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by aahortwwy 1439 days ago
"Well, the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia." - Malcolm Turnbull, Former Australian Prime Minister.

This is their attitude.

They will legislate to achieve the outcome they want. If that means making it criminal to use encryption without backdoors, they will do that. If it means making it criminal to use P2P technology, they will do that.

They have and will use control over mainstream infrastructure (Internet traffic, software distribution channels, etc.). Use of non-mainstream infrastructure will be made increasingly difficult and used as an indicator of guilt.

The more sophisticated the technical workarounds required, the fewer people will be capable of using those workarounds, and even fewer people will be capable of building those workarounds. Fewer people are easier to control.

TrueCrypt, Lavabit, etc.
1 comments
etherael 1439 days ago
While you're absolutely right that this is their attitude, what they will do, etc. The laws of mathematics steadfastly remain consistent despite your latlon and it doesn't matter what random idiot politician thinks about it.

This too will remain constant.

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aahortwwy 1439 days ago
That doesn't really matter.

The point Turnbull was making is something along these lines: https://xkcd.com/538/

No, they can't change the laws of mathematics to make all encryption have a government backdoor. They don't have to, though. They can just legislate to make use of non-backdoored encryption criminal. And if they want to make generating random streams of bytes a crime they can probably do that too.

It's not idiotic, it's authoritarian.

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etherael 1439 days ago
Sure, they can make thinking of a pink elephant criminal, too. That doesn't mean it will actually be effective.
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aahortwwy 1439 days ago
You don't think so? I worry that it will be very effective, that it will be passively accepted by the public, and that we will see widespread injustice as a result.
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etherael 1439 days ago
Sure, but that will happen no matter what given the public are idiots and the authorities are authoritarian. And that goes double for places like Australia where both of these things are particularly so.

And yet it will still be possible to ponder pink elephants.

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