Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmondo | Hacker News Reader

I’m sure Bron, Rob or Nigel will weigh in shortly. Fastmail is a damn fine service, I now trust Australian internet privacy even less due to recent law changes and this does concern me not just with Fastmail but as someone that designs and hosts platforms for software the organisation I work with writes - which is also in Australia.

View on HN

This is covered in the article.

>“Our particular service is not materially affected as we already respond to warrants under the Telecommunications Act."

The new laws would apply to something like Whatsapp or Signal, which do not have the ability to access the communications of users (thanks to end to end encryption). Fastmail already has enough access that if a legal demand is issued they can hand it over.

I think point is, that with backdoor you don't need the warrant. Which opens the possibility of the abuse.

FWIW, as currently legislated, the "backdoor" scheme still requires warrants to be issued for data captured under it.

Yes, that. The law allows for requiring new backdoors to be requested up-front, but still requires warrants to activate those backdoors for specific requests, and it still doesn't give firehose access. It's not as awful as it's made out to be by some, but it's still pretty ham-handed in some of its implementation, and that's what we're proposing they look at changing.

No, the new legislation's notices only are allowed to be exercised in order to fulfil the requirements of a warrant (or similar instruments that have judicial oversight).

Don't get me wrong, mandating crypto backdoors is obviously a brazen breach of privacy and opens the doors to all sorts of abuses. But plaintext systems like Fastmail won't be affected by the new notices because a warrant was already sufficient to get access to your plaintext emails.

They can ensure something, but law is law. If Fastmail employees pressed by Australia authority, they must obey, doesn't it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com