[SKIP]
Moderator:
... a federal appeals court in New York ruled on
Thursday that the once secret NSA program that is systematically collecting
Americans’ phone records in bulk is illegal.
It’s pretty extraordinary.
I guess the question is: do you feel vindicated?
Snowden:
It is amazing what this court decisions says,
because this is not a court that’s considered particularly partisan in the
United States. This is one that seems
very measured, very well respected and it’s probably the most well respected
appeals court circuit in the United States, and for them to review a program
and say that, despite the fact that it’s been operating for 10 years, it’s been
violating our rights for 10 years, is significant. Particularly, because it was kept secret, the public was not
allowed to know and, in fact, in the United States, the most senior intelligence
official here, the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, lied under
oath about the existence of this program and the court completely and
categorically rejected that; and, when we look at what the papers actually say
about that, it’s particularly significant because, not only did they say that
this case – ACLU vs Clapper – completely changed things in terms of was
it illegal, this has implications for many other programs, not just this single
program that was struck down yesterday, but the entire category of legal
reasoning behind bulk collection behind
mass surveillance, so we may see more legal challenges come forward. But moreso than that, we’ve seen something
which is amazing because we’ve got what’s called Amnesty vs Clapper,
which in 2013 was almost exactly the same case, but it was dismissed in 2013;
they said courts could not hear these programs: they were too secret, too sensitive and we simply had to trust
the government. Now, after these
stories hit the newspaper and after a new case – ACLU vs Clapper – was
given a chance to work its way through the legal system we saw something
amazing change, which is that judges said we can no longer simply take the
government at its word because the government has abused our trust, and that, I
think, is something that will last for not just years but hopefully for
decades.
Moderator:
The editorial in today’s New York Times –
I don’t have it in front of me, unfortunately, but it makes specific reference
to the fact that the key finding here really – or the key concern – is that
these programs would never have been made public or this decision would never
have been possible without your revelations.
I think we should take a step back, though, for our audience here in
Australia and focus a bit on the earlier revelations and just talk our audience
through them. So, we have a slide up on
the screen (if we can get it up for you) for our audience here, it’s actually
entitled FAA702 OPERATIONS and it lists two types of collection. It was one of the first slides made
available by the media from your leaks.
Would you be able to describe the two types of collections that they’re
describing here, the distinction between the two, how they work and we’ll come
to what they’re specifically collecting in a moment.
Snowden:
Okay.
So, I can’t actually see the slide from here, but I believe this is
quite a famous slide. It regards,
basically, the PRISM collection program, which is a sort of compelled
cooperation between the intelligence services of the Five Eyes countries – the
United States, the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada – and then we have
what’s basically called the Upstream program, which is where they collect this
not directly from the companies themselves where they simply say we want everything
from this citizen that we want in their data holdings; we want their e-mail; we
want the times they logged in, we want the locations they logged in; but we
also want to be able to collect that secretly without the knowledge of the
companies as it transits across the lines that connect the internet
together: undersea cables, satellite
links, fibre back-holes at telecommunications providers – and they are broadly
two sections of types of interception.
There’s what’s called metadata collection, which
is basically – metadata are the kind of details that a private investigator
would collect if they were following around – if the government basically
tasked an agent to monitor what you’re doing every day, follow you on foot;
they wouldn’t be close enough to hear every word and every conversation you
were saying because you would notice them, but they would see who you were
meeting with; what, generally, you were discussing; how long you met with them;
the places you met with them; where you went afterwards; who you were with;
basically, the fact that a communication occurred.
The second class is content collection where,
for example, they would actually be reading through the body of your e-mails;
they would actually be reading the website itself, that you had visited; your
entire web history; as well as the contents of the phone calls you had made;
they could literally listen to the words you had said to everyone else.
