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Australia Set To Spy on WhatsApp Messages With Encryption Law (bloomberg.com)
Australia is set to give its police and intelligence agencies the power to access encrypted messages on platforms such as WhatsApp, becoming the latest country to face down privacy concerns in the name of public safety. From a report: Amid protests from companies such as Facebook and Google, the government and main opposition struck a deal on Tuesday that should see the legislation passed by parliament this week. Under the proposed powers, technology companies could be forced to help decrypt communications on popular messaging apps, or even build new functionality to help police access data.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the legislation is needed to help foil terrorist attacks and organized crime. Critics say it is flawed and could undermine security across the Internet, jeopardizing activities from online voting to market trading and data storage.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the legislation is needed to help foil terrorist attacks and organized crime. Critics say it is flawed and could undermine security across the Internet, jeopardizing activities from online voting to market trading and data storage.
Do these legislative entities not realize that the bad guys can write their own encrypted apps?
Or send coded messages through existing apps that still won't help law enforcement?
What's to stop nefarious people from using that same functionality? If police can use it, even if you give them the benefit of all doubt that they would never do anything harmful with it, then the bad guys can use it too.... either because of leaks or hacking or what have you... and because the technology has to accommodate being decrypted in this way by legitimate law enforcement, how does the technology tell the difference, and recognize when it is being accessed by legitimate law enforcement and when it is not? And if (when) it cannot, then what extra measures are law enforcement going to take to protect the general public from such eventuality?
It seems to me that this is going to make law enforcement's job harder, not easier.
Australian lawmakers are idiots.... and that's being complimentary to actual idiots.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is stupid. Encryption is mathematics, and mathematics has no built in back-doors for illiterate politicians who don't understand how encryption works.
If you poke holes in it, then another motivated actor can find those holes and exploit them. Period.
Tell you what, politicians who demand broken encryption should be forced to use any such system for their own security. They'll cry loudly how their stuff is too important to use broken encryption.
Any encryption method which has back doors is, by definition, no longer secure. This will impact literally everything which uses encryption -- which these days is pretty much everything, including financial transactions.
You can't legislate that Pi is 3, and you can't legislate that encryption can be bypassed without understanding that if you can bypass it, someone else can and will also bypass it.
This is like mandating that all locks have a law enforcement button which opens the lock, and then saying nobody else will ever use that button because they're not supposed to -- it simply doesn't work that way in real life. Once you break it, it's broken for good.
These companies can't deploy once means of encryption in one place, and another means for Australia. So, yeah, TFS is right, this could undermine all network security.
Fucking idiot politicians.
It is worth knowing that this proposal emerged fully formed from the security agencies. This probably means that it was cooked up by the five eyes collective led by the USA and Australia was chosen as the country most likely to support it's introduction.
As many people have pointed out there is no way of implementing this without fundamentally violating the security of encrypted message applications and the impacts would flow on across the world. The assumption is that doing this would be undesirable.
Once in place, and proven to work other countries will rush to "catch up" with similar laws. Until this occurs the five eyes nations can all utilize the Australian back doors via existing intelligence sharing agreements.