The Australian Greens have slammed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's "knee-jerk reaction" of lending support to a push by his British counterpart, Theresa May, for a limit on access to encrypted communication services, in the wake of the terrorist attack in London on Saturday.
Turnbull was quoted as saying: "We need these global social media messaging companies to assist in providing access to encrypted communications… The security services need to get access to them."
As iTWire reported, May said on Sunday that Britain must take a new approach to tackling terrorism, and that this included denying terrorists and their sympathisers access to digital tools that she claimed were being used for communication and planning attacks.
Greens deputy leader Senator Scott Ludlam said: “This knee-jerk reaction to horrific incidents is not going to prevent more of them. Spying on more people can’t help, particularly when the perpetrators are already known to authorities – as they were in Melbourne, in London, in Sydney.
{loadposition sam08}“Mass citizen surveillance simply does not work. Finding needles in a haystack is only made more difficult when you increase the size of the haystack."
Scott Ludlam: "You can’t build a ‘backdoor’ into encrypted services and limit entry to a chosen few."
Ludlam pointed out that the same technologies which both May and Turnbull wanted limited access to, helped keep a majority of online services safe.
"The same technology used to keep your conversations private keeps your Internet banking safe, it protects against online fraud and theft, it shields businesses from attacks like the ransomware we saw last month," he said.
"You can’t build a ‘backdoor’ into encrypted services and limit entry to a chosen few. That’s not how it works. If a weakness is built into software to service one group, it will always be found and exploited by others."
In the past, many top security experts have gone on the record stating that providing entry through a backdoor will mean an increase in leaks and attacks from the black hat community.
Ludlam added: “Human intelligence, targeted scrutiny with safeguards and warrants, adequate resourcing for organisations that disrupt terrorist recruitment; these are appropriate responses.
"Making every person in the country more vulnerable to crime just because ignorant members of the far right saw a bad Hollywood portrayal of hacking and remembered a buzzword, is an atrocious way to make policy, even for the Liberal party."