Now, in Australia, this is particularly relevant
because there’s a metadata retention program that was recently passed under
what I believe was called the ASIO Act and this is really dangerous because it
has implications - actually, I think the ASIO Act affects more of journalists,
but I think there was an additional data act passed, as well - and the challenges here were not just as the
Australian intelligence services had grabbed for more power, the fact that they
say: well, if journalists are
publishing things that we consider sensitive programs, intelligence programs,
they will be held criminally liable for that, which I’ll point out, in that
judgement in the United States just yesterday,
the court said that they could not have reached this judgement without
the work of the free press; without the press publishing material which had previously
been secret, which was sensitive to intelligence agencies operations but was
vital and necessary for the public to know and understand in order to
understand the reality of the government’s policies; but the fact that under
these mandatory metadata programs that were passed in Australia, you can
immediately see, who journalists are contacting from which you can derive who
their sources are. If there’s, for
example, a leak that happens in ... the Australian intelligence services, that
reveals to the newspapers that the services have been abusing their powers, and
the government can simply go into their mass collection of everyone’s
communications, regardless of whether they’re suspected of any crime or whether
they’re going about their daily business, it’s all there. They can go, well, which employees from this
agency had contacted press organisations
and, immediately, they have a list of suspects. This is dangerous. This
is not things the governments have ever traditionally been empowered to
claim for themselves as authorities and, to have that change recently – in the
recent past, in the sort of 2013 era – is a radical departure from the
traditional operations of liberal societies around the world.
Moderator:
If we just go back to the PRISM slide for a
moment, the most recent one we were showing on screen. This is the one titled: ‘PRISM collection Details’; and if you
can’t see it, it lists a range of current providers on the left and then on the
right, it says “What will you receive in collection?” Do you want to just talk us through how this PRISM program worked
and, in fact, how Australians’ data would be treated here.
Snowden:
Okay.
This is particularly dangerous for people who are not US citizens
relative to other countries in the world.
In the United States if the government or if any of the Five Eyes
governments seeks your information under this program, they have to at least go
to a judge and get a warrant. Now, the
danger here is that it’s a secret court that in 35 years has been asked to
authorise warrants about 35,000 times,
and in those 35 years they’ve only said no twelve times. Unfortunately, for everyone who is not a
United States citizen they don’t require a warrant at all, there’s no
involvement of any court, there’s simply a blanket order signed by the Attorney
General and basically the national security services, or the spy agencies, can
basically submit basically a paper process to these providers and requisition
this content through them, outside of the warrant process. It’s more akin to a subpoena, but the things
that it reveals are extraordinary:
everyone you talk to on Skype;
all of the messages that you ever sent back and forth; everything that you’ve
ever done on your Facebook
pages; who you’ve talked to; how long you’ve been on the pages; what you liked;
what you didn’t like; these kind of information details. It’s extraordinarily revealing and for the
government to be able to entitle itself to these capabilities particularly in
secret, as it happened, without the public’s knowledge, is incredibly
empowering for them and incredibly disempowering for civil society.
The danger here is the creation of what’s been
referred to as ‘turnkey tyranny,’ which is where government claims to follow
process and things like that – we can hope for the best – but at any given
time, given that these programs operate in secret beyond the reach of public
oversight and review, they could change the policies that govern it; they could
change the frequency with which they use them, the intrusiveness with which
they apply those authorities; and not only would we not know about it, we would
have a very limited ability to meaningfully resist that assertion of authority,
and that’s dangerous.
Moderator:
And this is content that’s being hoovered up,
essentially, from these providers.
Snowden:
Correct.
Both content and metadata.
Moderator:
And does the Australian government also have
access to this data on Australian citizens?
Snowden:
All of the Five Eyes partners can request information
through the United States National Security Agency that would come from the
PRISM program, for example. But PRISM
is just one of many intelligence programs.
This is one that has struck people deeply because we all recognise the
service providers who were on the sly and the fact that they were sharing that
information secretly without our knowledge was really upsetting. But it’s also important to remember that
this is not the only program. It
actually goes much deeper than this.
