Friday, December 07, 2018

Anti-Encryption Bill, "Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill 2018," Passed By Australia's House of Representatives


Australia's House of Representatives passed the bill famously known as Anti-Encryption Bill, the "Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill 2018."  This law will allow the law enforcement agencies in Australia to  to bend any service providers security measures to get access to encrypted communications. This requires companies in some cases to build new capabilities to decrypt protected communications, if they don’t already have the functionality to do so. The authors  of the  Anti-Encryption Bill have attempted to mitigate concerns of this overreach by saying that this subversion of encryption would have to affect only targeted devices and not represent a systemic weakness impacting the larger population.
Critics are on the other hand accusing that the law was rushed through the legislative process without proper due diligence.
Core of the bill is requesting from companies like Google, Facebook, SnapChat or who ever else who are within Australia's jurisdiction to provide encrypted communications.

  • Technical Assistance Request (TAR): A notice to request tech companies for providing "voluntary assistance" to law enforcement, which includes "removing electronic protection, providing technical information, installing software, putting information in a particular format and facilitating access to devices or services."
  • Technical Assistance Notice (TAN): This notice requires, rather than request, tech companies to give assistance they are already capable of providing that is reasonable, proportionate, practical and technically feasible, giving Australian agencies the flexibility to seek decryption of encrypted communications in circumstances where companies have existing means to do it (like at points where messages are not end-to-end encrypted).
  • Technical Capability Notice (TCN): This notice is issued by the Attorney-General requiring companies to "build a new capability" to decrypt communications for Australian law enforcement.

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