Australia's anti-encryption laws used to bypass journalist protections: expert
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
And this is true around the globe, independent of evidence politician demand ever crazier methods (while at the same time usually reducing both the paychecks and numbers of police officers). I wonder how we, the people, can protect our democratic systems from these dangers?
Stop trading freedom for security?
Politicians will always tantalize you by proposing you <limit guns, limit speech, limit privacy, etc.> for <fewer deaths, fewer suicides, fewer terrorists, etc.> but if you let it go forever, you'll find all your freedoms have been traded for safety.
Most innocently, because the number of people worried about this remains relatively low, and regularly gets overwhelmed by other groups. That's how democracy works, obviously, but it alarms me because privacy is a partially unrecoverable resource; even if people organize and win, a great deal of damage may have been done.
More cynically, though, because it feels like many of our democratic systems don't work on this problem.
By its own admission, the CIA violated its charter - and in many cases federal law - numerous times from the 1950s to 1970s. These events were documented internally in 1973, but no one appears to have faced consequences, and the "Family Jewels" weren't publicly released until 2007. Also in the 1970s, the Church Committee concluded that the NSA had conducted illegal surveillance, failed to shut it down when instructed to do so, and then followed up by lying to Congress about the entire mess. It also concluded that no one could be prosecuted for this, essentially because the tracks had been covered too well to convict any specific individual. The history of other Five Eyes nations in not substantially more comforting, as a look at e.g. UK practice in Northern Ireland will testify.
Today, the state of privacy law in the US isn't even known, because much of it is decided in secret court hearings with no one but the government present. National Security Letters help ensure that the public can't object to state surveillance by forcing private citizens to keep it secret, and interfering with basic access to counsel for the recipients. James Clapper gave testimony to Congress that was prima facie perjury, for which he faced no consequences. The list goes on at enormous and alarming length.
I don't know what we do about this. Voting for candidates who oppose war and surveillance is good, but they generally perform poorly, the ones who do well often seem to reverse course after election, and the ones who follow through (like Wyden and Udall) are frequently stonewalled and outright lied to by intelligence services. It feels alarmingly like we've created a surveillance system which operates independent of any democratic decisionmaking, and no longer know how to walk it back.
Besides, if firearms can stop government corruption, how come police violence is still a thing in the US? If citizens can overpower the military with firearms, they should at least be able to overpower corrupt cops.
It is inevitable that collected information does create ambitions. This is why the anti-terror legislation of the last decade was a catastrophe. Societies will pay with trust successively and we already see the first effects of that.
Systems which rely on benevolent leaders fail. The solution is systems of checks and balances.
For example, in the US, the Supreme Court is often seen as the arbiter of constitutionality. If the legislature or the executive can get the Supreme Court, then, to give its approval to a limited, innocuous-seeming version of an abuse, it can then point to that as a seal of legitimacy — and the tactic frequently succeeds, mollifying what would otherwise become public outrage.
An example is the Supreme Court resistance to, and final acceptance of, FDR's New Deal policies. When the court finally relented and allowed Roosevelt to proceed, it took the wind out of the opposition, which might otherwise have put a stop to it. Instead, similar policies have proceeded without opposition ever since, and finally gained acceptance by both sides of the political establishment.
In the end, the only check on abusive government is the people, which must be able to identify tyranny and have a will to oppose it by either voting the bums out, resisting their abuses directly, or forcing them out if necessary.
Bureaucracies and people in power will, by nature, try to increase their power. That doesn't mean everything happens immediately. The purpose of checks is to increase the pool of people who must consent to an expansion of power. By setting up competing pools of power, the system can be made more resilient to a string of bad leaders.
Obviously, no system will survive an endless supply of idiots. But systems which rely on competent politicians tend to fail when the first dummy comes up.
That's a symptom of the people in power having too much power over the ones doing the checks.
Make the people checking fear a bad decision more than they fear your country's leadership. (Of course, it's easier said than done.)
Overall I don't find much of merit to that argument, as it is appears built from the weird notion that the state is the spawn of the devil and all its acts are made for the enslavement of mankind, slightly ignoring the fact that a state is actually a bunch of people with fairly boring jobs related to different sorts of accounting.
I'd be less inclined to say, "spawn of the devil… for the enslavement of mankind," than "parasitic beast bent on survival at any cost." (If it were less parasitic, fewer accountants would be needed.) Like a tapeworm, the government parasite doesn't require malice to be harmful.
So, in other words, we're screwed. Sounds about right.
No contrivance of checks and balances will let you escape from the basic duty of making sure bad people don't get power of something important.