Basically, the reach is far more expansive than and alarming, I think,
than just this alone.
Moderator:
So, a lot of the coverage of your revelations
has focused on the NSA, the British Tempora program and so forth. Can you tell us a bit more about the role of
Australia as a partner in the global surveillance regime?
Snowden:
Right.
So, Australia’s role, in mass surveillance around the world, is similar
to the United Kingdom and the Tempora program which you mentioned, which is
what’s called a ‘rolling internet buffer’.
Basically, they use local authorities, such as this metadata program
that’s been passed in Australia, to collect everyone’s communications in
advance of criminal suspicion - this is call ‘pre-criminal investigation’ – and
what this means is they’re watching everybody all the time, they’re collecting
information and they’re just putting it in pockets that they can search
through, not only locally, not only within Australia, but they can then share
this with foreign intelligence services such as the United States National
Security, the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters, and they
can troll through these communications in the same way, and this often happens
beyond any sort of court oversight. The
ultimate result there is the fact that regardless or not of whether you’re
doing anything wrong, you’re being watched in a new way.
Announcer:
EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE
WHISTLEBLOWER, WHO EXPOSED THE NSA MASS SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM, VIA VIDEO LINK
FROM RUSSIA AT THE PROGRESS 2015 CONFERENCE ON RN OR ONLINE YOU’RE WITH ‘BIG
IDEAS’.
LET’S CONTINUE THIS
SESSION WITH EDWARD SNOWDEN AND RETURN TO THE MELBOURNE TOWN HALL.
Moderator:
So governments in Australia, the US, the UK,
would say that they need these sort of systems to fight terrorism. They argue they would be hobbled in their
mission without these systems. I guess,
what’s your view on that?
Snowden:
So, it is important for governments to have the
ability to investigate terrorist incidents, to provide for national defence,
but the authorities that are typically used in pursuit of those objectives are
actually quite different from what we see intelligence agencies arguing for –
sort of their supporters, defenders, the apologists class, the legislators,
legislatures around the world – when they say:
you know, this will help us stop terrorism. For example, the court program that was struck down yesterday in
the United States as illegal, is based on exactly the same sort of concept as
this Australian bulk collection program of metadata. And what it is, is they ingest all this metadata – who you call,
when you call them – so they can create associations of people, and this was
sort of argued in parliament as being necessary to prevent terrorist
attacks. Now, unfortunately, for the
intelligence agencies in the United States after these programs were revealed,
the President himself appointed two independent panels, with comprehensive
access to classified information of all of us, with the ability to go into
these intelligence services, interview the heads and working officials who use
these programs, and say ‘Does this actually stop terrorist attacks? Has it in the past? Is it useful? Is it necessary?’
Basically, the purpose of these reviews was to answer a question: ‘Do these programs make us safer?’ And, unfortunately, the answer is ‘No’. And this is not me claiming this; this is
the United States government, that has every incentive to basically to let
these programs off the hook and say, ‘yes, they’re very valuable,’ ‘yes, we
want them to continue.’ In fact, they
said, despite the fact that these programs have been operating for more than a
decade in some cases, bulk collection of metadata has never prevented a single
terrorist attack, nor even made a concrete difference in a single terrorism
investigation in the United States. So
the question is not only, ‘Do we want these programs in the context of our
values, in the context of liberal societies?’
– but even if we were willing to
sacrifice our rights in that manner – which in the United States is contrary to
our constitution to begin with – but, ‘Does it make us safer?’ – and we have
classified information that is now public evidence that says, in fact: no it does not. Metadata monitoring has never been shown to be useful and it’s never
been shown to make us safer.
Moderator:
One of the proposals I read about today in New
York Times articles is a proposal to switch the storage of the metadata from
the NSA to private telecommunications companies and I guess that mirrors in
some respects the move here in Australia where the federal government has
introduced a mandatory data retention regime where the telecommunications
companies themselves have to store the metadata. Would you prefer the companies to be storing the metadata or the
government, if you had a choice?
