Fucking awesome. The 'encryption backdoor law' in Australia went through!

Now, whenever served with such warrants, companies which are active in Australia will have to pay hefty fines if they don't give encrypted messages to law enforcement in readable form. No matter whether this means just decrypting it with the keys they have or pushing backdoors/inject code into the messaging apps/services in order to extract the contents.

Now let's see how much the big companies really care about their users! (I'd expect them to pull out of Australia but the chance that this'll happen is as tiny as about nothing)

I almost downvoted this just out of how much I dislike this news.. but then I upvoted it!

🤔well this is one way to wake up and see the country fucking it self again 😎

Thank you for ruining my day mr @linuxxx

Clearly those Aussie politicians didn't see The Basics.. morons 😒
https://youtu.be/CINVwWHlzTY

So now it’s official!?

No one can tell me they didn’t do shit like this before. They just did it behind our backs..

I might be paranoid but better too paranoid than too naive😊

Still don’t do cloud backups or other stuff like that.

Reading about it on the net: <<The Guardian described the rushed legislative process as an “imbroglio of omnishambled batshit chicanery,” >>
At least my English vocabulary got improved by 3 new words.

So md5 will become mandatory?

@chabad360 That's hashing, not encryption ;)

Back to export encryption! Insecure encryption again!

@linuxxx ik, but guess what it will be used for now!

Ok, maybe not. That was just the first thing that came to mind when I thought of cracked algos.

How is this awesome? This is, and excuse my Dutch. Vuile tering zooi...

Man... Fuck Australia...

@incognito Awesome as in:
"ah fucking geweldig. Teringzooi, godverredomme"

@linuxxx ah good, was scared there for a second 😉

@incognito echt dan he, ne godverdomste kutzooi met al die politiekers.. kunnen die seniele ouwen dan echt niks?! 😑

@Condor 1 ;)

Wtf :/ How we as people fucked up so bad. Facebook don't care about people, what a news, google spies and cooperate with inhuman goverments. Poultice lies and don't care about people, people don`t care about other...

Everyone should be obligated to record each talk and send to your local, ixompetent police...

Polish national health system has one site for pharmacists and it was tested and prove to work on FF29 and IE11 - fucking time machine. .. I put so much trust in goverments IT guys, so much. ..

TOR!

@Jilano HE SHALL RAIN DOWN GLORIOUS ENCRYPTED TUNNELS FROM THE HEAVENS, ENSURING THE CONTINUATION OF A FREE AND PROSPEROUS INTERNET!!!

anyways sorry

So essentially because the government is too cheap to hire talented people to decrypt the encrypted messages they're going to try to force companies to have to go out and hire people to try to decrypt encrypted messages.

If one were to use triple encryption
RSA then Bluefish then AES256 and then send that message through somebody's software service Facebook whatever.

Good luck cracking that.

My point is If somebody really wants to hide something they can, and no amount of talented people will ever be able to decrypt it. This really only hurts innocent people and makes the bad guys step up their game.

Sad to see government making decisions out of frustration / taking the easy way out.

Seriously, tech companies should just refuse to operate in places with backdoor laws so that people will knock on their representative's door and get them to repeal it.

I see dark times for Australian technology companies. I hate how some politicians seem to be unable to look more than two steps ahead. They are going the NSA route but at least they are telling us about it. Very polite move.

Btw: ricochet? :)

@404response On my way!

@FrodoSwaggins I'd rather not kill such a like minded person 😬

list of approved Australian ciphers:

- rot26
- base64 (it totally is encryption! and damn safe! don't even worry about it)
- ECB mode (penguins? nah that's just... I don't see penguins...)

Do lock manufacturers need to build their locks with government-approved skeleton keys, too?

Do wall and fence manufacturers need to install hidden doors in their products for sunglass-wearing suits to use?

Do envelope manufacturers have to use special glue that unsticks in the presence of special government-approved spying solution?

No? Why is data any different?

And what ever happened to needing a search warrant?

@S-falken basically, any good encryption in unbreakable... politicians just don't grasp the concept of 'secure'.

Doesn't Australia realize that backdoors put in place for the govt also is put in place for other criminals?

@FinlayDaG33k That would be against the law.... 😜

Write backdoor mirrors: encrypt twice: if law and order asks for decryption decrypt it to senseless meanings. Nobody will get it.

The other side effect of this is that it may become difficult for Australian citizens to get hired for tech jobs that operate in other countries.

For example, here’s a company that publicly considered additional monitoring of Australian employees as a result of this: https://blog.1password.com/does-aus... (but note they apologized for this and claim they misunderstood the law). But I’ve heard numerous data centers considering the same (or not hiring Australians at all). Many simply wont comment publicly on this for legal reasons (discrimination on basis of national origin lawsuits).

Tinfoil on:

Its not about crime or terrorismn. If we perceive mathematics as one point of truth actual hard encryption is unbreakable, and a given group will eventually have a skilled mathematician who can, if not create but at least, verify the correct structure of a given encryption algorithmn. We got to a point in the digital armsrace where even trivial connection has to be encrypted. I would assume that secret services all over the world already sift through tons of data, mass surveillance with just meta data isn't so fun. In the end it's probably about population control.
And clueless politicians that are just pawns or at least willing grunts for a set of ruling people? Power hungry individuals, group dynamic?

One way or another, hardened criminals are not even slowed by this.
</tinfoil>

Why noone though about the economic impact is beyond me. Or the hope is to just pull it under the rug

I'm really curious about how they are going to get that from a company outside their borders

@yunusgnr Either they have to comply or get huge ass fines.

@yunusgnr @linuxxx Actually I wonder about that too in a way. I mean, the idea of fines carrying power for governments comes from the idea of companies usually having offices in said countries, right. So that the government can fine them under the threat of.. well, threatening the business for their local offices. But what if companies instead decide to move away from those countries and give a big FU to such governments? It'd be interesting to see what power governments hold when the company they try to (over-)regulate chooses to not have offices in said country, or not even provide services there at all. The latter would be unnecessary segregation though, and probably become a bad thing where everything is separated from each other very quickly. But the former, choosing to move away offices to say to governments, no we're not okay with stuff like this. Wouldn't that give companies a certain level of leverage against such governments?

@Condor Of course companies could move away but I think that moving away from a big country like Australia isn't "just moving away", I think the stakes are a little high for companies like Facebook and such.