In Australia, the majority and opposition parties have agreed to pass a law that will give the police and secret services the possibility of gaining access to the encrypted chats of programs such as WhatsApp and iMessage, heavily criticized by the big tech companies. The law has reopened a debate on how to manage the boundary between privacy and public security with new technologies, which for some years have allowed the application of encryption in many everyday apps. More generally, the debate is whether it is up to governments or corporations to protect people's privacy. Australian law, however, is expected to be approved this week.
With the introduction of end-to-end technology, the one that protects chats on Apple's messaging app and from 2016 also on WhatsApp, technology companies – Apple and Facebook, in this case – claim that messages are visible. only to the sender and recipient and by no one else, not even by the companies themselves. The CEOs of the two companies, Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg, have insisted a lot on this concept to demonstrate the attention to user privacy: but immediately they had to clash with the authorities who, periodically and for different reasons, asked Apple and Facebook to share private conversations of some users.
Australian parties have decided to pass legislation that will oblige companies to provide this data, either by decrypting messages or developing dedicated programs for the police. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has argued that the law will serve to thwart any terrorist attacks; Supporters also say that it will return to the police a weapon that encryption has severely limited in recent years, namely legal wiretapping. However, there are many critics who argue among other things that the law is poorly written and that it will end up damaging Australian cybersecurity overall, because companies will have to comply with the legislation with different and less tested standards than those currently in use.
Another, more pessimistic, consequence could be that large technology companies decide to exit the Australian market, because they are too hostile after the passage of the law. Apple commented on the bill in October, arguing that it adopts end-to-end encryption precisely to thwart criminal activity, and confirmed the hypothesis that the result of the law will be a weakening of Australian cybersecurity. In 2016, Apple had already clashed with the FBI for similar reasons, after it refused to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the terrorists who killed 16 people in the attack in San Bernardino, California.
