Date of Award

2024

Degree Name

Master of Philosophy (School of Arts and Sciences)

Schools and Centres

Arts & Sciences

First Supervisor

Associate Professor Daniel Baldino

Second Supervisor

Professor Martin Drum

Abstract

In the 21st Century, governments around the world are confronted by the challenges of policing against serious crime, terrorism, and other malicious-actor threats in an increasingly complex and convoluted digital landscape. Accelerating social changes and advances in secure and anonymising technologies (including end-to-end encryption) are providing regular frustrations to law enforcement and intelligence organisations. These agencies must detect, deter, and disrupt the threats to lives, public safety, and national security posed by malicious foreign and domestic actors who are utilising such technologies to communicate securely and ‘go dark’ online. Accessing encrypted data to identify and investigate these threats frequently requires public authorities to invite or compel the assistance of online service providers (OSPs).

However, in Australia and other liberal democracies such as the UK, government attempts to regulate digital industry and access secure data are hampered by prevailing post-Snowden trust deficits and digital security concerns among OSPs and civil society. OSPs argue that, in the current techno-social environment, compliance with access mandates is technically impossible without simultaneously compromising the security of their systems, the critical services that these provide, and the privacy, trust, and security of billions of law-abiding individual, business, and government users globally. Civil society is similarly apprehensive that by jeopardising individual privacy and digital security (even if only in the public’s perception), intrusive surveillance and digital regulations yield self-defeating outcomes by producing more (not less) threats to user confidentiality, public safety, and national security. In a convoluted and deteriorating threat landscape, degrading public trust in democratic institutions is being exacerbated and exploited by a perplexing information environment inundated by misinformation and malicious foreign and domestic disinformation efforts.

In addressing these multi-faceted challenges to online policing, public authorities in Australia and democratic nations worldwide must extend conventional focusses beyond agencies’ need for intrusive access empowerment in order to pursue their law-and-order and national security remits. Government must therefore take into serious consideration the criticality of protecting digital security and building effective public trust measures to achieve a more productive and holistic policy approach to public safety and national security.

Download Complete Thesis

Share

COinS