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Officials from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will discuss next month plans to force tech companies to break encryption on their products.

The so-called Five Eyes nations have a long-standing agreement to gather and share intelligence from across the globe. They will meet in Canada with a focus on how to prevent "terrorists and organized criminals" from "operating with impunity ungoverned digital spaces online," according to Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull.

In the most forthright call yet from a national leader to break encryption, Turnbull told Parliament: "The privacy of a terrorist can never be more important than public safety never."

Turnbull's comments reflect a more vague but similar response from UK prime minister Theresa May earlier this week in which she said she was focused on "giving the police and the authorities the powers they need to keep our country safe." And the UK authorities have already put in a legislative placeholder for breaking encryption into Blighty's Investigatory Powers Act. Australia's administration is rather enamored with that new UK law, and hopes to implement it Down Under.

The United States meanwhile has been having a long debate on the issue of encryption, with tech firms battling it out with law enforcement in both public and private.

It is in the United States where the issue will ultimately be decided however, since the most widely used encrypted services ranging from Apple's iPhone to Facebook's WhatsApp messaging are developed and run by US companies.

Even the UK's heavily criticized anti-encryption law recognizes that it may be powerless to enforce encryption breaking on products and services that come from overseas and online that geographic boundary doesn't exist.

The Five Eyes group is also going to have to decide how to deal with the mathematical realities of encryption. If companies are forced to insert a backdoor into their encryption products in order to make their contents accessible, there is nothing to stop a malicious third party from doing the same: you cannot wall off a vulnerability.

Security experts have called the argument put forward by law enforcement and politicians that they want access but don't want the bad guys to be able to do the same "magical thinking." The Five Eyes group needs to reach a decision on how to answer the inherent conundrum of magical thinking. Europe, which has been making its own noises about anti-encryption legislation, needs to do the same.

It is also possible of course that the vast and massively powerful spying machinery owned and run by the Five Eyes could be focused on cracking encryption. To isolate specific messages of concern and then throw all computing resources at them.

Or, a third way could be for the security services from the five nations to oblige tech companies to develop a way to undermine specific devices ie, create a piece of software that could be sent to an individual's phone that would allow spies direct access to the device and so enable them to bypass encryption protection.

America's National Security Agency is already known to have developed software that uses undiscovered vulnerabilities in software to give itself access to people's phones. If you have full access to someone's phone (or other device), all the encryption in the world won't make a difference.

Although some tech companies have been public in their determination not to introduce backdoors such as Apple and its feud with the FBI, and Facebook's fight with the Brazilian authorities it is notable that others have been silent or have called for compromise. Google, for example, has stayed out of the fray, while Microsoft has repeatedly implied it is open to a shared solution.

Where exactly the decision comes down will be hard to say not least because the security services will want the details to be as secret as possible. Next month in Canada, they will likely emerge with a plan.

Read more:
Five Eyes nations stare menacingly at tech biz and its encryption - The Register

Federal opposition leader Bill Shorten has indicated his party is likely to support the government's push to force technology companies to be able to decrypt user communications.

Over the weekend the government revealed its plans to follow the United Kingdom and introduce new requirements on operators of end-to-end encrypted communications services like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and Apple's iMessage.

The UK's so-called "technology capability notices" force communications operators to ensure they are technically able to hand over decrypted data in "near real time" to law enforcementfollowing the issuance of a warrant.

Critics of the scheme in the UK and now Australia say these noticesleave communications operators no choice but to build backdoors into their products.

The UK and Australian governments have both denied they are asking for backdoors, but neither have provided any detail on how they expect operators to meet the requirements of the technical capability notices.

The Australian government intends to discuss the issue with its Five Eyes partners at a conference in Canada in a fortnight.

Speaking to parliament today, opposition leader Bill Shorten said "big internet companies" needed to be "part of our society in the sense of working with us as well as taking from us".

"They need to see this fight as their fight, not just our fight, not just a fight wherethey help when asked, but a fight in which they come to us with ideas," Shorten said.

"We need them to be proactive, not reactive. Terrorism does not self-police, so we cannot rely on a self-policingsystem."

He said terrorists were hiding behind encryption technologies, Bitcoin, andthe so-called dark web to "stay in the shadows" and obscure their activities.

"We must target this threat head-on. As terrorists adapt their methods and seek to hide online, we must ensure our agencies have the tools, resources and technology so terrorism has no place to hide," Shorten said.

"We can allow them no sanctuary, no place torest - we must dislodge them from wherever they hide.

"In doing this, though, we must always be mindful of the rule of law and the properprotections of our citizens. [But] we cannot sit back when our enemies have access to a worldwide system to educate and fund extremists."

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said while encryption was a "vital piece of security" for everything from communication to shopping and banking,"the privacy of a terrorist can never be more important than public safety".

He denied the campaign was about creating backdoors, but did not detail how operators were expected to decrypt communications they do not hold the keys to.

"It is about collaboration with and assistance from industry in the pursuit of public safety," he said.

Turnbull said the government would 'balance the priority of community safety with individual liberties'.

"An online civil society is as achievable as an offline one, and the rights and protections of the vast, overwhelming majority ofAustralians, must outweigh the rights of those who will do them harm,"he told parliament.

"My government is committed to this. We will not take an 'if it ain't broke, we won't fixit' mentality.The government does not set and forget."

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Labor is likely to support Turnbull's encryption fight - iTnews