The Australian Government has finally released its draft bill on encryption, which would see law enforcement granted unprecedented new powers, including the ability to crack open encrypted communication.
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Last week, Singapore's ministry of health admitted information from 1.5 million citizens had been copied in "a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned cyber attack" by hackers who were specifically going after the personal data of the country's prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong. It took authorities a week to detect the breach, which, to be fair, is relatively fast given the average organisation takes more than six months.
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The government says its planned anti-encryption mandate will empower law enforcement, but it will enable far more crime than it will prevent, and regular citizens will bear the cost.
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It has been a tough two years for the technology industry. The 2016 US election was a turning point for what was formerly the face of upbeat, self-actualising capitalism. Today the common view is that a tiny minority has been making money by disrupting things at the expense of the majority. Technology companies are out of control because law-makers have been neglectful, indifferent or – worse – baffled by the prospect of regulation. But in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data-harvesting scandal, there is new interest in the role of ethical considerations in the work of technology companies, and the programmers who build their machinery.
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The Cambridge Analytica revelations have spawned outrage across the world, as well they should. The mass manipulation of millions of individual Facebook users, psychometric profiling to reveal potential pressure points, micro-targeted advertising and black-ops electoral interference are certainly something worthy of the headlines.
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The extraordinary revelations from the Observer/Channel 4 investigation into the practices of the digital marketing firm Cambridge Analytica have, like many a great internet controversy, produced great outrage but few answers or ways forward. People are rightly horrified at the prospect of such comprehensive personal information being used to manipulate them by the million, but also daunted by the task of correcting it.
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