Australia Encrypted Messaging Bill to Pass After Labor Strikes Deal with Govt

Re:Australia Encrypted Messaging Bill to Pass After Labor St... by kevin_b_er on Thursday December 06, 2018 @02:59PM (#18621534)

Signal would have to find a way to send a special app to you which does not encrypt or specially encrypts in order to funnel data to AU government. If it does not, it becomes illegal. Considering signal warns people if the key changes, it probably means Signal is now illegal as it might be physically/mathematically impossible to satisfy the law.

Secure communication is now illegal in Australia.

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Re:Australia Encrypted Messaging Bill to Pass After Labor St... by CiPHPerCoder on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:04PM (#18621605)

Or they'll have the carriers in Australia push an OS update that specifically exfiltrates your Signal session keys to the government.

Then it won't matter what Signal does or doesn't do, they can still get what they want.

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Re:Australia Encrypted Messaging Bill to Pass After Labor St... by JoshTriplett on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:09PM (#18621646)

> Or they'll have the carriers in Australia push an OS update

One of many reasons you should not have your carrier control your OS update channel.

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Re:Australia Encrypted Messaging Bill to Pass After Labor St... by zmmmmm on Thursday December 06, 2018 @03:46PM (#18622047)

I haven't checked the text that passed but I think non-feasibility is a defense. Which might mean that this just inspires a new round of canarying and end-to-end encryption wrapping to defeat the bill. However presumably there are very few companies willing to die on that hill, and it may be too expensive to fight those battles.

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