Subject: [Raven] Re: Australian URLs

From: Fred Baker <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 05 Nov 1999 17:30:14 -0500

I was sent the following URLs supporting lawfully authorized electronic
surveillance. They may be useful additions to the discussion

http://www.dcita.gov.au/nsapi-text/?MIval=dca_dispdoc&ID=529

http://www.afp.gov.au/publica/platypus/dec98/voice.htm

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From: "Richard Payne" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 22:32:28 -0500

>http://www.afp.gov.au/publica/platypus/dec98/voice.htm

Although these references certainly do display a possible point of view,
list members might want to keep some helpful facts in mind when they are
reading them. By way of background, in interpreting anything that the
Australian government might have to say bearing on the Net, please keep in
mind:

1) Australia, which has no analog of the U.S. Bill of Rights, passed a
really bad Internet censorship law (standard adjective: draconian) earlier
this year by a vote of 31-29. As one of the people who paid my A$15 to send
Richard Alston (the minister in charge of DCITA) a copy of "1984", I can
tell you that the government has no shame and is impervious to reason.

With no constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech, the best hope for
Australians to overturn this law (which is much worse than CDA or COPA and
would be unconstitutional in most other civilized countries) is massive
noncompliance and exploitation of the numerous drafting errors in the law.

Anyone interested in more details should check out the Nadine Strossen
(ACLU) / Richard Alston (Australian government) dust-up of a few months ago.

2) Even more interestingly, Australia commissioned a report on cryptography
(the Walsh Report) for public release in 1997 and then tried to supress it
when they didn't like the conclusions. It was eventually released under the
Freedom of Information Act in censored form. Electronic Frontiers Australia
got hold of an uncensored copy that had been filed in a depositary library
late in 1998 and released the information on the Web early this year. In
true Keystone Kops fashion, the Australian government tried to grab it back,
but it was too late.

The report is available on the Web at:
http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Crypto/Walsh/ If you're in a hurry, just read
the red parts: they are the ones that the Australian government tried to
censor. If you've got time, start at the home page for the site: it may help
you appreciate how much you have to lose.

In the censored part of the Report is (among other things) a discussion of
something that sounds amazingly like CESA, giving the Australian police the
authority to hack people's computers, subvert their software, and turn their
computers into covert listening devices. I guess there's no stopping a bad
idea when its time has come...

Also in the censored part of the Report is a frank discussion of why key
escrow (which was still government policy at the time) wouldn't work. Note
this well: the Australian government was maintaining publicly that key
escrow was workable long after their official crypto report had told them
otherwise.

We can conclude that the Australian government is an unreliable source of
information on crypto and the Net, but no worries, eh?

3) Nobody elected ILETS, which has been reported (by Duncan Campbell, I
think) to be FBI-funded with the purpose of lobbying for CALEA-type
legislation in OECD countries (anyone with hard information on this, please
send it along to the list). They were apparently behind Enfopol '98, which
the EU recently ditched.

They are just another lobby group, but with a twist: around about the fifth
time you read the phrase "Law enforcement requires", does anyone besides me
get an eerie feeling that they don't understand the concept of separation of
legislature, executive, and judiciary?

Richard Payne