[AusNOG] Assistance and Access Bill moves to PJCIS

[Paul Brooks]

On 23/11/2018 11:37 AM, Alex Samad wrote:
> Wondering what the implications of this bill and the recent China was stealing our
> traffic....
>
> So in theory could china steal / sniff our traffic and because of these weakening of
> encryption allow china to snope on our stuff 
>
> A
In theory no - this bill doesn't weaken encryption, and explicitly doesn't allow any
changes that would weaken encryption.

This bill seeks to bypass encryption entirely by giving the agencies easier access to
get into devices and the back-end databases of apps and websites, to see what is
stored in there -bypassing unlock codes, PINS, thumbprint readers etc on devices for
example. So for traffic being sniffed 'in the middle' the information is still
sent/received as fully encrypted - and man-in-the-middle snooper won't see anything.
But if the authorities get hold of your phone or PC, they'll have easier access to
look into your sent/received message stores and read whats in there, which is stored
in your device un-encrypted.

In practice, if they balls-up the change request given to the device manufacturer or
app/website developer, anything could happen.

P.