from such people.

If law enforcement has an encryption back door, then that exact same back door can and most certainly would be used by criminals. Laws against it wouldn't actually stop anyone who was already intent on breaking the law anyways, so all one is accomplishing by adding such backdoors is endangering everybody so that law enforcement is more readily able to catch people that may have otherwise used it for nefarious purposes.... except now law enforcement has exponentially *MORE* work to do, because now they also have to catch all of the bad guys who are using these back doors with nefarious intentions to harm people... people they wouldn't even have to *TRY* to catch if private individuals were allowed to use truly secure encryption.

To be fair, it is certainly regrettable that criminals can get away with their actions by using externally undecipherable encryption to conceal any evidence of their misdoings, but in the end, it is simply outside of the realm of the principles of reality by which this world seems to operate that one can ever really prevent this without seriously endangering those that could have had an entirely legitimate use for encryption.

There is no agent in this world, or for that matter in all of the entire knowable universe, that could hope to actually enforce the notion of "X can do this math, but Y cannot", so that is why what he is asking for defies the laws of math.... and unlike laws of a nation, the laws of math are not simply constraints by which people or things are expected or obligated to conform to, they are observations that have been rigorously proven to be universally true within the domain that any given such law governs.

Re:Storm in a tea-cup

[Opportunist]

The laws of nature limit what laws humans may implement. You cannot make a law that falling out of windows is illegal on grounds that gravity must not apply. I mean, of course you can make such a law, it's just impossible to enforce it and you look like a complete idiot for even proposing one.

Like this goofball here.

And yes, it IS impossible to give governments a backdoor while at the same time having sensible encryption that allows your economy to make sensible business deals. You cannot have your cake and eat it too. You can either have an economy that works or you can have broken encryption with backdoors. Pick your poison. Because one thing is certain: As soon as you must not use sensible encryption anymore in a country, it becomes really, really, REALLY difficult to convince a foreign actor to deal with you in any sort of deal that requires even the least kind of confidentiality.

And you better don't expect me to do any kind of business online in such a country.