Australia rushes its ‘dangerous’ anti-encryption bill into parliament

This is bad for Australians and bad for anyone doing business in Australia.

I already know of a case where an Australian subsidiary is being shut down and all operations being moved to Europe in response to this draconian measure on the part of the Australian government. The company just doesn't want the liability of operating in such an environment, and has now classified Australia as equivalent to China in terms of risk factor. So, a multi-million dollar budget goes to Europe instead, and Australia loses a tech leader.

This is only going to hurt the Australian people.

Thankfully because the government didn't want to get steamrolled on an asylum seeker bill, this bill didn't get rushed through today (which is the last sitting day of the year). So we get more time for it to simmer until next year...

Which is great, because trying to rush it through was a farce. My favorite part is where there were 170 amendments made and published only at 9:30AM today with the debate/vote on the issue only 3 hours later. And it wasn't the only topic of discussion. Meaning basically no one would have read let alone understood or considered all of the amendments.

I know the USA had a similar situation recently, passing some new controversial bill with several hundred pages of unread amendments (I can't remember which it was, but it wasn't long ago)

I really wish that kind of process was outlawed (har har). These processes should generally ensure people have had adequate time to read an consider all changes, amendments, etc.

Of course the Australian government continually tried to side step normal due process this month, specifically calling to skip over normal process.

The whole thing disgusts me, regardless of how good an idea you think the general scheme is or not (spoiler alert I don't think it's a good idea, but even if you did, the details can really matter and shouldn't be rushed).

Some more details from the sizzle: https://share.thesizzle.com.au/antiaa.html

- An Australian

This bill is terrifyingly ham-fisted, contradictory and dangerous.

Also techcrunch's page is ridiculous. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page, it goes to the next story and you literally can't scroll back up. I've never seen a page ruin scrolling so badly.

The only way to punish Australia will be to completely distrust every bit of code from that police state island. Move all your code off Atlassian bitbucket and close your Jira tickets. Shut down your AWS Sydney EC2 instances. Fire all the Google Australia employees. It is all now tainted, and you can't trust a thing.

As an Australian and residents can tell you we all think the stupid is great here. It's like a clue free zone around law enforcement claims

I checked digitalrightswatch.com.au, there is a video of a hearings they did with parliament people.

They did not even bothered to be present, the girl was on skype and a guy on the phone. Room was empty.