Snowden:
So, it’s a little bit ... – the political debate
happening about these authorities in the United States is a little bit more
complex. It’s difficult to address in
short terms because of the amount of nuance.
But to break it down broadly, there are two possibilities. There were three. One was that they would
reauthorise this sort of intrusive capability without any changes. That’s dead on arrival now; it’s simply no
longer a possibility. The court has
said it’s illegal, it’s politically unwise, no reasonable legislator would try
to do that. There is the second option,
which is what you describe, where they amend the program slightly, in that they
request information from telecommunications providers rather than having the
government intercept it themselves.
There’s not necessarily ... a mandate that requires the
telecommunications providers to collect this type of information, in this
particular way, because it gets touchy and difficult. Rather, the general common sense perspective here is that most
telecommunications providers have to hold onto some amount of metadata
communications activities, some sort of, basically, call detail records for
billing purposes. So now how many SMS
messages you’ve sent in a month, how many people you’ve called, how many
minutes you use these type of things, the government does not have to force
providers to retain that kind of information, they can simply request it
through a legal process. There are
questions to be asked there – ‘How should we balance this? How intrusive should
we make it?’ – but, generally, that is a lot more reasonable than what’s
happened in the past, although still not optimum. The third option - which is the one which has best the arguments
at this point – is simply that they let this authority expire completely and
that they go back to using subpoenas and warrants as they always have, because
traditional law enforcement authorities here have been shown to work, they’ve
been shown to be reliable and they’ve been shown to save lives. Why are we changing to untested authorities
which have been proven not to make us any safer, which require extraordinary
amounts of investment – I believe, in the case of Australia, the new bill
mandating metadata retention has been estimated to cost at least $400-million
annually. Should we really be doing
this at all? And that’s the question we
should be asking.
Moderator:
I guess also, with the Sony and the liability of
our telecommunications companies in Australia, I’m not sure I would be trusting
them with my data.
Snowden:
And there is a real question of once you start
gathering this data. From an attacker’s
perspective – at one point I did, basically, computer network attack analysis
for the National Security Agency, which meant I was trying to see what
malicious hackers and so on and so forth were doing around the internet – and
wherever this data is gathered, where it’s centralised, it’s exactly as you
say, it becomes a target, a vector for attack and, ultimately, these things are
very difficult to defend against capable actors but, also, you know, the
sixteen year old in their basement.
Simply, attack is easier than defence nowadays and if you gather
sensitive information, it will be misused or control of it will be lost.
Moderator:
So, Ed, as far as I gather, only a small
percentage of the files you’ve leaked have actually been reported on. Why is this, I guess, and do you expect
there to be more revelations, including about Australia?
Snowden:
So, the reasoning behind this is I, as an
individual, as a citizen working on behalf the government, I didn’t want to
make a decision unilaterally about what should and should not be published in
the case of classified information, because there’s a chance that based on my
own political biases, which are quite clear, I would like to think, I could
basically err too heavily on the side of disclosure, perhaps improperly,
perhaps I could misunderstand some of the implications of a particular detail,
even though I worked for the secret services for about 8 years and understand
them quite well, so the question for me was how do I basically try to mitigate
the risk of making a personal mistake if I were publishing this myself and, so
what I believed was the best way to do this was to partner with institutions of
the free press – you know, institutions that everybody trusts, everybody
understands are working to basically hold the government to account of both the
law and the public – and allow them to make the decisions about what should and
should not be public, and then I would require them as a basis of receiving
materials, or unlisted [?] material here, to ask the government in advance of
publication to review it just to ensure that no particular detail – you know,
the name of an individual officer, the name of a site which may not be fully
understood, if the implications are revealed that would not be fully understood
– to certify, basically, that this errrr—these stories are not going to risk
life or harm—the threat of harm to any particularised individual; and in every
case that’s been the process that’s been followed, the result of which is the
fact that now we’re in 2015 and while in 2013 government officials are saying
the sky is falling, this is going to enable terrorists, there’s going to be
blood on the hands of press institutions that are publishing this material, in
fact that hasn’t come to pass in even a single case. National Security officials have been repeatedly questioned about
this, under oath in front of Congress and never in a single case have they
shown anyone who has come to harm or even harm that has resulted to collection
capabilities and so forth as a result of this material becoming public, and on
that basis, I think it’s pretty fair to say that publication will continue and
the purpose of the free press in society is to do exactly this kind of thing;
to champion the public interest, to act as an adversary against the government
on the behalf of the public, and to really hold the most powerful officials in
our society to the account of the law, which traditionally is quite difficult
to do when operations have kind of been in secrecy.
