Australia is set to announce laws to force companies like Google and Facebook to decrypt messages sent by suspected terrorists and other criminals.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will today announce that laws will be moved in Parliament later in the year to place such obligations on technology companies that provide apps for encrypted messaging.
No indication has been given by the government as to how it intends to enforce the laws.
In an interview with Channel Seven's Sunrise programme earlier this week, Turnbull told presenter David Koch in response to a question: "We have the right now to get the co-operation from the telephone companies, from the telcos. What we don't have is the legal right to get that sort of cooperation from the Internet companies like Facebook, or WhatsApp or Telegram and so forth, and Google.
{loadposition sam08}"So what we’ve got to do is modernise our laws. We cannot allow the Internet to be used as a place for terrorists and child molesters and people who peddle child pornography and drug traffickers to hide in the dark. Those dark places online must be illuminated by the law."
But Turnbull added that this did not mean he wanted backdoors in popular software. "I'm not talking about giving intelligence agencies backdoors or anything underhand. This is simply saying the rule of law must prevail online as it does off-line," he said.
Turnbull said he had discussed this at last week's G20 meeting. Attorney-General George Brandis raised the issue at a meeting of the Five Eyes nations last month.
Brandis told the ABC's AM programme this morning: "We would apply to Internet companies, to device makers essentially the same obligations that apply under the existing law to enable provision of assistance to law enforcement and to the intelligence agencies, where it is necessary to deal with issues: with terrorism, with serious organised crime, with paedophile networks and so on."
He said he had been assured "by the leading experts in the world with whom I've spoken, including as I said before the chief cryptographer of GCHQ, that this is technically possible".