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> It's beyond difficult to describe how ridiculous that is.

Especially since ASIO (who really wanted this bill to pass) has stated that even if the bill passed today, they wouldn't have the necessary powers before Christmas.

So now any of the Five Eyes intelligence agencies can have a chat with ASIO and get them to coerce companies and individuals within companies to put these back doors in. Then they can all use the same back doors, so everyone living in the USA, UK, Canada, and New Zealand can have their encryption compromised and communications intercepted. There's no way that companies will create back doors specifically just for Australia, so everyone will have access.

In terms of Australia I'm not sure what we could actually do about this. Given that it's ASIO and other government departments that want these powers and that they have tried to introduce this sort of law over the course of the last decade. Both major parties have introduced legislation such as this and both voted for it. Maybe it is time for civil disobedience, and have everyone create and distribute encryption applications for all devices, because they couldn't possibly jail everyone right? I just wonder who will be the first person jailed or the first company fined for refusing these orders.

In terms of the world at large, which country should we trust now? A lot of the Western Democracies are becoming rapidly "security" focused authoritarian, and the other countries powerful enough to stand up to them are not much better. Should we trust applications with code written in Russia? What about hardware products manufactured in China? Should we trust services running in the USA? Now we also have to be wary of any company that runs a service in the Five Eyes countries.

Sometimes I wonder if we really have it better than people in the middle ages or other earlier periods, in some ways it clearly is, but in others it's just the same smell coming from different shit.

And then somebody from inside will get a guilty conscience, but remember what happened to Snowden, and just sell the backdoor straight to Huawei or NSO or Mohamad bin Salem (salving themselves by pretending they're going to donate hundreds of millions to "improving the world", but instead will by private islands and matching citizenships to Peter Thiel's...)

:sigh:

Realistically, if you were a developer not in the chain of command and asked to do this: Would you? Could you?

You would be knowingly putting your name to a vulnerability, and if someone asks then you have to keep it a secret and feign incompetence. Then if they revert your change you'll have to re-implement it.

If you do tell your superiors (which would be most likely what would happen, even before writing the code) then you would be in violation and could be put in jail.

If you refuse you would be put in jail, or they would go to the next person in their list.

If you think about logistics they'd have to make contact with people in the company to even find out who the devs are who are capable of making a backdoor. That would probably tip off others in the company as to what was happening anyway. You'd think they'd essentially have to serve the whole dev team with the secret order.

I think you could immediately resign. It's not a slavery bill... is it?

There's LinkedIn, there's social media, there's actually keeping a record of who enters and leaves a company's premises. There's heading down to the bar after work on Friday. There's community events and meetups.

And there's the previous backdoors they got into BitBucket/Github/Gitlab/Mercurial/Perforce/etc. And,no doubt, the "LEO Portals" that FAANG and FAANG wannabes already have which they'll just hand over to Australian authorities (probably including local councils and the taxi commission, based on evidence about how the metadata retention powers have been used...)

After the first few times they use these new powers, the people who're gonna come asking are 99.9% likely to know exactly who the person who will write, commit, and code review the backdoor they're demanding... And their direct manager, and the management chain all the way to the C suite...

I think I need to quit this entire industry, maybe take up boatbuilding or something...

But just seeing who's going into the building doesn't tell you exactly who is handling encryption and security in the codebase.

I wonder what the legal implications of just quitting on the spot when asked might be?

While America might have the Espionage Act, we have an law (passed a year or two ago) that gives mandatory minimum sentences of >15 years for revealing information about ASIO. And sharing the information (even if it's public) carries the same penalty -- so re-tweeting such revelations is a criminal offense. As is viewing it.

Chilling effect? More like dipped-in-liquid-nitrogen effect.

I hope Australia will have its own Edward Snowden, but the immediate repercussions would be far more severe in Australia.

It's 100% posturing and optics. There was nothing achieved by passing this law at the last day of sitting.

When I was a kid I really wanted to see Australia. Kangaroos! Coral! Toilets that go backwards! Crocodile Dundee! (I was a kid, alright?)

It just seems like a hotter, drier America at this point.

New Zealand still looks lovely though. Maybe they could invade you?