Moderator:
And about Australia, do you think there will be
more about Australia?
Snowden:
I think that’s fair to say.
Announcer:
EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE FORMER NSA CONTRACTOR
RESPONSIBLE FOR THE LEAKING OF CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS THAT EXPOSED THE MASS
SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM UNDERTAKEN BY US AGENCIES ... [skip]
... JOINING EDWARD SNOWDEN ON THE PANEL ARE
GREENS SENATOR SCOTT LUDLAM AND THE AUSTRALIAN DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH,
ELAINE PEARSON.
Moderator:
How does this sort of surveillance regime and
the other Australian national security legislation that Ed alluded to affect
our human rights?
Elaine Pearson:
(HRW Australia)
Clearly, fundamentally, this is about the right
to privacy. But the right to privacy is
really—you know, it has knock-on effects for every one of our civil
liberties: freedom of speech, freedom
of assembly, freedom of association. If
the government is intercepting and monitoring, you know, what we say and who
we’re talking to, this is going to have a chilling effect in terms of how we
communicate with people, where we go and, you know, how we meet up with
people. And, you know, this is a
particular concern to human rights activists because the work that we do is
really about exposing the behaviour that governments are often seeking to cover
up or to hide, and my organisation
has done quite a bit of work on this in the United States. We’ve looked at the harmful impact of mass
surveillance on journalists and on lawyers.
Lawyers have told us they, basically, how they’ve had to resort to the
tactics of drug dealers simply to get the job done: you know, using ‘burner phones’, ensuring that they have face-to-face
meetings, these sorts of things; and, you know, this is really worrying and
it’s particularly worrying in Australia where, as Ed mentioned, we have this
new ASIO act which was rammed through parliament with very little discussion
and journalists and human rights activists and whistleblowers now face five to
ten years in prison simply for making certain types of unauthorised
disclosures, even if they’re in the public interest and I think ...there are
certainly some editors and some journalists who are going to sort of not report
on certain things, particularly in Australia where issues of asylum seekers,
immigration we’ve been talking about today, are seen as a national security
issue. We don’t want to see a sort of
legitimate public debate of these issues covered up because people are scared
about being thrown in prison.
Moderator:
Thanks, Elaine.
Scott, Ed described the role of Australia in the
Five Eyes agreement. What’s your view
on Australia’s participation in this cooperative spying regime?
Scott Ludlam:
(Australian Greens)
Well, I think it needs to be subject to
comprehensive public review and thanks to Progress for getting Ed on-board and
thank you Ed for being here – obviously for beaming in so we can hear from you
directly, but also in a way for enabling the conversation to occur at all. So, I guess on behalf of all of us, thank
you for what you’ve done.
