Only a few decades ago Australians would have seen the issue of national security primarily in terms of protection from military attack.
At the Herald’s National Security Summit on Thursday, however, the risks of conventional warfare were somewhat sidelined by a new generation of threats. A range of speakers warned of less obvious but equally worrying threats of terrorism, cyber attack, covert political influence and child sex abuse.
While former prime ministers Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull spoke about the best way to handle the rise of an assertive China, Home Affairs departmental secretary Michael Pezzullo reserved his most colourful language for the threat posed by Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Google. Mr Pezzullo, in particular, criticised the American firms for denying the Australian government access to encrypted messaging apps such as Messenger, Signal and WhatsApp.
A world-first law passed in late 2018, just before the federal election, ordered Big Tech to open up their codes to security agencies in order to stop criminals such as terrorists and paedophile rings using the apps to conceal their activities. The companies have been slow to comply. They say that if they give security agencies backdoor access to encrypted message apps, criminal groups could exploit the same weaknesses to spy on private communications.
Since then, Australia has joined with the US, Britain, Canada, Japan and India in calling on tech companies to come up with a solution. Mr Pezzullo was particularly concerned about Facebook, which announced early this year it would gradually transfer all its messaging apps to end-to-end encryption. This means that not even Facebook would have the key to decrypt messages. Only the end users could.
