I did a bit more research here and found that these laws apply to any crime which carries a maximum sentence of three or more years in jail. An article I found shortly afterwards mirrors my thoughts pretty closely.
I think that in this case terrorism and other serious crimes are being used an excuse to give authorities the power to view encrypted messages at their convenience.
The power for authorities to create mandatory backdoors counts as "too much power".
Set in a law lecture once, where this was discussed. This is exactly what you usually have separation of power for. On an individual case basis it might very well be warranted to impede on peoples right to privacy (think sending closed envelopes, instead of postcards) but if you do - in the past there usually were checks in place that there had to be a formal official legal request, and another person from another branch (judiciary) had to look over them on an individual basis and grant you the right as an 'exemption'.
There is still much leaning on this principal (not sure how its used in the australian case we see).
Of course this wasn't ever the case in regimes with a higher emphasis on police action, or when state security is considered to be affected - but in every other case - in a democracy, this was it.
If you do away with the "four eyes" principal and grant blanket surveillance rights, that changes a lot. Like - an entire judicial tradition.
That would not be just slippery slope, thats actually a sea change.
The only potential argument to do this with blanket rights granted, is to be able to run predictive algorithms against the data collected to make a new kind of police work possible. Thats not only a theoretical argument, its actually the way the US argued for doing the stuff Snowden is now in russia for leaking.
Every other form of policework, could be done with less impact on constitutional/universal human rights.
Now there is a thing to be said about about "feasibility" of use.
For example. If encryption (think telegram) becomes the norm - its actually "too good" to circumvent it easily.
What the police would have to do is to target the individual, and backdoor their smartphone (which apple might have a thing to say against...
) otherwise, they dont get the communication excerpts.
So there is no "intercepting letters in post" process anymore.
But on the other side - look what they are gaining. Location tracking, people giving out social profiles for free on facebook (or posting pictures with the loot from there recent robbery, or *win* images with geolocation), many more unique identifiers (harder to go dark), and for the most part - a public that still uses message services, where the provider has all the encryption keys - so they could go to them and ask them nicely.
Also they can still use covert operatives, and what not - I'm no expert on this stuff.
So what do they actually need access to all peoples conversations for - in a blanket fashion?
1. Predictive work (the algorithm stuff), 2. To make their lives easier.
Now that proposes two questions.
Do you need 1.? Answer: No. (US was widely criticized for implementing it post 9/11 (300 people dead vs. surveillance of the worlds internet traffic?))
Do you need it because of 2? Answer: No - policework already has become a lot easier, without their ability to read everyones conversations.
So what they may have lost (access at the 'in post' level) they already have gained manyfold through other forms of being able to aquire peoples personal data.
Slippery slope can already be argued on the "4 eyes" principle, if the data exists in a vendors (think gmail) warehouse. Because of a tendency to "rubberstamp" rights to grant access on a judicial level. And because in the US's case individual requests skyrocketed (think 1000x) in the recent years, because - using digital requests made it so easy.
And show me one criminal, who goes by this principal (
https://cldc.org/protonmail/ ), doesnt use whatsapp, or gmail, changes phones (imei) for everything they do, has perfect opsec and isnt in a group small enough that you could go with targeted surveillance to catch whatever hes doing.
So the real argument is for predicitve policing, and thats where this is heading.
Also - yes, there is a need for privacy for stuff like political activism, journalism, and so on... (see link above (site not veted by me, but seems to lean heavily into that direction)).
Fun talk to listen to in regards to some of these concepts from this years Chaos Communication Congress is:
The power for authorities to create mandatory backdoors counts as "too much power".
The thing here is, that everyone wants what china's got.
In a very real sense actually. Also - the better backdoors are security bugs (backdoor + "we didn't mean to"
) And we are currently in a discussion about this being potentially harmful in the US as well (China = manufacturer of the world > Huawei (state sponsored) being allowed to sell you all your 5G equipment. (Its allowed to in europe.))
