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U.S. officials urge Americans to use encrypted apps amid unprecedented cyberattack
(www.nbcnews.com)
this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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The Australian government tried to straight up ban encryption some years ago.
I laughed so much at that. Encryption is literally just long complicated numbers combined with other long complicated numbers using mathematical formulae. You can't ban maths.
If I remember correctly, there's also a law in Australia where they can force tech companies to introduce backdoors in their systems and encryption algorithms, and the company must not tell anyone about it. AFAIK they haven't tried to actually use that power yet, but it made the (already relatively stagnant) tech market in Australia even worse. Working in tech is the main reason I left Australia for the USA - there's just so many more opportunities and significantly higher paying jobs for software developers in Silicon Valley.
tell me about it; it tried that against my teacher in middle school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number
You can try, and in the US, we have export restrictions on cryptography (ITAR restrictions), so certain products cannot be exported. But you can print out the algorithm and carry it on a plane though, so I'm not sure what the point is...
Now laugh at banning chemistry and physics (guns and explosives and narcotics). Take a laugh at banning murder too - how do you ban every action leading to someone's death?
Any "must not tell" law is crap. Unless you signed some NDA knowing full well what it is about.
Any kind of "national secret disclosure" punishment when you didn't sign anything to get that national secret is the same.
It's an order given to a free person, not a voluntarily taken obligation.
That said, you can't fight force with words.