SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted by chromas from IRC, as story from ZDNet:
"The governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are committed to personal rights and privacy, and support the role of encryption in protecting those rights," began a document agreed to last week. Sounds good. But wait.
The government ministers who met on Australia's Gold Coast last week went on to explain that the information and communications technology vendors and service providers have a "mutual responsibility" to offer "further assistance" to law enforcement agencies.
"Governments should recognize that the nature of encryption is such that there will be situations where access to information is not possible, although such situations should be rare," it said. That's clearly setting an expectation for industry to meet.
The good news is that service providers who "voluntarily establish lawful access solutions" will have "freedom of choice" in how they do it. "Such solutions can be a constructive approach to current challenges," the document said, cheerily, before ending with a warning.
"Should governments continue to encounter impediments to lawful access to information necessary to aid the protection of the citizens of our countries, we may pursue technological, enforcement, legislative, or other measures to achieve lawful access solutions."
The document is the Statement of Principles on Access to Evidence and Encryption. It's one of three statements to come out of the Five Country Ministerial (FCM) meeting of the homeland security, public safety, and immigration ministers of the five Anglosphere nations. They were joined by the attorneys-general of these nations, who have met annually as the so-called Quintet of Attorneys-General for a decade now.
These are, of course, the same nations that participate in the so-called "Five Eyes" signals intelligence (SIGINT) sharing arrangements under the UKUSA Agreement, although these close allies cooperate both diplomatically and operationally at a number of levels.
The FCM meeting also issued an Official Communiqué, and a Statement on Countering the Illicit Use of Online Spaces.
Taken together, the three documents represent a toughening-up of the governments' attitudes to the regulation of online communications. For diplomatic language, some of the communiqué's wording is blunt.
Related Coverage
Also found by Arthur and reported at CNET.
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday September 04 2018, @07:54AM (2 children)
What was happening a few years ago? It was 2013, and Edward Snowden's new friends were dropping docs like candy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes [wikipedia.org]
So it was only around then that the extent of their modern activities began to become well known. And the cooperation had already expanded beyond ECHELON. For example, "As of 2010, the Five Eyes also have access to SIPRNet, the U.S. government's classified version of the Internet."
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Tuesday September 04 2018, @11:55AM (1 child)
JFYI - The 5-Eyes agreement goes back to just after WW2 - ECHELON is/was only a very small part of it.
There was a book published in the 1970's which compromised Top Secret and Secret codewords which identified product/intelligence produced by member nations. And I'm having trouble now recalling what its title is....
If you Google for books on SIGINT, COMINT and other related topics there are loads of examples.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Tuesday September 04 2018, @12:18PM
The question was "There wasnt any mention of five eyes by the media until a few years ago, why do we always hear about them now?"
ECHELON was a major part of the package, and revealed in 1988 [wikipedia.org]. But it didn't get that much media attention at the time. I bet more people today have heard/read about PRISM than ECHELON.
Maybe part of the answer is that while some details about the Five Eyes agreement were already known, the mainstream media chose to ignore it and most people didn't get the memo. But in 2013 and especially today, the media landscape has become far more fragmented, information goes viral, and people are more paranoid. The nature of the Snowden revelations, with the dramatic unveiling of Snowden in Hong Kong and subsequent escape to Russia, the steady drip of stories, etc. also helped to propel the story into the public consciousness and keep it there for a long time.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]