Why do you think it’s vanishingly small?
You could somewhat trust the the current govt but you can’t trust the future. I’ve lived in Australia for a long time and the trend is clear. More surveillance is to come. Australia is very much a police state as it is.
But that doesn't help my on the other side of the equation where I need to sign contracts that directly prohibit things that I would be mandated to do under these laws (and do secretly). I will need to come up with some interesting boiler plate escape clauses that allow for it without sounding completely dodgy.
They'd be stupid to start with giants like Apple or Google.
Also you stating that you might have been forced to insert malware by the government surely breaks the rule that says you can't tell anyone too, if I'm understanding it correctly.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-gover...
They can literally ask for all communications of every one of your users.
Lets go with how the law is actually written.
Say they decide hn is a den for hackers. I mean, it's right there in the name!
Hacking attracts a >3yr sentence - hence, we need the data of all hn users, they're all potential hackers!
The Director General of Security or the chief officer of an interception agency must not give a technical assistance notice to a designated communications provider unless the Director General of Security or the chief officer, as the case requires, is satisfied that:
(a) the requirements imposed by the notice are reasonable and
proportionate; and
(b) compliance with the notice is:
(i) practicable; and
(ii) technically feasible
Because even if the current government is harmless, the next regime might not be, and these powers are basically the equivalent of a nuclear bomb with respect to privacy. They move the pendulum far away from what many would consider reasonable for a free society.
These laws just seem so rife with loopholes and ambiguities that even as an honest law-abiding citizen with nothing of interest to hide, I find them honestly terrifying.
If they're doing these things for legitimate reasons then there would be little reason to be against having reasonable limits to scope, reasonable oversight, accountability, as well as real reporting on the actual number of citizens whose data has been accessed.
The fact these concerns and all the consultation submissions from experts in both legal and technology issues have been ignored makes me strongly fear the whole law has not taken citizens right to privacy into account at all, and that is a terrifying proposition.
I'm hoping that if more people realize the implications of this horrible law, there's more chance of the lobotomized public actually exerting some pressure on our supposed representatives to actually represent us.
It's unlikely given the media has been painfully silent on the horrible implications of this terrible law.
However, there is no guidelines on how these judgements should be made and what is / isn't acceptable. Effectively it will be left to the courts to decide through legal disputes.
Yes, really.
However unlikely, the idea that I could be commandeered at any moment to betray the users of my software and ship malware to them sickens me. But I also know that the reality of this happening is almost vanishingly small. I genuinely don't know what to do.