Irreal

In what could be considered a corollary to The Iron Law of Data Collection¹, the UK’s GCHQ (their version of the American NSA) has informed Parliament that their use of bulk device hacking—originally promised to be used sparingly only in special cases—has “evolved”. What that means is that they’re going to do more of it. Of course they are. Just as with data collection, once something like this starts its use grows. Before long it will be the normal procedure.

If there’s one thing the nosy parkers hate, it’s not being able to stick their noses into everybody’s business. Because they find that intolerable and because the use of encryption is making it harder to do their snooping by intercepting communications, the GCHQ wants to hack into peoples computers and cell phones. They’re there and they may contain information that the authorities want to know about so we better hack them.

Sadly, the UK has already traveled well down the road the Orwell warned about. The police routinely monitor social media to make sure that no one is indulging in Bad Think™ and, really, it wouldn’t be surprising if they’re mining this type of information too. If they aren’t, you can be sure they soon will be.

Just as with data collection, the only way to end this is for the UK citizens to deliver a firm “NO” to the GCHQ.

Every Irreal reader knows, I’m sure, about the proposed encryption—anti-encryption is more accurate—law that the Australian Government is trying to push through Parliament. When it was first proposed, I thought that it was another case of politicians being ignorant of the realities of encryption and security engineering and that adult leadership would soon exert itself. As the debate raged on and the government refused to listen to what the experts were telling them, I came to believe that they were more than ignorant, that they were stupid.

What other conclusion can you draw after every expert in the world told them their plan would be a disaster and harm, not help, their national security? It turns out that there is another conclusion: they’re insane. That’s a pretty strong statement but take a look at this article in 10 Daily entitled If Encryption Laws Go Through, Australia May Lose Apple. The point isn’t Apple could withdraw from the market—although I’m sure it would anger many Australian citizens—it’s that Australia would become isolated from the technical world. No one would buy their products, their engineers would emigrate to lands with saner laws that didn’t allow them to be jailed for merely doing their jobs and their tech industry could be destroyed.

That sounds hyperbolic, I know, but read the article. It’s hard to reach any other conclusion. It’s also hard to conclude that the folks pushing this bill are anything but insane. It appears that the effort to ram this bill through on the last day of Parliament’s current session failed so the legislation is dead until next year. That doesn’t make those pushing the bill any less insane.

Hat tip to Kontra who asks if Australia will commit to a digital lobotomy.

UPDATE [2018-12-06 Thu 13:11]: Apparently I was wrong about the bill failing. According to this ABC report, Labor withdrew its ammendments and the bill passed. Now the Australian Government can enjoy the reaping of what they’ve sown.