According to the above, Australia’s Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018, has been passed by the legislature.
Notably in the ABC article above it lists the new powers given to the government:
Technical Assistance Request (TAR) - voluntary Technical Assistance Notice (TAN) - company is “required to give assistance if they can” under threat of fines Technical Capability Notice (TCN) - requires creation of backdoors, “as long as it does not force encryption to be broken”
I’m still trying to figure out how this meshes with the wording used by its proponents:
“The lack of access to encrypted communications presents an increasingly significant barrier for national security and law enforcement agencies,” Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said when introducing the bill to parliament in mid-September.
which makes it clear that the goal is to break/access encryption.
For as long as letters were a thing, we had encrypted communications. look at the Caesar Cipher, for a perfect example of extremely old encryption.
There is nothing new under the sun. Law enforcement is just being lazy.
If I can break encryption in my home office, Law Enforcement can break encryption with the resources they have access to. It’s not hard, they just need to hire people who are capable of doing it.
More importantly, do non Australia based firms need to comply with these edicts?
From what I understand, yes. Though ProtonMail says they will refuse anything of the sort, so maybe in practice it will only affect companies with offices in Australia?
Otherwise they would need to block credit card companies from letting Australian users purchase from ProtonMail or whatever other companies is refusing to comply with their wishes.
Assuming the comments about compelling someone to secretly put code in software, then it’s not a huge issues. Do not do software work in Australia, and if you hire an Australian out of Australia then either have them give up their citizenship or don’t hire them.
