Displaying items by tag: George Brandis

Controversial changes to laws aimed at controlling threats of spying, foreign interference and sabotage in the telecommunications sector have been passed by the Australian parliament.

When Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Attorney-General George Brandis get down to the nitty-gritty of formulating proposed changes to encryption laws which they have talked about, they might like to stop and consider one fact: most tech companies will bend over backwards if they have something to gain from it.

Apple has gone on the front foot as far as the passage of encryption laws in Australia goes, having already sent some of its people over in the last month to talk to government officials about the legislation.

It is one thing to stand before a podium, as Moses did on the mount, and promulgate laws. It is quite another thing to put those laws into effect, especially when they cover encryption.

Australia has announced that it will promulgate laws to force companies like Google and Facebook to decrypt messages sent by suspected terrorists and other criminals.

In a statement that brings to mind the valour of Don Quixote, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has flagged "a crackdown on ungoverned spaces online".

Australia will use a meeting this week to try and get the co-operation of its partners in the Five Eyes alliance to "thwart" the use of encryption by terrorists.

A lobby group for IT workers has slammed the Coalition government over its proposal to introduce laws to gain access to encrypted communications, saying such moves were completely unworkable.

A lobby group for IT workers has slammed the Coalition government over its proposal to introduce laws to gain access to encrypted communications, saying such moves were completely unworkable.

Attorney-General George Brandis has created a tremendous amount of confusion over what the government plans to do about encryption in the wake of the London attacks – but, given his famous bid to explain metadata, one should, perhaps, not be surprised.

The Communications Alliance has urged the federal government to go easy on telecommunications service providers as they attempt to meet a 13 April deadline for complying with the data retention regime.

An amendment to the Privacy Act, in order to criminalise the re-identification of anonymised released government datasets, may fail to clear the Senate if the report of the committee appointed to look into it is any indication.

The Australian Labor Party has refused to rule out giving its backing to a move by the government to allow the use of telecommunications metadata in civil cases.

Three primary school students, who had access to metadata similar to that which has been available to Australian government agencies since October 2015, were able to track down a mock whistleblower in just two hours.

The 112-page report into the failed 2016 census, tabled by the Senate Economics Reference Committee on Thursday, presumably brings to an end — for the year at least — the unedifying tale of how bureaucrats and tech firms bungled what should be an orderly count of the populace.

The Abbott Coalition government pushed through laws on metadata retention last year claiming that they would aid in the fight against terrorism. Yet it appears that when metadata access is sought, the crime being investigated most of the time has to do with drugs.

The federal Department of Health has been forced to remove a dataset made available to the public on the data.gov.au website after a researcher at Melbourne University found that service provider IDs could be identified.

The Australian government has announced that it will amend the Privacy Act 1988 to make it a criminal offence to re-identify government data that has been de-identified.

There are many similarities between the head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics David Kalisch and federal Attorney-General George Brandis.

Australia's attorney-general George Henry Brandis is a man who knows very little about technology. Being an educated individual — at least going by his CV — one would thus assume that he would steer clear of areas that are bound to embarrass him. Unfortunately, this is not the case with the current Apple v FBI situation.