Bit harsh, compared to America it's still saner day-to-day with healthcare, gun control, and very liveable cities with public transport.

And it isn't like other western countries aren't thinking of doing something similar. While this is a bad law, being smug about it is the wrong reaction.

Which other western and non-English-speaking countries are doing similar things? This democratic-authoritarianism seems to be unique to the Five Eyes nations.

I don't mean to be smug. It's just kind of sad to see what's happened to a country with enormous soft power. Same goes for the US.

I wish I knew more western countries who were defending privacy, and the environment for that matter. For a period it kind of looked like Germany _might_ but that hasn't stood up (Who knows, maybe the Pirate Party will get a chancellor someday). The Nordics don't seem amazing either.

What does that leave us with? Some rocky archipelago in the middle of the Pacific? Developing nations that simply don't care or lack the ability to have meaningful enforcement? I'm really struggling to think of something.

One of the best criticisms for the rushing through of this POS legislation was "if it's such a rush to get this done, why hasn't Australia's threat level been increased?"

The answer from the intelligence agencies is that there must be a known specific threat in order for the threat level to be increased (from "Probable" to "Expected")[0]

So, they're saying that it's important for this legislation to be passed for the sake of the safety of Australian citizens despite the fact there's no specific threat that's worth raising Australia's threat level for.

Add this to the huge list of WTF's surrounding this situation.

[0] https://www.nationalsecurity.gov.au/securityandyourcommunity...

  > OpenVPN

They'll probably want a backdoor in that too.

Careful criminals will surely be able to find a set of software that isn't affected. Australia isn't the US, only a small portion of software companies would have a large local presence here.

The problem is that a backdoor might not be so obvious. It can be simply a wrong chosen algorithm key size, and you need to be a cryptographic expert to know that.

That would have to be a systematic weakness... except systematic weakness is probably doublespeak for "whatever the fuck we want to do" anyway.

I’m sure that will change now.

From small portion to none. And basically Australian software developers are unemployable now.

No reason for them to be getting it.

The government's primary goal is to protect itself and continue growing like cancer. In many ways the citizens are it's greatest threat because they can vote to cut budget and the power of the political elites. These laws are a way to increase monitoring of citizens so problems can be squashed before they grow too big and threaten the government.

Make no mistake, with the rise of ML governments will be able to crush social movements in the nascent stage before they become too big to stop. People will be arrested for thought crimes because they posted the wrong thing on the wrong website. And currently a large number of people would cheer because the people getting arrested are on the "other" side of the political spectrum. Be careful what you wish for

Except that there's other countries where their governments don't seem to have these problems.

coughs in American

where? From what I've seen Europe, UK, USA, Canada, and especially China are all moving in this direction of more privacy intrusions. Considering the West has traditionally offered the most freedom for its citizens I'd say things are trending towards authoritarian governments

EU seems to be pretty concerned with data privacy, and they even have laws protecting it.

They have laws protecting individuals from companies, not the government. The GDPR has special exceptions for government investigations, and many EU countries have strong domestic spy agencies that spy on their citizens.

Aside from the UK (which is doing its best to leave the EU, and never really felt like an EU country anyway), which countries are actually spying on their citizens like that to any great extent?

The EU had (until 2014 when it was ruled to violate fundamental rights) a data retention charter which required member states to store all telecommunications data generated within the EU for a period between 6-24 months[1].

The GDPR explicitly allows for government surveillance to be excluded from the directive's protection.

Privacy International and a bunch of other NGOs have filed complaints[2] against "Belgium, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K." for violating rulings by the European Court of Justice over illegal mass surveillance. Here's another article[3].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive [2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2018/06/25/eu-na... [3]: https://medium.com/privacy-international/a-new-era-of-mass-s...

> This is another thing that adds to my deep sense of shame to live in this country (sadly, that list is long and growing).

I don't support this legislation, but I have to ask, which country is doing a better job on human rights issues than Australia in your opinion? Surely not China or nearly any country in Asia, Africa, or South America? Surely not the US? Probably not much of Europe?

Iceland.

But yeah, “cryptonomicon” utopias are hard to get by, these days.

Why does it matter? It's not a zero sum game, what others are doing is completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not what we're doing is disgustingly immoral (and it is, as far as I'm concerned.)