Scott Ludlam:
(Australian Greens)
And in terms of Australia’s participation in the
Five Eyes, I guess one of the things that’s been so valuable about these
revelations and the way they’ve been reported is that at least we now know a
little bit. So the Australian agency,
the Australian Signals Directory – the ASD – is one of the partner organisations of the Five Eyes and
operates with the absolute bare minimum of scrutiny and I feel like we know
probably less about its operations even than we do about the US NSA now or some
of the partner organisations because the debate here in Australia is so
stifled, we don’t have a benchmark and a bill of rights to kind of test some of
these concepts against in court, and we have a really flattened political
debate, you know, unlike even in the United States where it’s ferocious and
fierce and very polarised, but here in Australia we’re told, you know, these
people are traitors, they’re a national security threat, just trust the
government everything’s going to be fine.
I think the Five Eyes agreement needs to be comprehensively reviewed by
the light of day and we can’t do it without this kind of information in the
public domain.
Moderator:
Thank you.
Ed, do you have any quick response to that?
Snowden:
I do, actually.
I would say that he pointed out a really critical *** basically in the
management of intelligence services.
It’s not that anyone aims, working in an intelligence services organisation is—errr, you know,
they’re intentionally being ***; none of these are bad guys; they’re all trying
to—errr, they see themselves as—the culture of these places is that they’re
good people doing bad things for good reasons:
they want to help, they want to keep us safe. But the problem is when you reach that sort of utilitarian
culture, sort of an authoritarian tint, over the operations of how you go about
your business, simply saying that the ends justifies the means, and you don’t
have the public involved in the oversight and the review of that, you don’t
have the full body of legislature who’s able to challenge the operations of the
executive branch of government, you run an almost certain risk that these
services will go to far. And we’ve seen
this not just in the United States, we’ve seen this in cooperating agencies,
Five Eye services around the world. For
example, in the United Kingdom they found that the intelligence sharing between
UK and the US had been unlawful. It had
violated the rights of people for more than seven years. We saw when these programs were happening in
secret nobody really contested them, but when it became public, when we saw
basically international law reviews, when we saw domestic law reviews, they
were found to violate people’s rights on a massive comprehensive scale again
and again, in country after country, and government officials, they pushed
back. They said, look, this is just metadata
in some cases, because they didn’t want to talk about the content cases. They felt that metadata was an easier win,
but having worked at the NSA, I can tell you that metadata is much more
valuable than content. As someone
looking at computer tech and computer communications, basically looking at your
signature web track, looking at everything you do online, what you’re doing on
your smart phone and so on and so forth, I would much rather troll through your
metadata of your communications than the content of it, because metadata is much
easier to search on machine based terms, it’s much easier to analyse
algorithmically and metadata doesn’t lie.
People lie when they’re engaged in actual wrongdoing. You know, you may tell the truth to your
grandmother when you’re discussing a cookie recipe and things like that. But when we’re talking about bad people
planning bad things, they talk around it, they use code-words, they’re
deceptive. But the impact of metadata,
the sensitivity of metadata, simply cannot be overstated. They’re collecting information about
everyone in every place regardless of whether or not they’ve done anything
wrong, which the US Director of National Security Agency – the previous one,
Michael Hayden – said: “We use metadata
to kill people.” His general counsel,
the top lawyer for the agency, said that metadata is a proxy for content. When you have enough metadata, you don’t
need content at all. So the
government’s tried to split hairs and say, you know, metadata’s not that big a
deal. You should be very sceptical about that. And beyond that, when we talk about why
they’re so concerned about the public knowing about just the bare outlines of
what they’re doing because, again, what’s been published had not been granule
details. We’re not talking about the
names of human agents operating behind enemy lines or anything like that, that
would pose any sort of risk to life of any individual. We’re talking about systems. We’re talking about legal authorities. We’re talking about the government’s secret
interpretations of the law. And when we
look at this kind of thing we have seen time and time again and within
classified governments within the halls of government where they said, you know
they’re not actually afraid that anyone in government is going to come to harm
from these programs that any public representative is going to incur a greater
risk, that we’re going to be hit by attackers that we won’t be able to
stop. What they actually said – this is
in the United Kingdom – they said in a top secret document amongst its lawyers,
what they were really afraid of was a damaging public debate. What they were afraid of was not that
terrorists would know about this but that its citizens would know about this. That we might begin to mount legal
challenges that we might try to have a voice in the policy in a way that they
simply did not want to, and that is something that I think we really need to
create structures within our institutions to prevent. It’s not about bad intentions; it’s about bad structure. It’s the
fact that when you create systems that watch everyone, everywhere, all the
time; when you collect it all, as the NSA motto is, you understand
nothing. And we’ve seen this time and
time again. The fact that we’re
monitoring everyone’s phone calls in the United States did not stop the Boston
marathon bombings. The fact that the
attackers in Charlie Hebdo in France were known to the intelligence services
prior to the attack did not stop it.
