Ars Technica:
On Thursday, the Australian parliament approved a measure that critics say will weaken encryption in favor of law enforcement and the demands of government.
The new law, which has been pushed for since at least 2017, requires that companies provide a way to get at encrypted communications and data via a warrant process. In short, the law thwarts (or at least tries to thwart) strong encryption.
Companies who receive one of these warrants have the option of either complying with the government or waiting for a court order. However, by default, the orders are secret, so companies would not be able to tell the public that they had received one.
The Australian government wants companies to expose themselves but not to be exposed in turn.
Besides opening up consumers to more hacking of their information, this will drive tech companies out of Australia.
well, maybe this has a good side effect…if a messaging app continues to be publicly available in australia, then we know that there‘s a backdoor and it‘s not secure to use anymore.
i think, it‘s a given that popular apps like facebook messenger, imessage, whatsapp, signal,… will get court orders. (microsoft’s skype won‘t, it‘s already known that it has a backdoor).
And who watches the watchers?
First they came for the actual terrorists…
Then they came for everybody else. Because reasons and current year.
back door legislation is a losing proposition.
Maybe. If companies are forced to, they might special-case Australia, and you still won’t know for sure. It really depends on the product and its use cases. (Though, I suppose there would be documentation about such a thing.)
heosphorus 3+
talking about messengers here, so product and usecase are pretty much defined. really, i wouldn‘t expect facebook/whatsapp for example to document any surveilance interface, nor would i be at the least surprised if one was found. i guess, there‘s a reason the whatsapp-founders left facebook because of user-data abuse. there‘s even one messaging app – microsoft‘s skype – that has a documented backdoor for surveilance purposes. regardless of which country it‘s used in – no special casing here.
Well, WhatsApp is the most interesting case—it’s currently end-to-end encrypted and it *tells* you this whenever you start a new chat. A change to meet backdoor requirements would therefore be very visible in its absence.