To paraphrase our PM, speaking on medical evacuation of children, "I will do whatever is possible to prevent it."

Australia's government blocked legislation that would help kids not die. Because they came on a boat. Which has never been the primary way illegal immigrants get into this country.

Nauru was declared a human rights travesty by the UN.

The medical board that decides whether or not it is a medical emergency that needs to be treated in Australia is staffed by lawyers and only occasionally features a doctor.

We're killing people from neglect, because they dared to take any avenue available to them to escape their homes.

If we put half the effort into assessing their case as we do into making sure they stay in a place reminiscent of WWII slave encampments, there would be no issues.

It is an absolute national shame. MSF recently likened the mental health of the people on Nauru to victims of torture.[1]

The most disturbing aspect is the strong bipartisan and public support for the ongoing abuse. Every Australian should wake up in the morning, take a long hard look in the mirror and ask themselves if they're proud of what they've become.

[1] https://www.msf.org.au/article/statements-opinion/indefinite...

>The most disturbing aspect is the strong bipartisan and public support for the ongoing abuse.

Is there really public support? Everyone I've talked to thinks it's a disgrace.

The pollies seem to think so. I don't know anyone who admitted voting for Abbott in 2013 either but a lot of people obviously did.

My personal social circle and Sydney Inner West socailly aware bubble all thinks it's a disgrace, but I'm not kidding myself into thinking I'd need to go very far before I bumped into people who'd justify it to themselves as "necessary for the country", and not a lot further to find people actively and vocally celebrating the cruelness...

Yes this is the sad truth unfortunately a huge swathe of the general population support the 'tough on refugees' stance. It can get pretty ugly. About 5 years ago I was pretty heavily involved in refugee activism a friend and I were spat on in a shopping center for circulating a petition and was not uncommon to get verbally abused by people in the street. This was in a safe labor area too so it's not exactly like I was in some conservative heartland.

Some people say the efforts by Liberal/Labor are to discourage a lot more refugees from overwhelming Australia. Resulting in increased crime, less jobs, etc. They acknowledge that some will suffer in the process.

Other points I noticed: - Coming across as emotional about the harm and suffering on Nauru or escaping war, they will dismiss all arguments as immature and feel like they're being an adult to you. - Some are persuaded by increased economic activity and net welfare investment benefits but want more screening but wouldn't know how to do this effectively.

Source: Asking random people about policies. Some people you can try asking: mechanics, tradies, checkout people, business people, asking people who handout stuff for Liberal/Labor. To get a deep understanding, read their sources, any of the Murdoch rags or right wing morning shows (ie Alan Jones).

>Some people say the efforts by Liberal/Labor are to discourage a lot more refugees from overwhelming Australia. Resulting in increased crime, less jobs, etc.

Meanwhile we're letting every man and his dog waltz in through the front door, as long as they have money.

But we don't want those dirty refugees! Lock them up in our own Aussie Guantanamo and throw away the key. It's sickening.

There have been slightly more encouraging signs recently that the tides are shifting, at least in my view. The rinsing the state Liberals got in Victoria after desperately pushing the openly racist and patently false "African youths are all gang members and everyone is afraid of being robbed" rhetoric, as well as the uptick in general awareness and number of protests makes me hope the publics apathy is morphing into a deep national shame.

That being said being a "coastal elite" in a progressive area isn't necessarily a good litmus test

Actually I think several latin american and european country do a better job on human rights issues. Some african countries as well.

See for instance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Index_of_Moral_Freedom#W...

This is a classical‘whataboutism‘ trying to deflect from the real subject by bringing up another. But keeping in line with that theme: what about detaining immigrants in Nauru, Christmans Island, Manus Island etc. under doubtful circumstances with no open access for press and NGOs?

I didn't read the comment as tu quoque, I read it as "it's a bit shit everywhere". Even Canada treats native populations badly, I don't know what things are like in the Scandinavian countries.

Too bad, it's almost 2020 and we still can't get "treat people well" right. What hope do animals or the environment have?

Wasn't the situation in Nauru that the immigrants aren't considered detained as they are free to return home as soon as they agree to do so?