Dr. Herb Lin relays the laugh of the day (and a lesson in narrow educational costs) at the expense of Prime Minister Turnbull of Australia, via Lawfare:
Australia is weighing in on the encryption debate regarding exceptional access by law enforcement. As George Brandis, the Australian Attorney-General, described last month, the Prime Minister’s office advocates requiring “internet companies and device makers [to follow] essentially the same obligations that apply under the existing law to enable provision of assistance to law enforcement and to the intelligence agencies, where it is necessary to deal with issues: with terrorism, with serious organized crime, with paedophile networks and so on.” He further asserted that the chief cryptographer at GCHQ, the Government Communication Headquarters in the United Kingdom had assured him that this was feasible.
The Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, subsequently entered into an interesting interchange with a reporter. When asked by Mark DiStefano, a reporter from ZDNET, “Won’t the laws of mathematics trump the laws of Australia? And then aren’t you also forcing people onto decentralized systems as a result?” The Prime Minister of Australia said “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.”
Dr. Lin explains how Turnbull could have credibly handled it:
Turnbull’s statement is absurd on its face. A more astute response would have been to acknowledge that human laws must be consistent with the laws of mathematics but then to say that the laws of mathematics do not prevent compliance with a requirement such as the one proposed by the Attorney-General. But the Prime Minister would also have had to acknowledge the above-mentioned trade-off explicitly—and maybe such an acknowledgment would have been politically inconvenient.
In other words, backdoors can be used by law enforcement AND criminals, which is also true in non-digital-life.
