Australian Government and Cracking

D-Fly writes "The Australian government is trying to withdraw from public view a secret report which, among MANY other interesting things, recommends that laws be changed so that Aussie spy agencies can legally "hack" (their terminology) their way into private computer systems. I recommend that you read the report. It reflects a lot of the same motivations and goals you would see among US intelligence services. It's just that you rarely see this kind of stuff go public."

Comments

This seems sensibly written.

[Christopher Thomas]

That doesn't mean that I support the idea of the government of any country being able to put back doors in Joe Average's computer system. However, they do seem to have a good grasp of the problems that easily available strong encryption pose to law enforcement.

As far as I can tell, the sections deleted fall into two categories:

• Admitting that competent criminals can easily use encryption that their government can't break.
  This is true. There isn't much that they can do about it, and they know it, but they'd rather not proclaim this to the masses at large, because a large fraction of the criminal population is lacking in common sense and won't clue into the need to use this for a while if left alone. That still leaves the competent criminals, of course.
  
  
• Asking for the power to legally break into peoples' computer systems and to bug commercial programs to echo data back to them.
  I tend to agree that this might be the only practical way to monitor encrypted communications and so gain incriminating evidence. However, I have doubts about it being worth the cost in practice (it's too easy to abuse this power, which means that eventually the intelligence agency would). The fact that the Australian government was reluctant to release this information shows that they know how well this would fly with the public.
  
  

Anyone reasonably competent could figure out the above on their own, so it's not really secret. What this document says to me is that the agency writing it _was_ reasonably competent, and realizes that it's up the creek.