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While you're absolutely right that this is their attitude, what they will do, etc. The laws of mathematics steadfastly remain consistent despite your latlon and it doesn't matter what random idiot politician thinks about it.

This too will remain constant.

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That doesn't really matter.

The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/

No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too.

It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.

Sure, they can make thinking of a pink elephant criminal, too. That doesn't mean it will actually be effective.

You don't think so? I worry that it will be very effective, that it will be passively accepted by the public, and that we will see widespread injustice as a result.

Sure, but that will happen no matter what given the public are idiots and the authorities are authoritarian. And that goes double for places like Australia where both of these things are particularly so.

And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.

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