A balance is a tool that simplifies a task, nothing more.
Defining "bad" in this context is where the advice becomes useless. "Constitutional respect and restraint" is a dog chasing its tail, since the question is punted to the meaning of constitutional respect and restraint.
At the end of the day, certain types of people will always be drawn to power. And the people in power will inevitably have certain undesirable traits in common. The solution to this is, in part, testing for tyrannical tendencies in elections. But it's also in having systems in place that impede fast, fundamental decision making of the type that turns democracies into tyrannies.
Keeping those not appropriate is out is still the task, even if "appropriate" varies strongly with the precise context.
And without a deep discussion on what precisely is appropriate for all the contexts the state operates in, insistence on bureaucracy is merely (intended or not) a codification of conservatism.
That's actually the point. You get a group of people together to agree on who are the good people. You put them in place. You then install mechanisms to ensure that original view of "good" propagates, with changes being heavily guarded until a consensus similar to the original one re-appears.
Governing isn't about good and bad. It's about amongst whom consensus must be formed to produce action. Expanding the pool of necessary votes is what checks and balances accomplish.
This leads to claims that most people support such measures, yet not so long ago we had a huge grass roots campaign against mandatory ID cards (and related measures like the database behind those cards) that ultimately succeeded in preventing their introduction, so clearly it's not really as simple as that. Certainly some reports based on polling that get brought out to demonstrate that public "support" for these measures have glossed over heavily loaded questions in the polls themselves. (They're not quite "Terrorism is a really serious threat and a nuke might kill everyone. Do you support stronger government powers to prevent bad people doing these bad things and keep your children safe?" but sometimes they get awfully close.)
This is the reality of the politics of fear in the Western world today. Personally I'm slightly optimistic that things will turn for the best within the next few years. We seem to have widespread concern about "fake news" and unwarranted interference in democratic processes, to the point that now we see explicit "fact checking" becoming a common practice in media reporting of political statements and we're seeing big social media platforms trying to rein in the more questionable propaganda and stop their systems from becoming little more than a rumour-driven mob on a national or global scale.
Maybe someone will finally notice that the threat from terrorism is actually pretty small, the threat from excessive government powers is actually pretty big, and in any case all of these resources might be better spent on other areas of government like education or healthcare or infrastructure projects that could make a much bigger difference to a lot more people anyway. We can hope...
All we can do is hold our politicians to higher standards but we have to expect nonetheless that the system will fail from time to time and be ready to fix things when it does.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
(H. L. Mencken)
Not because of the voting system, but the very inherent nature of the political process.
You and me should be much more afraid of a lot of fools being turned into an organised political force than of typical "fascist intellectuals" ganging up on somebody.
It is much more easy to coerce an insecure and ignorant person to do crazy things, than that of even most villainous man with intelligence whose crazyness will be at least limited by his instinct of self preservation.
Minority juntas tend to be weak because everybody "have to look after their own backs," and different parties trying to prevent others from achieving monopoly on violence, or doing something stupid that has a chance to jeopardise them both.
The long lull after WWII was all due to that "everybody having to look after own back" in both society and on the world stage. Four generations have passed since then, and all lessons of that time are now forgotten.
The future is scary unless we turn this trend around.
Stories about the raiding and seizing of journalists computers and other materials go back to 2000 at least, see links at end of https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jun/04/feder...
Honestly the scariest part is how there's was virtually no opposition whatsoever to the police being able to put anything onto other people's hard drives, anything! It's an authoritarian wetdream.
One thing I did notice during the ABC raid was how the police ignored general digital forensic practices and simply created an archive on the target drive (overwriting any data previously there), dragged and dropped what they wanted into it, then zipped it up and left (this was according to one ABC employees twitter feed while they were in the office as it was happening).
Who cares I guess, they have the power to modify any data they want anyway. It's crazy.
It's nuts that something that used to be seen as solid evidence in court could now be seen as totally unreliable, and just because someone may present it saying "trust me because I'm a cop" means absolutely nothing when someone has a duty to factor the human element into the equation. The guidelines regarding the handling of digital forensic evidence (and all types of evidence for that matter) were designed to deal with this. So yeah, I think what I'm trying to say here is that among the new laws, that one in particular could do much more harm than good due to being so vague in its wording and scope. From what I've read about the US court system, this type of evidence would no longer be permitted in 99.9% of cases, It wouldn't matter if you're the damn pope presenting it, everyone's human. I actually wish I knew a magistrate in real life to ask them how they would handle a case involving this law and a drive handed to them by some prosecution team involving the AFP.
