Australian parliament passes controversial ‘anti-encryption law’
The Australian Senate on Thursday approved a controversial law requiring tech companies such as Apple and Facebook to cooperate in unencryption when intercepting communications.
The Labor party objected to the law, but dropped it at the last minute under pressure from the government and the prosecution. It was the last day of this year on which this bill could still be discussed in the Senate. According to Australian News.com, there were concerns about terrorist attacks in the period around Christmas. “We are not going to jeopardize the safety of Australians,” a Labor spokesman said, according to SBS News.
Labor then dropped the amendments it wanted to table to the controversial Assistance and Access Act and the Australian Senate approved. Labor has promised to improve the law when parliament meets again in February. The government then said it was still ‘considering’ the amendments.
According to critics, the bill passed the parliament too hastily, given the major impact and the many ambiguities in the text. The law expands the powers of the police and intelligence services in the country, but criticism focuses mainly on the new possibilities to access communications that are hitherto inaccessible, for example through encryption.
The authorities will soon be able to make a technical assistance request, or TAR, to tech companies and online services. This is a request for voluntary assistance, for example to provide technical details. In addition, there are technical assistance notices, or TANs, which lead to mandatory cooperation on pain of fines. This can, for example, be an obligation to help provide insight into message traffic, even if it is encrypted. Finally, there are the technical capability notices, TCNs for short, which make it technically possible for the authorities to access suspect data.
The powers should only be used for serious crimes such as terrorism. An important safeguard in the law is that the requests must not lead to systemic weaknesses such as backdoors or weakening encryption, but critics say this will be irrevocable and the safeguard is vaguely defined. Tech companies like Apple have already criticized the bill heavily.