The Weekly Cybers #16
Online age assurance pilot gets the green light, Online Safety Act to be reviewed (again), telcos told to sort out Triple-Zero, and more.
Welcome
In last week’s edition we looked at the evils of social media. This week the government’s theme is online safety, with another legislative review and the green light for an online age assurance trial.
We’re also got a billion dollars going offshore to a quantum computing firm with minimal oversight, telcos get a bunch more oversight for the Triple-Zero service, and Optus and TPG team up to cover regional Australia with better mobile coverage — despite a similar deal between Telstra and TPG being killed by the ACCC.
Read on and enjoy the wonderful world of Australia’s digital policies…
Government announces online age assurance trial
For reasons which are not entire clear — well actually they’re very clear — the government chose this week to launch an online age assurance pilot.
Communications minister Michelle Rowland has bundled it into a hand-waving response to misogyny and violence against women under the title “Tackling online harms”:
Ending men’s violence against women and tackling misogyny and the harm it creates requires concerted action from all levels of government and all parts of society and we are building on investments already made in this space.
To build on our prevention efforts, the Albanese Government will introduce a suite of online measures to address easy access to pornography for children and young people and tackle extreme online misogyny, which is fuelling harmful attitudes towards women.
The government will also introduce legislation to “ban the creation and non-consensual distribution of deepfake pornography”, Rowland said.
The reforms will make clear that creating and sharing sexually explicit material without consent, using technology like artificial intelligence will be subject to serious criminal penalties.
The urgency is of course a response to last month’s mass stabbing attack in Bondi Junction, which targeted women in particular.
Age verification for porn isn’t a new idea, however. The eSafety Commissioner has already been working through an age verification roadmap.
This is a complex topic, and I can’t hope to cover all the angles in this humble newsletter. So here’s just a few links to consider.
- ABC News has outlined what we know so far.
- At Crikey ($), Bernard Keane says Age verification won’t work, but idiot verification is doing fine in the male violence debate. “Imposing age verification in an effort to block kids’ access to pornography will just send Australians to the darker and more sinister parts of the internet.”
- Renowned cryptographer Dr Vanessa Teague says age verification for porn ‘doesn’t work’. Indeed, the eSafety Commissioner has been told this repeatedly.
- Processor Paul Haskell-Dowland describes the difference between age verification and age assurance — the latter being a fuzzier AI-based approach to guess someone’s age based in their face or some similar method.
This is the curious point. While the eSafety Commissioner uses the term “age verification”, the minister says the pilot is “age assurance”. Whether this is simple confusion, an accurate description of a deliberate change in technological approach, or simply wanting to use a softer verb than “verify” remains to be seen.
Something to watch out for here is the conflation of “age-inappropriate material” with “violent pornography”. Conflating a general category with the worst item in that category is a classic political tactic for convincing us to introduce new social controls.
Remember how the need for more extensive surveillance powers for “serious crimes” is always framed as being about terrorism, child abuse material, and international drug trafficking, while the laws themselves end up covering everything down to spraying graffiti on a public building in Queensland?
Anyway, funding for the age assurance pilot will be provided in the Budget on 14 May. Stay, as they say, tuned.
As an aside, Texas recently introduced a similar law to age-restrict porn sites and even make them carry a health warning. Over at Platformer, Casey Newton says this law could shatter a First Amendment precedent. But that’s The America.
Online safety laws to reviewed yet again
On Monday the government kicked off its Statutory Review of the Online Safety Act 2021, publishing an issues paper.
As usual this was bowled with some spin by the communications minister, Michelle Rowland, especially given what I’ve written immediately above.
The Government brought forward the commencement of the Review to 2024 from 2025 to ensure the eSafety Commissioner has the tools necessary to keep Australians safe...
The Review is considering the effectiveness of the current framework, including whether more powers are needed to address new and emerging harms.
The Review is also examining options to reduce harms caused by online hate, as well as new harms raised by emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence.
ABC News posted a decent summary of the issues paper.
Think tank Reset Australia reckons the new laws should not be based on the current voluntary industry code as planned, because those standards are not being met. Indeed, X has already been kicked out of that code.
The review is being conducted by Delia Rickard, who has already been consulting with “academics, civil society, and Government departments,” and of course the eSafety Commissioner. Submissions close 21 June.
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Also in the news
- Labor will be launching an ad campaign urging parents to learn about the harmful misogyny children see online. No word on what will be done on the misogyny they see elsewhere.
- The federal and Queensland governments have invested nearly a billion dollars in California-based company PsiQuantum to build a quantum computer, but no one asked the government’s advisory committee on quantum for their opinion. Oops.
- The latest Targeting Scams report from the ACCC shows that there’s been a 13.1% decline in reported losses by Australians to a mere $2.74 billion in 2023. Check out the media release or the ABC News story.
- Services Australia says it has processed more than 500,000 Centrelink and Medicare claims in just 10 weeks, which is impressive given the backlog of claims was 1.1 million in December 2023. All it took was hiring 3,000 more staff.
- “Reserve Bank of Australia will take colocation space in a CDC Data Centres facility as the replacement for its current head office data centre under a $37 million deal,” reports iTnews.
- Telcos will have to cooperate in running the Triple-Zero system, with a bunch of new rules about disclosure and the notification of outages.
- From the Australian National Audit Office, a report titled National Broadband Network — Transition from Construction to Operation.
- At Guardian Australia, Paul Karp writes: “Nearly six years after law enforcement agencies gained the power to compel social media companies to hand over data, our world-leading legislation appears practically useless.”
- A curious little piece from the Parliamentary Library’s blog last month, The Digital Government Index: How does Australia measure up?. It’s worth noting the difference they make between “digital government” and “e-government”.
Inquiries of note
- The Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started publishing the submissions it’s receiving. If you want to add your own, submissions close 10 May. There’s also hearings coming up in Canberra and Sydney on 20 and 21 May respectively.
Elsewhere
- Sign-in data for some 18 ClubsNSW venues has been exposed, affecting maybe a million people. Police have arrested a Sydney man, who they expect to charge with blackmail.
- Optus and TPG have agreed to share their regional spectrum and mobile network infrastructure for 11 years, although as iTnews points out, “a similar deal between Telstra and TPG was sunk by regulators”. It’s due to start in “early 2025”, if they get the relevant approvals.
- “Parents who share photos of their children online are more likely to be offered cash for sexually explicit images of their kids,” according to a report from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC).
- Also from the AIC, a pair of reports: Participation in anti-authority protests and vulnerability to radicalisation and Grievances and conspiracy theories as motivators of anti-authority protests.
- In an echo of robodebt, the NSW debt recovery system was operating illegally for a few years.
- And in totally unrelated news, last night I posted a podcast discussing the latest in the climate crisis, as well as the decline of Twitter into X. You can find The 9pm It’s Raining and We’re All Going to Drown with Ketan Joshi in your usual podcast app. Just search for The 9pm Edict.
What’s next?
Parliament is currently on break until Budget Night on Tuesday 14 May, unless of course something dramatic happens.
On Monday 6 May there’s a public hearing in the Senate inquiry into supporting the development of sovereign capability in the Australian tech sector.
Any questions or comments? Just reply to this email. Cheers.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
If I’ve missed anything, or if there’s any specific items you’d like me to follow, please let me know.
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This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.