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Australians join international protest against government 'backdoors' in encryption

Nearly 200 experts, companies and civil society groups from more than 40 countries — including Electronic Frontiers Australia, the Australian Privacy Foundation and Australian Lawyers for Human Rights — are asking governments around the world to support strong encryption and reject proposals that would undermine the digital security it provides.

"The internet belongs to the world's people, not its governments. We refuse to let this precious resource become nationalised and broken by any nation," Brett Solomon, executive director of Access Now, the online advocacy group that organised the open letter, said in a news release.

The letter, released online in 10 languages at SecureTheInternet.org, marks an escalation of a debate over encryption — a process that scrambles data so that only those authorised can decode it. The fight has been brewing for more than a year, prominent in Australia and the United States but also spreading everywhere from the United Kingdom to China.

Encryption is widely relied upon to keep e-commerce and many of the websites people use every day safe from the prying eyes of cybercriminals. But the spread of the strongest forms of encryption, those which companies themselves cannot unlock, into products from major tech companies has drawn criticism from some law enforcement officials who argue that it may allow criminals and terrorists to "go dark."