The relationship between the AFP and journalists in Australia seems pretty adversarial, and this new law has simply been misused facilitate already occurring egregious behaviour. It does not appear to allow any novel violations of journalistic rights.
Well, yes. The AFP was, for a long time, an incompetent shambles. The media reported on the generous vistas of incompetence, bastardry and shambolatry.
Now the AFP is essentially taking its revenge, with gusto.
Politicians will not their position on the topic until they are personally attacked.
When their private conversations, images, friends and families start leaking they will begin to care.
Yes, I'll laugh when their pants inevitably fall down. I wonder what the reaction will be.
But seriously, I have to wonder what these politicians want the endgame to be. A police state isn't good for anyone, including them.
I used to think Australia was the best country and think they were trying their best for Australia's interests, but they are busily removing the good things about Australia at a really scary rate. I don't want to trade a minor increase in "safety" for living in a surveillance dystopia, which is 100% where we're headed.
Along with that I must accept that petty crime is going to happen, because I am not the only one walking down the street without being monitored.
I think that crime needs to be reevaluated. There needs to be a good financial analysis of where the time and attention is best spent, they cannot find all crime all of the time (which feels like the goal)
As the KGB saying goes, "Everyone has committed a crime, it's about who we decide to prosecute".
"Encryption is a vital security measure for digital data and the Australian Government is committed to strong protections for personal and commercial information. It makes the communications and devices of all people more secure. While encryption is an important aspect of modern communications it is routinely employed by terrorists, child sex offenders and criminal organisations to mask illegal conduct. This is an impediment to our agencies’ ability to detect and disrupt serious threats to the public.
Rapid technological change means that valuable sources of evidence and intelligence are diminishing; 95 per cent of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s (ASIO) most dangerous counter-terrorism targets and 90 per cent of communications lawfully intercepted by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are encrypted and unreadable. By 2020, it is expected that all communications among terrorists and organised crime groups will be encrypted. The Assistance and Access Act was introduced as a direct response to this challenge. The legislation passed both Houses on 6 December 2018 and received Royal Assent on 8 December 2018.
The need for a modern and fit-for-purpose legal framework was highlighted by the fatal terrorist attack in Melbourne in November 2018, and the subsequent disruption of alleged planning for a mass casualty attack by three individuals. Encrypted communications commonly facilitate the planning and execution of such attacks and it is the Government’s duty to ensure that Australia’s law enforcement and security agencies have the requisite tools to protect the Australian public.
The Assistance and Access Act balances the needs of investigators with important limitations and safeguards that protect the privacy of Australians, maintain the security of digital systems and ensures law enforcement’s powers are used appropriately. Robust transparency, oversight and independent scrutiny measures ensure that industry and the public can maintain confidence in the products and services that allow them to communicate securely online. The new laws are not about breaking encryption. It is paramount that the services and devices that Australians rely on remain secure. Through the provisions of the Assistance and Access Act, Government can partner with industry to modernise investigations and prosecute criminals that hide in online spaces while ensuring their assistance does not make the communications of innocent parties vulnerable. That is why the Assistance and Access Act clearly prohibits law enforcement from requiring a communications or device provider to build systemic weaknesses or backdoors into their systems (so called ‘back doors’). The Assistance and Access Act also states a provider cannot be prevented from fixing known weaknesses.
Australian agencies are committed to working collaboratively with industry. The regime sets out how this collaboration will occur and builds greater partnerships between providers and Australia’s key law enforcement and security agencies. This is a framework for assistance and does not allow for unwarranted access to communications content or data. Access to this material remains subject to an underlying warrant or authorisation and strong oversight.
The Government undertook an extensive three-stage consultation process to develop and consult on these measures, engaging with industry and the public on the entirety of the Act. Significant changes were made in response to feedback from the technology community and civil society – this consultation process improved the legislation, and ensures a more robust response to the challenges posed by a rapidly evolving communications environment."
I doubt this "anti-encryption" legislation is what allows the police to stomp into a journalist office and take things like cameras as the ABC warrant allowed.
I mean, clearly a law supposed to help combat terrorism is gravely misapplied when used to search for a journalists source, but the real problem is that journalism seems to lack pretty basic protections at all in Australia.
So it was exactly these horrible laws that allowed them to stomp through and do whatever tf they want, including modifying data.
This circumvention seems to be mostly added convenience. The only novel bit is the allowance for modifying data, but I doubt it matters much in practice as the AFP will likely just take physical devices and at best hand it back wiped.