Politicians have unrealistic expectations put upon them – how can you be an expert worthy of heading a country’s transport / banking / law / social policy sectors when you’ve spent your career learning to be a politician? Some sectors are a little easier to understand & some are essential to have at least a working knowledge of – the whole Internet thing is an area that you’d expect a person vested with authority to be somewhat conversant in. Yet the Australian government just passed into law the Assistance and Access Bill, which aims to remove the safety & privacy of encryption from the Internet. Well, not remove it, but somehow the government expects to be given magic keys to decrypt any data that they decide. Australia – that’s not how it works!! You eggs. Get some new politicians, your current ones are useless. Fight back here.
Pfft, decryption keys. If they existed, these magic keys to open a secret back door, uhmm, what could possibly go wrong?
“Assistance & Access” – what a misnomer. Would you like some Assistance & Access? Would you? Not if when you’ve got the Feds demanding assistance to access your private data, that’s for sure!
Look, Privacy is a basic human right, one held universally by civilised societies worldwide. If the Australian bill wasn’t defeated by basic math, then it would seek to dismantle this basic human right. Fortunately, math beats statutory law every time.
Because this law strikes at the effective operation of my all-time favourite app – Signal Private Messenger – I’m linking their official response to this nonsensical Australian statute. The word of Signal.org is a lot more authoritative than mine. Plus they tend to publish in less emotive terminology than I do.
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