Does Australia's access and assistance law impact 1Password?

Unfortunately it doesn’t seem likely that this will last much longer, unless the UK makes a u-turn on brexit.

Really terrible companies, in short.

I guess I'll forfeit them both and just... go some where else?

Edit: typo, spare=sparse.

It’s legislative and electoral cowardice more than political pragmatism.

Shorten/Labor let it through because they support it and won't look at it next year. We judge them on their actions not their vague promises.

2) those with courage resign and sit on the cross bench (as we have seen recently).

We don't need to "reserve judgement until then". We already know they don't plan on repealing the bill in any meaningful way. They also gave up on creating a new interim bill because "the police wouldn't have access to these powers over summer", which is an even worse excuse than the one that they don't have access for Christmas. These excuses all sound made-up, and like they weren't even trying.

Labor did make Liberals compromise on one thing - not allowing the anti-corruption agency access to this power. I guess they gladly "fell on their sword" for that one, huh? This is such a joke, I can't believe people actually take their excuses at face value. There must be bigger partisanship in Australia than I thought, which make people ignore this.

Also, 99% of the public comments were against this bill, and Labor ignored that, too. But, ultimately, if Labor did actually believe they were "keeping people safer over Christmas" with this bill which had no debate and was passed at night, then that just shows extreme weakness to compromising.

Will they pass any bill the other parties want to pass as long as they threaten Labor with accusations of "not wanting to keep people safe"? Is that how weak of a party they are, that they can't find real arguments against what that is a baseless accusation meant to cause misdirection?

One more thing, Australia just became the first western country to allow encryption backdoors, something all security experts have been warning is a very bad, terrible idea, that will both destroy the security of the systems in which those backdoors exist and hurt the tech economy. Even if you believe that Labor's action was genuine, does that really not sound like something you would want your party to "fall on its sword" over?

But again, their excuses make no sense, especially in the light of them actually fighting Liberals on disallowing the powers to be used against politicians.

What happens 2 decades down the track when a newly elected government suddenly realises that through 20 years of apathy they've been slowly handed every tool they need to turn themselves into the 4th Reich?

And I’d argue that forcing someone to spy on others, to engage in sabotage, and to lie is a violation of basic human dignity.

I also gather that Chinese generally face more scrutiny in the US, in at least some industries. And they're more likely to be investigated.

The worst vagueness is in specific areas (e.g. what does the prohibition on "systemic weaknesses" in mandated technical capabilities actually mean - lots of expert opinion says that the definition of that particular safeguard doesn't actually protect us against very much).

The final section of their post discusses a common idea that interception agencies can request individual employees to do things without their employers' knowledge. I'm pretty confident this is bogus, and appears to be based on a misunderstanding of statutory interpretation that some organisations have encouraged (see the thread at https://twitter.com/stilgherrian/status/1072666031963979777, which includes at least one actual lawyer), and at least one representative of the Australian Government who was involved in drafting the legislation has explicitly denied this (towards the end of the recording at https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-global-developme..., there may be better and more formal written sources for this).

Also, they're wrong about the start date of this legislation - it's already commenced.

So, yes, the law is very bad and vague (in parts), and yes, you need to think about worst case scenarios, but that doesn't excuse poor analysis.

edit: I should also add that apart from the badness of the law itself, the Government primarily has itself to blame for not communicating with industry and community and allowing wild speculation to go around unchecked - they have really lost control of the narrative here, and that's bad for their own desired outcomes more than anything else.

The fact that they get this wrong is probably a good indication of how much you should trust the rest of their analysis on how this may affect them.

As someone who has had family members go through the unfair dismissal process (where an employer tried to pull exactly this tactic), employers cannot just lie about the reasons for a dismissal. Doing so can actually result in larger compensation, as a punitive measure. There needs to be sufficient evidence for the lay-off, as well as evidence that it was a long-term issue. Courts often favour employees in such cases (in one case a friend was unfairly dismissed from CSIRO, a government body, and they received the maximum possible compensation as well as assistance from CSIRO to help him update his resume for his next job).

But this is besides the point. The topic in question is whether employers should lay off their employees in protest of the new law -- it would hardly be an effective protest if you didn't state why you were laying this people off. It'd also be ridiculously suspicious if the entire Australian office was fired because they "consistently showed up to work late".

Don't get me wrong, I really hope companies retaliate by killing Australia's tech industry so the government realises how much they just shot themselves in the feet (if you can't buy an iPhone from Apple in Australia I guarantee there will be riots -- that's just what it takes unfortunately). But if you're an employer you should make your employees whole -- because doing otherwise will result in lawsuits.

But the business can decide how they'd lay off all their employees, and a proper severance (and transition period) and so on would be the reasonable way to do it. There is an unfair (retaliatory) way to do it too, and that's what I was referring to.