Five eyes speak as one on foreign interference
Five-eyes countries including Australia will respond jointly to ‘severe’ foreign interference and call out the nations responsible.
Five-eyes countries including Australia have agreed to respond jointly to “severe” foreign interference and call out the nations responsible amid concern in the West over Russian and Chinese government influence.
The countries also attacked tech companies for not meeting government officials to discuss how illicit material was shared online and said they would work together to force them to allow access for law enforcement to users’ data.
Five-eyes ministers — Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, British Home Secretary Sajid Javid, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, New Zealand Justice Minister Andrew Little and US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen — met on the Gold Coast. In a joint statement, the ministers said foreign governments, actors and their proxies were involved in “coercive, deceptive and clandestine activities” to “sow discord, manipulate public discourse, bias the development of policy, or disrupt markets”.
Australia has been one of the most aggressive countries in putting the issue of foreign interference on the agenda, with new laws passed this year.
The five-eyes countries said they would hit back at foreign interference and one way they would do this was by jointly accusing the country responsible of the act. “We committed to establish a mechanism for the five countries to share developments in our respective approaches to confronting the foreign interference challenge,” the statement said. “We undertook to share information on foreign interference activities with a view to advancing our collective knowledge of how to counter such threats. In the event of a severe foreign interference incident within our sovereign nations, we agreed the five countries would co-ordinate on appropriate responses and attribution.”
Australia is in the process of introducing laws to force technology companies, apps and services to provide authorities with a way to access user data to combat terrorism and child pornography.
The Coalition insists the move will not weaken encryption, but the technology sector is sceptical.
The joint statement made it clear this approach was part of a wider global effort among Western nations, saying there was an “urgent need” for law enforcement to get “targeted access” to data on apps as long as there were legal safeguards. The ministers said they wanted companies to voluntarily “establish lawful access solutions to their products and services”, but if they did not, then authorities might introduce laws or use technology so law enforcement could get the data.
“Governments should not favour a particular technology; instead, providers may create customised solutions, tailored to their individual system architectures that are capable of meeting lawful access requirements,” they ministers said.