The n-Category Café

So…. suppose they go ahead and do that… would it then be illegal to use the approved Backdoorful “Encryption” standard to, say, play Diffie-Hellman?

Also, would His Honour mind going first, and declassifying all Australian State Secrets? Surely Australia has as much right to know what its government has been saying to everyone else about them as the government has to open everyone else’s birthday cards?

Utter nonsense from the Aussie PM.

Oh no, as a patriotic Australian I feel compelled to do something I’ve never done before, that being to defend Malcolm Turnbull our current PM .

I say current here, because over the past few years our PMs have turned over about as quickly as tourists have fallen to our crocodiles. So we may well be onto a new PM by the time I finish this response.

To be absolutely accurate, I won’t defend Turnbull at all. His comments about the Laws of Mathematics were of course farcical in the extreme. It is worrying, however, to observe that they could have been uttered by any world leader today. Indeed, it is generally now held by our political classes that they can suspend the laws of nature at will; evidence their universally cavalier attitudes to the science of climate change.

Turnbull is not an unintelligent man, he was after all one of the few people to take on Margret Thatcher and mark up an unlikely win, as the lead barrister for the defence of Peter Wright in the infamous Spycatcher case. He also made a significant slab of his personal fortune through far-sighted investment in, and management of, internet startups in the late 90s. So he is not unaware of the practicalities of the internet age. He just refuses to acknowledge those realities publically, especially when he feels that his self interest is best served by sending a security dog-whistle to his fractious right-wing supporters.

He knows that the Laws of Mathematics will continue to rule, completely unhindered by back-doors, on the “dark web” and in open tools like GPG. Regardless, he still chooses to canvass laws that will push any remaining “terrorists” still using WhatsApp into the safety of the internet underground. His agencies will have backdoors to snoop on law abiding citizens who only wish to make internet purchases safely. They will, however, loose the few remaining tools available to trace the miscreants he claims to be targeting.

All of this wouldn’t be scary were it only Turnbull pushing this agenda. In truth, however, we are a little behind this curve here in Australia; we are only starting to get serious about implementing such measures here, while other countries, such as the UK, have acted much more quickly. For example it was Theresa May, the current UK prime minister (reason for emphasis the same as above), herself who as home secretary introduced that country’s Snooper’s Charter, a 2016 bill that gives the government sweeping powers to collect and analyse its citizens’ electronic communications.

According to the Guardian newspaper “The snooper’s charter already forced internet providers to store browser histories and has asked technology companies, such as WhatsApp, to build backdoors into their messaging platforms” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jun/20/theresa-may-crackdown-snoopers-charter-encryption-terror-backdoor.

Theresa May renewed her efforts to increase mass surveillance and decrypt our messages in late June, in the wake of the Manchester and London Bridge attacks. She may be weakened by her recent electoral surprise, but this is one point she appears intent to remain strong and stable on.

My only solace in all of this is the inviolable fact that the Laws of Mathematics will continue to reign supreme, regardless of modern realpolitik. My open source encryption tool will continue to obey them, free of backdoors. So my private communications will remain private, right up to the point where one of us builds the first mass market quantum computer!