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Comment by brian-armstrong | Hacker News Reader

What's the defense to this? For starters I think you'd want to close your Australian offices and lay off any Australian-born personnel, but what else?

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Well, it seems the specific argument about implications for US citizens doesn't hold much water to me. Apple's legal standing for refusing decryption requests in the US is because the tool has not yet been built yet, and they cannot be compelled to build a circumvention tool; it seems they could continue to rely on this defense even if they were to build a circumvention tool that only circumvents the specific, circumventable encryption scheme used in their custom AUS-market firmware.

Of course, the principled thing would be to pull out of the AUS market, but even Apple has not proved themselves to be that principled.

I think the defense is to absolutely not do business in Australia, and to mark your products as not for sale there.

Which, I'd like to point out, isn't a big loss: it's population 24 million, about the size of Taiwan. If you're making a physical product, shipping and taxes will make it criminally expensive to sell there, and if you're making a digital product, there's this and the considerations of slow internet and a different time zone.

I think it's actually quite reasonable and doable for companies to boycott Australia over this, and I hope we see some. It'd be free press for the company and cost relatively little - I'd imagine the press would pay for any missed Australian sales. And it'd put some pressure on the Australian government for this idiocy.

Australians are quite accustomed to bypassing geoblocks and import restrictions, in any case.

But that's not really the problem here -- it's more that Australian products and employees may be tainted by unknown government interference.

As an Australian, I'd almost rather this so then it actually makes it a problem for everyone. Then the politicians might take a good hard look at what they're trying to do.

and to mark your products as not for sale there.

Other companies have done similar things in the past, though probably not for the same reasons.

I had a GRiD Compass laptop that had a big sticker on the back with a surprisingly long list of countries where it was illegal to bring the computer. The only one I remember offhand was Israel.

And what about if you are an Australian? What defenses do you have if you're stuck here?

There are plenty of businesses and invividuals in Australia that this law adversely affects. What are they suppose to do?

On the ground it's looking like the answer to that is protest. I'm sharing posts like these with as many as I can to show how negatively the sentiment towards us is becoming as a result. The next step is to protest.

The hope is that a boycott from global businesses would pressure the politicians into a reversal. Protest and voting by citizens would pressure them from the other direction. For better or worse that's how democracy works: you're stuck with the decisions your elected officials make, so you better vote accordingly.

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