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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: 4, Informative) by requerdanos on Tuesday September 04 2018, @01:06PM (2 children)
No. When there are elections, we get new executive branch leaders and new legislative branch lawmakers.
But the government is run by the various bureaus, agencies, and departments of the government--the department of this, the bureau of that, the department of whatever, as well as the TLA, the EFLA, and other acronym-oriented bodies.
Sure, those congresspeople make the laws. But congresspeople are temporary, and the culture, positions, policies, and staff of the actual institutions of government (bureaus, agencies, and departments) are not.
Oh, sure, your leaders, such as Trump, can appoint and/or fire a person or two at/near the "top" of an agency, but that person only affects the the culture, positions, policies, and staff of the body in question in the same way that Congress does: By establishing guidelines under which the BAD unit (bureau, agency, or departmental unit) operates.
Now the interesting thing about that is that each BAD unit is going to do pretty much what the heck they want, twisted slightly to fit whatever those guidelines are. Should the laws, guidelines, bylaws, whatever change, then the activities of the BAD unit might change 'spin' to appear to comply (or not, depending on what they can get away with--lots of what they do isn't even known, so no one knows to change it), but it's the BAD units that form the actions of >99% of what the government does.
Not Congress, and least of all Trump (who is privy to even less information than Congress is). Figureheads and lawmakers set broad parameters for government, but the government (the BAD units) is the government. We don't get a new government when we have elections: We get new figureheads and congressmen to preside over the same old same old.
To learn more about this process (should you desire*) by way of analogy, I recommend watching the UK television programs "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister", in which an elected minister and an unelected civil servant combine forces to run a "Ministry of Administrative Affairs" and later the government itself. The show is a silly but highly illustrative work of art that demonstrates whether temporary, transient, nominally powerful elected officials--or humble civil servants--actually run things. Same principle applies anywhere humans are involved, such as in the U.S.A.
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* If that isn't your desire, then watching that program and learning about the situation probably won't help.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Tuesday September 04 2018, @04:03PM
Congress however has an "easy" solution - completely defund the culpable bureaus, agencies, and departments along with stripping them of all legal authority, and restart from scratch. Of course intelligence agencies are probably near the center of the rats nest, and political corruption being what it is congress is ripe for being blackmailed into avoiding that path. Not to mention those
(Score: 2, Insightful) by curril on Tuesday September 04 2018, @11:35PM
I'm afraid that you are still giving the "deep state" too much credit, even you are calling it "BAD" instead. If elected officials vote to shut down the superconducting super collider, then it gets shuts down. If they decide to send troops to Iraq, then troops go to Iraq. The inertia of government agencies to change isn't because of conspiring bureaucrats pulling the wool over the eyes of naive politicians, it's because agencies are created to fulfill the requirements of a network of laws, and you can't really change the agencies without rewriting the laws that created them. A lot of the directives of Trump's political appointees violate the laws and rules the agencies are supposed to operate under, so if the bureaucrats follow the directives they get sued and lose in court. Maybe if Trump gets enough loyal judges willing to ignore the law for his sake, then you might see the bureaucracy corrupted so that in the future agency behavior is determined more by nepotism and cronyism and so covertly resists changes by the ruling political party.