Australia's war on encryption: the sweeping new powers rushed into law

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: December 11, 2018 at 3:56:18 AM GMT+9
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Australia's war on encryption: the sweeping new powers rushed into law
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> Australia's war on encryption: the sweeping new powers rushed into law
> Australia has made itself a global guinea pig in testing a regime to crack encrypted communication
> By Paul Karp
> Dec 7 2018
> <https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/08/australias-war-on-encryption-the-sweeping-new-powers-rushed-into-law>
>
> In the hit US TV series The Wire police are initially baffled when the criminal suspects they are investigating begin 
> to communicate through photographic messages of clock faces.
>
> After several seasons of plots driven by the legalities and logistics of setting up telephone intercepts on suspected 
> drug dealers, the police can’t keep up when overheard conversations are replaced by an inscrutable form of pictorial 
> code.
>
> The Wire cops eventually break the clock-face code but they’d have a great deal more difficulty in 2018 if they were 
> chasing criminals using WhatsApp, Wicker, iMessage or other encrypted communications.
>
> End-to-end encryption is a code so strong that only the communicating users can read the messages.
>
> As a result, law enforcement agencies the world over are struggling with a wicked problem: what can they do when the 
> suspect or target of investigation “goes dark”?
>
> In Australia, the government claims to have found the solution to that problem in the form of a new law not 
> necessarily to break encryption itself – as the equivalent United Kingdom legislation allows – but to co-opt 
> technology companies, device manufacturers and service providers into building the functionality needed for police to 
> do their spying.
>
> The mind-bogglingly complex law, more than a year in the making, passed the Australian parliament on Thursday. The 
> opposition Labor party shelved its plans to improve the scheme and waved it through in response to overwhelming 
> pressure from the Liberal-National Coalition government, desperate to see it made law before Christmas.
>
> But with digital rights and technology experts warning that government amendments are confusing or counterproductive, 
> it’s questionable whether Australia has finally unscrambled the encryption omelette or set its law enforcement 
> agencies and IT industry up to fail.
>
> No back doors but a window into your digital life
> The Telecommunications (Assistance and Access) Act starts with a golden rule about what law enforcement agencies 
> cannot do: they cannot require technology companies to build a “systemic weakness”, or back door, into their products.
>
> Instead, agencies gain new powers to issue notices for companies to render assistance, or build a new capability, to 
> help them snoop on criminal suspects.
>
> John Stanton, the chief executive of the Communications Alliance, said it was concerned about “the breadth and range 
> of activities” law enforcement agencies could require companies to do.
>
> The list of acts or things is long and includes: removing one or more forms of electronic protection, providing 
> technical information, facilitating access to services and equipment, installing software, modifying technology, and 
> concealing that the company has done any of the above.
>
> With these compulsory notices subject to varying levels of safeguards police could, for example, send a suspect a 
> notification to update software such as Facebook Messenger that in fact allows police access to their messages.
>
> Agencies may not be able to directly decrypt messages, especially if they are located overseas such as the Russian 
> app Telegram, a key weakness of the UK security architecture.
>
> But using these notices, Australian agencies could install key logging software to enable them to see, keystroke by 
> keystroke, what users type into a message. Similarly, software could take repeated screenshots that don’t break 
> encryption but photograph everything going in and out of the communications app.
>
> Other examples include: modifying a device such as an Apple Home or Amazon Alexa to record audio continuously; 
> requiring a service provider to generate a false website that appears to be protected but isn’t, similar to a 
> phishing email; or requiring companies to hand over more accurate phone geolocation data.
>
> [snip]
>
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