Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05@uow.edu.au>
Originally From: Greg Taylor <gtaylor@gil.com.au>
ELECTRONIC FRONTIERS AUSTRALIA
MEDIA RELEASE 30th June 1998
CALL TO ABOLISH AUSTRALIAN CRYPTO CONTROLS
Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) today called for the abolition
of all controls on cryptography in Australia. EFA spokesperson Greg
Taylor said, "The current export controls are a failure because strong
cryptography software is already widely available throughout the world.
Furthermore the regulations are stifling Australian initiatives in
developing secure communications protocols."
"Far from achieving their purpose of preventing criminal activity, the
restrictions on deployment of strong cryptography increase the risk of
criminal attack on vital infrastructure such as banking and the
electricity supply system.", Mr. Taylor said.
"EFA welcomes the Australian government's recent initiatives in respect
to Electronic Commerce. However, these initiatives will come to nothing
if secure communications cannot be guaranteed. Business, privacy and
technology interests around the world are unanimous that unless there is
a relaxation of the cold-war era mentality in relation to encryption
policy, electronic commerce will never achieve its full potential. This
is also a privacy issue, a fraud prevention issue, a jobs issue, and an
international competitiveness issue."
"The Defence Department, which is responsible for administering export
controls under the terms of the Wassenaar Arrangement, has extended
Australia's compliance with the agreement by encouraging key recovery
"backdoors" in systems proposed for export licensing. This is despite
extensive international evidence that key recovery systems of the type
proposed by law enforcement agencies are fundamentally unworkable and a
risk to data security." said Mr. Taylor.
"How would Australian citizens react if they were required to lodge
copies of their home and office door keys with a government agency, so
as to enable law enforcement authorities to search their personal files
without their knowledge? Yet that is a close analogy to current
Australian policy on encryption software."
The Department of Defence has recently come under fire for threatening to
prosecute a Brisbane-based cryptography development group, who developed
a world-renowned crypto-library and made it available online to
commercial software developers. This software has been incorporated into
the leading web-server product used for secure electronic commerce. It
is generally acknowledged that the current export regulations,
administered through the Customs Act, do not apply to software made
available for downloading on the Internet, and EFA will lobby Labor and
the Democrats to oppose any moves to amend the Act to ban electronic
export.
One of the Brisbane development team, Tim Hudson, said, "The crypto-export
restrictions are based on the premise that not only are there no competent
programmers or mathematicians elsewhere in the world, but also that the
Internet does not exist and that no one can read or type. The source code
behind the majority of modern encryption algorithms is available in almost
every major library in the world."
Mr Taylor continued, "Australia can show the lead by proposing that
cryptography goods be dropped from the terms of the Wassenaar Arrangement,
an international regime to control trade in high-grade munitions. Federal
Coalition policy opposes heavy-handed attempts to ban strong encryption
techniques, and the other major Federal parties have also supported
relaxation of current controls. Furthermore, the Prime Minister announced
in March that Australia would adopt the OECD Cryptography guidelines,
which are regarded as far more acceptable than existing controls. Despite
these promising statements, Australia persists with a cold-war mentality
when it comes to actually implementing policy."
"EFA intends to contact every Senator and Member of Parliament to bring
them up-to-date with this issue. Despite the importance of crypotgraphy
to Australia's future in the Information Age, the matter has received
scant attention by the Parliament. We think it's time that our
legislators were informed about this critical issue," Mr. Taylor concluded.
Electronic Frontiers Australia is an online privacy advocacy group
concerned about the growing intrusion of government into people's personal
lives.
[ENDS]
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For further information:
Greg Taylor - Brisbane 07 3370 6362 E-mail: gtaylor@efa.org.au
Kim Heitman - Perth 08 9458 2790 E-mail: chair@efa.org.au
Danny Yee - Sydney 02 9351 5159 E-mail: danny.yee@efa.org.au
Electronic Frontiers Australia Inc http://www.efa.org.au
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For background material and references, please see the full release at:
http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/PR980630.html
-o-
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Received on Mon Jun 29 20:06:23 1998