George Brandis says Facebook, Google and Apple should be threatened with ‘legal sanction’ if they do not cooperate

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

The Turnbull government is seeking changes to the law to allow intelligence agencies to decrypt communications of terrorist groups on the internet.

The attorney general, George Brandis, says existing laws do not go far enough in imposing obligations of cooperation on internet giants such as Facebook and Google, and on device makers such as Apple, to assist authorities who want to break the communications of terrorists using their systems.

“In the first instance, the best way to approach this is to solicit the cooperation of companies like Apple and Facebook and Google and so on,” Brandis told Sky News on Sunday.

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“And I think there’s been a change of the culture in the last year or more. There is a much greater conscious proactive willingness on the part of the companies to be cooperative.

“But we need the legal sanction as well.”

Last week Malcolm Turnbull announced a special meeting of state and territory leaders to “comprehensively review” Australia’s laws and practices that are directed at protecting citizens from violent extremism.

He made the announcement just days after an attack in Melbourne’s suburb of Brighton in which a woman was taken hostage, and three police officers shot, before gunman Yacqub Khayre was killed.

Khayre had previously been in prison for a violent offence but was out on parole. When he committed the attack, he said he was acting for Islamic State and al-Qaida.

Turnbull said the law would now be strengthened to create a presumption against bail and parole for people who have demonstrated support for or have links to terrorist activity.

He said the reform was “a vital element in keeping these people who are a threat to our safety and our safety of our families, off the streets”.

On Sunday, Brandis said he was “astonished” that Khayre was paroled.

“This man’s terrorism antecedents were a publicly known fact,” he said. “Although he had been acquitted for his involvement in a conspiracy to mount a terrorist attack on the Holsworthy army barracks in 2009, at his trial he had openly admitted to training with al-Shabaab in Africa for six weeks with the intention of returning to Australia to perpetrate terrorist violence.

“That was a publicly known fact. So why that was not something that the parole board in Victoria was aware of, I don’t know.”

Brandis said deradicalisation programs were successful “up to a point”, and online radicalisation was a “very difficult” problem.

He said online radicalisation involved constant monitoring of the internet.

Presumption will be against bail and parole for those with terrorist links, Coag agrees Read more

“That particularly requires proactivity by [social media companies] to take down radical messaging,” he said.

He said there will be a Five Eyes meeting in Ottawa, Canada, in a fortnight’s time, and Australia will discuss the need for internet and tech companies to better assist authorities break the online communications of terrorists.

When asked if, under the changes he is proposing, intelligence agencies would be able to access the encrypted online communications they desire without needing a warrant, he said: “Well that’s a discussion that we need to have.”

The Labor frontbencher Ed Husic said people had to think differently about a whole range of things that keep people safer.

“It’s striking balance,” he told Sky News. “I think the public is willing, more open to the notion that if we have to sacrifice some of our liberties to protect ourselves, we are willing to do it.”

But Greens MP Adam Bandt said he was unhappy that government was seeking to take away liberties, and give itself more power, with every threat of terror.

“The idea that somehow, by treating everyone as a suspect and saying that no longer are you able to have secure communications with someone else, no longer can you talk confidentially, that everything is potentially going to be open to the government is, again, very, very worrying,” he told the ABC.