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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: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday September 04 2018, @10:39AM (1 child)
> They pretend to be democracies
I don't think the sort of democracy you envisage has ever existed, certainly not in the UK. There has never been a time when people outside the "political class" have been in control in UK. An interesting test is what is social mobility into, and out of, the "political class". I wonder if anyone did a study...
e.g. John Major and Gordon Brown had no prior history in the political class, Cameron did, not sure about Thatcher, Blair, May...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 04 2018, @04:10PM
The USA has historically not been quite as classist as the UK, but that is only because our society was younger.
As time passed, we have acquired very entrenched classes too.
I'll just point out that our founding politicians were rich, so by saying that we HAD been less classist than the UK, I am saying so only in a RELATIVE sense. USA politics has been classist and continues to become more so (Kennedys, Roosevelts, Clintons, Bushes, etc.).