Crypto: The True Defender of Privacy or the Greatest Threat To Society?

The rights to silence apply to most things, apart from unlocking a mobile phone. If you do not present your finger or the PIN number for your phone, you are likely to end up in prison.

Assistance and Access Bill consultation

In Australia — as part of its Assistance and Access Bill consultation — the government has now defined that companies must unlock mobile phones, or their owner will face up to a decade in prison. Imagine the headlines:

Apple sends Fred Smith to prison because it refuses to open up his iPhone

Currently, a person in Australia will get two years for withholding data, but the new laws will increase this to a decade. The bill, too, covers telecom operators, devices vendors and application developers, and, in fact, any company with any kind of presence in the country.

To implement this, consultation defines two notices:

• Technical assistance notice. This involves the hand-over of all the encryption keys that companies hold related to a suspect.
• Technical capability notice. This is where it is not possible to gain the encryption keys, and where a company must put in place data taps that would allow government agencies access to the…