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Comment by TheChaplain | Hacker News Reader

Isn't Atlassian Australian? Or did they move?

They’re Australian but have offices in other countries. I believe they would move for the right reasons. This seems like a pretty big reason, considering they’re targeted at enterprise. But move where? UK will have this next, America does this without any laws at much greater effect and scale.

Iceland? Switzerland?

They'd need the system admins, CI infrastructure and code review team to be in a jurisdiction free of this kind of thing, and then treat all changes subject to laws like these as hostile

The alternative is sell software that everyone knows has backdoors. Pretty hard business case to make

California. I had to agree to some changes to their ToS the other day (for Bitbucket) in which I agreed to dispute resolution under California law. I suppose that's a pretty good indication of their thinking. It's not like this legislation is unexpected or sudden.

Are the U.S. "gag orders" equivalent to this new Australian law?

No, the new law has no judicial review and has a few other things that wouldn't fly in the US. It's markedly worse (though don't get me wrong, the US definitely has it pretty bad in this area too).

You say that like FISA Courts are actually judicial review and not rubbing stamps... where you win is that you have a stronger set of rights and case law about it.

The difference is that there isn't even fake judicial review. And I disagree that we have a stronger set of rights -- the difference is that the NSA explicitly ignores your constitutional rights.

All of our rights (other than the right to a jury for certain criminal trials, freedom of religion, the aquisition of property must be 'on just terms', the right to be a senator if you can vote, and the right to vote in federal elections) are in common law. This means that any new law can overturn those interpretations.

Personally I think Australia needs to push for a constitutional bill of rights. Unfortunately this is going to be a very hard battle to win, given the enormous requirements to get a constitutional amendment passed.

I believe Fastmail is too, sadly.

It looks like the cloud services are supplied by a company incorporated in the US [1] ‘Atlassian, Inc’. They probably needed to do this when they listed on the NASDAQ.

There is also an Australian entity `Atlassian Pty Ltd` but it’s not clear to me what role that has.

[1]: https://www.atlassian.com/legal/cloud-terms-of-service

Atlassian is still very much based in Sydney. The CEOs (there's two joint CEOs), vast majority of the engineering teams and more are all just down the road from me. As with most large international tech companies, they have a number of different legal entities for regulatory, tax and other reasons.

So that means things like BitBucket / Trello are now all fair game to the Australian government?

Trello is based in NYC. I don’t know the actual corporate structure, but they could potentially be spun into a controlled company, maybe, to avoid this law somehow.

To be honest, Trello is the least of your worries, with Atlassian. Authorities having unfettered access to all your code, regardless of privacy settings, is more worrying imho. Then again, GitHub is US-based and the PATRIOT Act already gives that power to US authorities, so if you care about that, self-hosting in the only way.

There is still a substantial engineering team in Sydney

For now. I bet there's a lot of passports being dug out and resumes being polished up tonight...

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