"Practically speaking, 'stopping the bots' is every bit as important to Australians as 'stopping the boats'," said the Hon Angus Taylor MP, minister for Law Enforcement and Cyber Security, on Wednesday night.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the standard of debate supporting the Australian government's forthcoming legislation that's intended -- somehow -- to make decrypted messages available to law enforcement without them, or the communications provider, having access to the encryption keys.
The Coalition government dumbed down discussion of the mind-boggling complexities of international refugee resettlement to the cheap three-word slogan of Operation Sovereign Borders, and counts it as a success. You can't see the boats, so that's the problem solved, right?
"Its lack of nuance was absolutely central, in my view, to its success," Taylor said.
So now that same intellectually sophisticated approach will be the solution to the the mind-boggling complexities of international cybercrime and cyber statecraft.
It's tempting to leave the analysis of Taylor's speech[1] at that. It was a standard stump speech, revealing nothing new about the government's intentions or arguments, respectively vague and shoddy as they are. It's easy to laugh, and I am most certainly laughing.
The audience, though, was the Sydney Institute, an organisation run by a couple of confused old people for other confused people, namely that species of far-right conservatives who imagine that western civilisation is on the verge of collapse, and that they alone are its true champions. Which is to say, the sort of people whose numbers prop up the Coalition, and who the prime minister dare not ignore lest he be deposed.
So it's worth paying attention to what they're being told, because this is the framing that will