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In the aftermath of the Australian government passing laws that allows the government to force companies and individuals to work with officials to bypass encryption, scary implications of the new laws are being discovered. One very concerning effect is that officials can now force Australians to unlock their phone — granting the government full access to anyone's email history, personal files, pictures and other files on their phone. Senator Steele-John was quoted as saying "Far from being a 'national security measure' this bill will have the unintended consequence of diminishing the online safety, security and privacy of every single Australian,". With fines of up to $50,000 for individuals who refuse to hand over an unlocked device or cooperate with authorities, new devices and software are expected to enter the market including dual OS devices, hidden partitions, encrypted files and partitions similar to TrueCrypt, cloud only applications, device wipe pins, secondary hidden OS functions and other security measures which so far have largely only been implemented on desktop computers. This latest bungle by the Australian government may very well propel mobile device security forward decades in the same way RIAA and MPAA advanced P2P.
(Score: 5, Informative) by deimtee on Friday December 07 2018, @03:55PM (8 children)
It's both. Mostly at companies, and they have much higher penalties, but there is a provision in there for an 'intelligence officer'* to direct you to unlock your devices, Page 224, Section 34AAA. It's worse than just unlock the phone though, "access data held in, or accessible from, a computer or data storage device", it requires you to provide access to online accounts as well.
Up to 5 years in prison and 300 penalty units if you refuse. A penalty unit is currently $161.19 so $48357.00
*it lists 'intelligence officer' as ASIO, ASIS, or DSD. There are many sections that refer to criminal acts as well as national security, so I think AFP will be right in there too.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday December 07 2018, @05:03PM (5 children)
Oh hey, look, Australia fines target the poor, just as US fines do.
If you're going to use "penalty units", it should be (at least) in terms of percentage of yearly gross income, and perhaps incorporate a percentage of net worth as well. Not base units of currency.
As it stands, 100 "penalty units" is nothing to rich person A, but crushing to poor person B. It's fundamentally the same thing as doing it in currency, and just as discriminatory.
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All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
(Score: 2) by pipedwho on Friday December 07 2018, @07:02PM (4 children)
They do penalty units so they can keep indexing the fines every year without having to rewrite the laws. For example, a parking fine that was $66 ten years ago is now $112. Not sure how they decide what CPI is, but penalty units are tracking much faster.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fyngyrz on Friday December 07 2018, @07:17PM (1 child)
Yes, I understand. Abstracting the fine one level is a good idea, so that fines can keep up with inflation, deflation, etc. Otherwise every law has to be re-examined (and we know legislators won't do that.)
However, abstracting these units from the fundamental currency is a truly awful idea. Unless you're rich. And people keep electing the rich, so who could possibly imagine they'd set it up this way?
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Democracy: Where any two idiots outvote a genius.
(Score: 1) by easyTree on Saturday December 08 2018, @01:34AM
They should just abstract away the whole thing:
* X is punishable by Y and update X and Y every nano-second in a super-secret filing cabinet underground.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Friday December 07 2018, @07:19PM (1 child)
Fixed fines is "screw the poor, but the richer will feel it less and less over time"
Inflation adjustment is "screw the poor progressively more, while keeping the pain constant for the richer", where "pain" varies based on your income, from mild suffering to mere light rash.
Income-based fines can be two ways too. In one version, it's linear with income, which still hurts the poor a lot more than the rich, and isn't nightmarish to implement.
The other version scales up in percentage as income grows, like income taxes, which is the only way the rich actually start hurting for their misdeeds, while the poor only pay what they can afford. Setting that up without massive new infrastructure would essentially require paying your fines at tax return time...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by deimtee on Saturday December 08 2018, @11:26AM
I like the idea of progressive fines, and it occurs to me a way to implement on top of the current system would be to keep the penalty unit system in regard to fines, but make the actual unit value a variable based on income/wealth. This would only require modifying the law that sets the value of a penalty unit.
I also lean towards basing it much more heavily on the side of wealth rather than income. Entitled trust fund brats should not offend with impunity just because they have zero "income", while hard workers pay more just because they did a lot of overtime.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 08 2018, @11:37AM (1 child)
Run away very fast?
Have a kill switch in the device that melts the phone?
Have a pin that opens a vanilla clean OS instead of the standard OS?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 09 2018, @08:07PM
Don't carry a smartphone?