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What is this Technology Pledge?

There are millions of them. They're well-educated, wealthy, and they vote. They're the users of the Internet, and now they've got their own political platform: the Technology Pledge.

The Technology Pledge is a political platform for the technological public and industry to make their needs known to Federal, State, and Local candidates. By urging your candidate to answer the questionnaire or take the Pledge, you can educate them as to the needs of the Internet and online community.

The Technology Pledge

For over a hundred years Australia has engaged in an ever-expanding experiment of democracy. Digital information technology will be the engine for continuing our successful government into the twenty-first century.

The digital economy is Australia's explosive new industry. The actions of the Federal and State Governments in the next few years will dramatically affect the business worthiness of this new medium. Because of its fragile state, great care must be taken to avoid over-regulating the growing industry we are seeing today. Careful avoidance of over-regulation will also prevent us from acting hastily in the areas of the public's civil liberties.

Issue 1: More Parental Responsibility, Less Government Regulation of Content

The new interactive medium is fundamentally different from the print world, the broadcast medium, and the telephone environment. Unlike those media, the interactive medium contains everything needed to empower users, including concerned parents, to control access to unwanted information. In addition, current obscenity and child pornography laws extend to the interactive world already.

While in office, I pledge to support parental control instead of government censorship on interactive services.

Issue 2: Online Availability To Public Documents

One of the cornerstones of our democracy has been its openness. Many government documents are already available to the public through the Australian Government Publishing Service, and your local library. Online technologies present an opportunity to increase public access and to provide faster access to government information with little or no increase in production cost.

While in office, I pledge to support online availability of government information to the public free of charge as an additional standard method of government publication.

Issue 3: Encourage the development of a secure Global Information Infrastructure (GII)

Encryption technologies are an enabling tool to allow businesses and the public to protect their privacy and the security of their communications and stored information. Businesses require cryptography to stay competitive; the public requires it to safeguard their confidential information.

By supporting software and hardware companies in the building of products with market-driven encryption standards, a secure Global Information Infrastructure can be built that the marketplace will trust. The electronic marketplace is similar to the local marketplace: if the public and the industry do not trust the safety of the marketplace, they will not use it for transacting their business. Thus far, encryption proposals from the U.S. Administration such as the Clipper Chip have failed to meet the needs of both the public and industry for building this secure marketplace.

While in office, I pledge to support market-driven standards for cryptography instead of anti-competitive government regulation.

The Technology Pledge Questionnaire

Briefing sheet: Internet content regulation

This year has seen an unprecedented public debate on the issue of children's access to material on public networks such as the Internet. In particular, it has become obvious that much material that the States and Commonwealth are working to restrict is in fact covered by current law and prosecutable by current methods. In particular, laws that criminalize child pornography, solicitation of minors, and obscene material have been enforced in recent South Australian and Queensland prosecutions, proving that new legislation is in fact not necessary.

These prosecutions prove that current laws already extend to the Internet, and that no new legislation is needed to prosecute them. Furthermore, new laws to attempt to regulate the "grey area" that is traditionally left up to the discretion of parents are not enforcible on the global Internet, nor can they hope to be enforced by the multitude of businesses currently thriving on the Internet.

Industry has not been asleep though. Far ahead of any regulation, consumer demand has created a new industry of blocking software that allows parents to restrict and monitor their childrens access to the Internet, even when the parent is not present.

Not only can a parent use such software on their home computer, but many online services now offer free blocking software to their subscribers, allowing parents to configure the amount of access they wish to give their children to the Internet. Blocking technology is more sophisticated for interactive services than for any other medium.

All of these presently existing measures point to the fact that parents are really the most appropriate people to be policing their children's access to the Internet, and if they need help, there is an extremely competitive market willing to offer it to them, often as a free service.

Briefing sheet: Online Availability of Government Information

Briefing sheet: Market-driven cryptography policy

Cryptography is the art of "secret writing". In other words, writing something in such a way that it cannot be read by others, even if you give it to them.

Although strong encryption technologies are not in wide public use at the moment, there is great demand for them in the marketplace. Virtually all banks and large corporations use encryption to keep their proprietary information confidential from hostile foreign governments and competitors. Users of public networks, such as the Internet, use encryption to attempt to secure their sensitive personal information from eavesdroppers.

To enable business on the Global Information Infrastructure, market-driven standards need to be enacted that can be embraced by customers and implemented by the industry.

The U.S. Administration has proposed two policies on the use of encryption that may potentially doom the U.S. software and hardware industry. The first proposal was introduced in 1994: the Clipper Chip. This chip would allow users to hide their confidential data using encryption, but only in a proprietary manner that could be later decrypted by the U.S. government. This proposal was very unpopular, as both the U.S. public and private industry insisted that no one would buy products with the Clipper Chip. Sales of products incorporating the Clipper Chip have been expectedly flat.

The second proposal, dubbed "Clipper II" or "Son of Clipper", was presented in July of this year by the U.S. Administration at a workshop sponsored by the U.S. NIST in Maryland. Clipper II was just as unpopular with the U.S. public and private industry, as many companies argued that there was no market for products whose overriding requirement is law enforcement access.

In July 1995, Steve Orlowski, Assistant Director, Security Management, Australian Attorney-General's Department, presented his "personal" views on cryptography to a cryptography policy conference in Brisbane. In his paper Mr Orlowski proposed a two level encryption policy. Weak encryption for the general public which could be broken by law enforcement and security services and strong key-escrowed cryptography for financial transactions with banks and large institutions.

Are the government's concerns about the misuse of cryptography reasonable? There is some evidence that criminals will someday use cryptography to commit crimes, the same way that today they use cars for getaways from bank robberies. However there are few, if any, documented cases today of criminals using encryption to evade capture and arrest by law enforcement.

Many representatives from the public and private sectors are working hard to find a common ground between the needs of law enforcement, the public, and private industry. Both Clipper schemes so far have met the needs of law enforcement, but failed to address the needs of industry and the public.

It is clear that this is an issue that will require a significant amount of public debate with give and take from all sides. However one thing remains clear: any solution that is unpopular with the marketplace will not be purchased by the public, and will not be produced by industry for a market that does not exist.

Questions and Answers

Q: If I support this part of the Pledge, does that mean I support the right of citizens to foil an authorized wiretap?

A: No, this provision does nothing to diminish the powers of law enforcement to obtain a warrant to perform a wiretap. Nor does it diminish their power to use any tools available to them to decrypt any encrypted communications you might be using to build evidence for their case.

Q: If I support this part of the Pledge, does that mean I support the right of law enforcement to perform wiretaps in an unauthorized fashion, or in greater capacity than they are currently authorized to do?

A: No, this statement does not propose to expand the powers of law enforcement to conduct legal wiretaps.

Q: Isn't encryption used by criminals?

A: As of this date, there are no documented cases of criminals using encryption to evade law enforcement officials, although there are many urban legends about such an event. Assuming there will someday be one, this is still a very small number for the attention this issue has been given. In addition, law enforcement has benefitted from advances in technology that have given it a wealth of other investigative tools recently.

Finally, we cannot ban everything that might be used in the course of a crime. Automobiles are not munitions just because criminals use them. What we need to focus on is the original crime.