The same case in Canada. The
same case in Australia. Nine times out
of ten when you see someone on the news who’s engaged in some sort of radical
jihadist activity, these are people who had a long record and the reason these
attacks happen is not because we didn’t have enough surveillance; in fact, it’s because we had too much. We didn’t prioritise the cases we had
because we had wasted too many resources on watching everybody who didn’t
present a threat that we couldn’t allocate the manpower, the man hours, the
actual dollar resources, to watching the people who actually did represent a
specific imminent threat.
Moderator:
And I guess the countries we’re speaking about
Australia, the UK, the US, countries which we consider democracies, which have
strong protections in general – for example, the US Constitution – and we’re talking
about technologies that are actually, I guess, you know, at the early stages of
their development. Are you concerned—I
guess my concern, really, I’m interested in your views on this, where this is
going in terms of other countries and the future developments of technology as
we move forward.
Snowden:
Yeah.
Thank you for asking because this is really important. You know, people think about this as sort of
science-fiction-like. Only the National Security Agency can do this, only the spies in Western advanced countries have
these capabilities, can achieve these capabilities and that’s categorically ***. I mean, China has led the world
for a very long time in monitoring the internet communications: the way we firewall it, the way we censor it,
the way we block it. Russia, very
little has been reported on it, but one has to assume they have very much the
same capabilities; they have a program called SORM, which is assumed to be very
much the same. And we see this
happening in country after country. The
problem is that even if we pass the best laws in the world in the West – you
know, even if we have comprehensive reform in liberal societies, the Australian
parliament says we reject mass surveillance comprehensively; metadata
retention; we’re striking it down; encryption backdoors, we will never engage
in that; we’re going to ensure anyone that engages with an Australian company,
that buys an Australian product or service, or engages in Australian civil
society, their rights and their privacy will be protected; as soon as your
communications cross your borders that’s going to change – that’s no longer
going to be enforceable because every other country in the world would have to
have the same laws. We have to have
basically governments work in partnership with industry with academia, and
civil society to basically push forward research and activism efforts to ensure
that we can enforce our rights; not just through our law, but through our
technology, that we demand strong, robust, reliant encryption. That means when an Australian communicates
with a web service, with a provider, with a friend through their phone, or
anything like that, they know that the only person who will be able to read
that communication is the intended recipient at the other end of that
communication and that the government will basically work to champion and
uphold that social contract, rather than undermine it. We don’t want to move toward a world where
basically we’re choosing between surveillance and security, and that’s very
much the case today. They stand on
opposite ends of basically incentives and policy. In order for governments to be able to monitor us, they have to
weaken the security of the communications that we all rely upon everywhere,
whether it’s through your bank, whether it’s through your private lives, your
private records. And when they do this,
they don’t only make it easy for themselves to monitor the communications, they
make it possible for every authoritarian, illiberal regime to do exactly the same
thing.
TRANSCRIPTION
STOPPED AT – 38:20 of 53:58 total audio.
Asterisks used to mark spaces where audio
unclear to me.
Question marks used to mark best guess at
preceding word.
[ Q & A
Follows ]
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