Blessed are the cryptographers, labelling them criminal enablers is just foolish
Preserving privacy is hard. I know because when I tried, I quickly learned not to play with weapons
Mark Pesce Wed 12 May 2021 // 07:31 UTC Share
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Column Nearly a decade ago I decided to try my hand as a cryptographer. It went about as well as you might expect. I’d gotten the crazy idea to write a tool that would encrypt Twitter’s direct messages - sent in the clear - so that your private communications would truly be private, visible to no one, including Twitter.
Writing the code turned out to be surprising easy; as I wrote it all in Python, I had libraries to handle the Twitter integration, and the cryptography. I read up a bit on the theory, put the pieces together, and with a bit of debugging “CrypTweet” was up and running.
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It is easy to forget that Chinese researchers from Wuhan discovered the origins of the 2002 SARS outbreak. In a remote cave in the southwestern province of Yunnan, virologists identified a colony of horseshoe bats with virus strains that jumped to humans and went on to kill hundreds of people around the world. They made their discovery in 2017 â almost 15 years after the first SARS outbreak.
Around the same time as the researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology were searching for the bats, another group of Chinese researchers were working on a far less credible theory â that SARS had been weaponised by foreign countries and introduced to China. The claim was published in a 2015 book,
Paper discussing biological warfare of ‘great interest’ to Chinese military: Intelligence chair09/05/2021|12min
Liberal Senator James Paterson has revealed he holds concerns about China’s lack of transparency amid revelations researchers discussed the use of biological weapons five years before COVID-19 struck.
Mr Paterson – who chairs the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security - said he was “concerned” that Chinese military researchers had discussed biological warfare in the document.
“What this paper shows is it is of a great deal of interest to the highest levels of the People’s Liberation Army,” he said.
“What we would ask of them, as we’d ask of any government in the world, is to be transparent and open about that.”
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Image: Getty
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The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) says there’s no justifiable reason why a law-abiding citizen would need to use an encrypted communication platform like Signal, Telegram or ProtonMail
In a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) as part of the inquiry into the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020, the ACIC asserted that encrypted messaging services are “almost exclusively” used for illegal activity, which is simply not true.
Banning Possession of Nazi, ISIS Flags ‘Overkill’: Australian Law Council
The Law Council of Australia is warning against criminalising the possession of extremist memorabilia, calling it overkill and saying it would have “unintended consequences.”
Richard Wilson SC, the co-chair of the Council’s National Criminal Law Committee, was responding to comments yesterday by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) calling for new laws to address gaps in the monitoring of extremist activity.
One recommendation from the AFP was that the possession and sharing of propaganda, flags, and insignia along with online content from extremist groups such as ISIS or the Nazis be criminalised.