Hello and welcome to another M-Lex podcast. I'm Laurel Henning, Senior Correspondent at Emlex,

and today I'm with Australasian managing editor James Panicki in our Sydney offices. Hi James.

Hello Laurel. Well it has been a week of political drama here in Australia with heated debates

over Australia's controversial encryption bill going into an evening parliamentary sitting last night

and we're recording this podcast on the morning of Friday, December 7th in Eastern Australia.

At one stage, last night, it looked like a political deal had collapsed, only to be revived

at the very last moment. As a result, the telecommunications and other legislation amendment,

assistance and access bill, will become law, much to the dismay of US technology companies

Amazon.com, Apple, Cisco, Google, Facebook and possibly Microsoft. All of them had warned that

Australia's encryption laws would hurt the overall security of encrypted communications around the

world. The reason for this is that Australian law enforcement agencies

will now have the powers to demand decrypted communications from WhatsApp or Telegram

messaging services to name just a few. James, we'll get to the recent developments, but first

let's recap what this debate is about. The way it has been framed by law enforcement and spy agencies in Australia is that

this is simply an attempt to update existing laws that apply already to telephone intercept.

So the police at the moment are able to tap phones in the context of criminal investigations,

as they always have been able to do

ever since telephones were invented. But obviously the use of encrypted messages. So these

are messages that cannot be intercepted. If you intercept a cryptid message, it just comes out

as a jumble of numbers and letters. These, this type of messaging has left investigators at a

disadvantage. So they're saying that the proposed legislation is simply an attempt to bring

phone tapping arrangements into the modern era. Much has been made about how criminals and terrorists

...