From itnews.com.au
‘Not going to end well for anyone’.
Australia’s decision to rush in laws designed to weaken encryption has drawn ridicule from international cryptographic experts at the annual RSA security conference.
Cryptographer Whitfield Diffie, a panel regular at the conference, said that Australia’s laws would not be “productive”.
“I think the problem is roughly this: that it’s actually easy to disrupt the use of cryptography by legitimate large scale commercial organisations to make them a lot of trouble, but it’s not clear whether those techniques are going to be the same amount of trouble to, for example, terrorists,” Diffie said.
“So I think this is a step that is not going to be productive.”
Diffie ridiculed the basis for the laws, in particular referencing former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immortal quote that “the laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.”