Broad Alliance Calls For Australian Government To Listen To Experts' Warnings About Flaws In New Compelled Access Legislation

from the nah,-we're-ramming-it-through-anyway dept

The battle against encryption is being waged around the world by numerous governments, no matter how often experts explain, often quite slowly, that it's a really bad idea. As Techdirt reported back in August, Australia is mounting its own attack against privacy and security in the form of a compelled access law. The pushback there has just taken an interesting turn with the formation of a Alliance for a Safe and Secure Internet:

The Alliance is campaigning for the Government to slow down, stop ignoring the concerns of technology experts, and listen to its citizens when they raise legitimate concerns. For a piece of legislation that could have such far ranging impacts, a proper and transparent dialogue is needed, and care taken to ensure it does not have the unintended consequence of making all Australians less safe.

The Alliance for a Safe and Secure Internet represents an unusually wide range of interests. It includes Amnesty International and the well-known local group Digital Rights Watch, the Communications Alliance, the main industry body for Australian telecoms, and DIGI, which counts Facebook, Google, Twitter and Yahoo among its members. One disturbing development since we last wrote about the proposed law is the following:

The draft Bill was made public in mid-August and, following a three week consultation process, a large number of submissions from concerned citizens and organisation were received by the Department of Home Affairs. Only a week after the consultation closed the Bill was rushed into Parliament with only very minor amendments, meaning that almost all the expert recommendations for changes to the Bill were ignored by Government. … The Bill has now been referred to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), where again processes have been truncated, setting the stage for it to be passed into law within months.

That's a clear indication that the Australian government intends to ram this law through the legislative process as quickly as possible, and that it has little intention of taking any notice of what the experts say on the matter -- yet again.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and +glynmoody on Google+

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community. Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis. While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: australia, backdoors, compelled access, encryption, security