Australia advocates weakening strong crypto at upcoming “Five Eyes” meeting

Two top Australian government officials said Sunday that they will push for "thwarting the encryption of terrorist messaging" during an upcoming meeting next week of the so-called "Five Eyes" group of English-speaking nations that routinely share intelligence.

The move indicates that Canberra is now running ahead with what the FBI has dubbed "going dark" for several years now. This is the notion that with the advent of widespread, easy-to-use strong encryption on smartphones and other devices, law enforcement has been hindered. Many experts say, however, that any method that would allow the government access even during certain situations would weaken overall security for everyone.

According to a statement released by Attorney General George Brandis, and Peter Dutton, the country’s top immigration official, Australia will press for new laws, pressure private companies, and urge for a new international data sharing agreement amongst the quintet of countries.

"As Australia’s priority issue, I will raise the need to address ongoing challenges posed by terrorists and criminals using encryption. These discussions will focus on the need to cooperate with service providers to ensure reasonable assistance is provided to law enforcement and security agencies," Brandis said in the statement.

The Five Eyes group, which includes Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States, will meet in Ottawa next week to discuss national security issues.

"Within a short number of years, effectively, 100 per cent of communications are going to use encryption," Brandis told Australian newspaper The Age recently. "This problem is going to degrade if not destroy our capacity to gather and act upon intelligence unless it's addressed."

Earlier this month, James Clapper, the former American director of national intelligence told the National Press Club in Canberra that he hoped Silicon Valley "would use all the creativity and innovation and energy that they apply to create such miraculous things as iPhones, you know, the centre of my life now, that they would apply that same creativity, innovation to figuring out a way that both the interests of privacy as well as security can be guaranteed."

However, he admitted: "I don't know what the answer is. I'm not an IT geek, but I just don't think we're in a very good place right now."

When Last Week Tonight did a hilarious and informative segment on this in March 2016, citing various security experts, comedian John Oliver likened this "figure it out" approach to being analogous to "walking on the sun"—in short, impossible.

Clapper also suggested that he likely would support a "key escrow" system, where a government would only be able to decrypt communications given certain situations. However, he seemed to forget that while he served as the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the early 1990s, the Clinton Administration pushed for such a system—dubbed "Clipper Chip"—which quickly fell apart.