1. https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/a3j466/assistanc...
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dowpZ_Xtr1N_DgkHJN8i...
Today I watched my country's democracy die via livestream, with the words "Labor withdraws all amendments".
For me, this was the 50tone block of concrete on the lead coffin on the rotting cadaver of a political system that serves humanity in a balanced manner.
The US government and their agenda to spread similar laws in their country and across the world.
Labor was always on board with the core of the legislation; likely as they were aware of some unreported Five Eye's agreement that Australia will be the 'thin edge of the wedge' to introduce such laws worldwide.
Any amendments proposed wouldn't have changed the goal and was simply the basis for some political theatre to look like such a law has been considered and debated by the politicians. The outcome had already been decided a lot earlier than that point.
The same interests they are always representing. Themselves. The organisations and lobbyists that got them voted in. The organisations they're looking forward to offers of high-priced consultancies and directorships after the next election.
Did you expect anything else?
Voters? I don’t mean to be snarky, but while Tweets, submissions and letters may inform the content of bills in democracies, but the counts of these are not numerically representative of much, apart from the feelings of people who feel strongly about an issue.
That said, these laws sound exceedingly stupid.
For context, here was the letter we sent: http://i.imgur.com/yRrZHAq.jpg
In talking with some other companies, some of them are looking at potentially moving any role that would have the ability to compromise encryption outside of the country. That way there'd be no way any employee could be legally forced to implement any backdoors or weakening of encryption. That's an extreme measure and is probably overkill right now as the loophole that states you don't have to do anything to weaken your security will likely be used as a challenge against building in any backdoors. We'll have to wait and see how things pan out.
I saw that, but another part of the bill that I've seen (on a cursory review, and as a non-professional) is the sweeping, extreme secrecy measures surrounding the execution of any part of the bill.
Basically, my understanding is that you can't tell me as a customer if you've been required to compromise my privacy.
So say you even take the extreme measure and ship some sensitive roles overseas. If for any reason that's not enough, and your government requires you to surrender some of my data, then you will be legally unable to tell me.
That will destroy all trust.
I like Atlassian and am extremely sorry to see this happening to you.
I've read an interpretation that indicates that all Australian citizen employees are now essentially compromised, as they could be compelled under penalty of jail time to insert backdoors into an application without informing their employers.
>The Synod has some hesitancy about ‘safeguarding national security’ being one of the objectives of the notices, as it is not clear what additional activities this captures that are not criminal activities. For example, notices to address terrorist activities are already about enforcing criminal laws as would be notices targeting foreign espionage. We have a concern that ‘safeguarding national security’ might mean the desire of a government of the day to target civil society groups and individuals that oppose its policies or to target whistleblowers that expose wrong-doing by the government of the day. It would be good if the explanatory memorandum of the Bill includes an explanation of what non-criminal activities are intended to be caught under ‘safeguarding national security’ under the Bill.
FTFU
So, yeah, a great day for humanity that didn't want this.
As with most deeply technical issues, it is hard to communicate to the general population exactly what the proposed problem and solution is, so the politicians are allowed to freely pass legislation (without understanding it themselves mostly) without much opposition besides the vocal minority.