Encryption crackdown: Government putting finishing touches on legislation

General Article
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Oh dear, it appears Turnbull is committed to his War on Maths:

Encryption crackdown: Government putting finishing touches on legislation

Apparently the legislation they’re planning will be based on the UK Snooper’s Charter.

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Oh dear. The stupid — it burns!

The inability to distinguish between ‘backdoor’ and ‘bug’ alone is a red flag.

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Should this be of any surprise? If they can’t control something that’ll benefit the masses, they’ll block/restrict/regulate it.

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Not at all.

They’ll try to, but sooner or later they’ll finally grasp what end-to-end encryption and public key cryptography really means. Perhaps even the difference between OpenPGP and S/MIME.

I for one will continue to develop precisely the type of tools they’d like to remove from everyone quite happily. It’s kind of nice knowing that each line of code is another act of civil disobedience:

import gpg
import os

rkey = "0xDEADBEEF"
text = "Turnbull doesn't know diddly squat."
plain = gpg.core.Data(text)
cipher = gpg.core.Data()
c = gpg.core.Context()
c.set_armor(1)

c.op_keylist_start(rkey, 0)
r = c.op_keylist_next()

c.op_encrypt([r], 1, plain, cipher)
cipher.seek(0, os.SEEK_SET)
ciphertext = cipher.read()

plaintext = gpg.Context().decrypt(ciphertext)

if plaintext[0].decode("utf-8") == text is True:
    print("Turnbull is provably a clueless git.")
else:
    pass

Enjoy! :slight_smile:

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Ooo. I very much like. Mind you I have a long history of deleting more lines of code than I add and habits die so very hard. A tentative optimisation…? (Maybe I need to leave the

line in as well?)

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And yet we’re still left with the Turnbullshit, go figure.

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Here was our submission to an inquiry sort of on the subject, though not about the legislation they are secretly developing:

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A very good document although I fear it will be regarded as a poor submission for the simple reason it is so far from compatible with the current incumbents’ collective mindset. These people do not respect Guardian reporters or Snowden as authoritative: ergo instant dismissal without remorse.

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We don’t really do it for them. We do it for public service policy wonks, academics, tech journalists and interested observers. It also applies pressure to the Greens and ALP to have the right policies as recipients of our preferences.

People in the public service have complained to us for not submitting to reviews in the past because they liked our approach to politics and it influenced their thinking. A lot of policy gets worked out by bureaucrats, so getting them to think the right way can lead to better outcomes all-round. Same goes for academics as they train up the next generation and tech journos as they write about topics we care about.

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Meanwhile in Germany here we have police openly admitting they use trojans to conduct “source telecommunication surveillance,” infiltrating smartphones, supposedly only of “suspects”, circumventing encryption and reading the messages post-transit. Who is to say how much this is already being used and where?

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Oops, the last part of that code block should really be:

if plaintext[0].decode("utf-8") == text:
	print("Turnbull is provably a clueless git.")
else:
	print(text)
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