>> Costello okays SingTel buying Optus
>>23/08/2001 - Treasurer Peter Costello has given the green light to
>>SingTel's takeover of Australia's second-largest telco Cable and
>>Wireless Optus.
>><http://www.sofcom.com.au/cgi-bin/news/getAAPPreview?keyword=cwoptus>
>>more...
Tony Barry <me@Tony-Barry.emu.id.au>
>Does anybody find this a little odd? ...
When asked by a reporter last week about the national security
implications, I made the following points:
(1) the content of military messages is protected through crypto;
(2) the pattern of military messages is readily detected through
traffic analysis. This would enable the service operator to, for
example, infer that there was something going on that was causing
unusual volumes of defence traffic between Canberra and, say, K.L. or
Jakarta;
(3) service quality and bandwidth would be dependent on ongoing investment
by a foreign government, which might treat the lines to an outpost
like Australia as a lower priority than its trunk-lines to Asia and
the rest of the world;
(4) should the Singapore government become upset at Australia, it could
instruct its company to shut Australia off for a few hours, to
bring them to heel. Note that Singapore has been an opponent of
Australia being permitted into Asian forums. Note too that the
Singaporean government is quite capable of such acts.
What the reporter *didn't* ask me was 'what about commercial and
private users of Optus services?'. The answers would be:
(1) most commercial and private messages are *not* encrypted, and their
content is therefore at risk of interception;
(2) traffic analysis alone could reveal patterns useful for industrial
espionage;
(3) service quality and bandwidth are dependent on ongoing investment
by a foreign government-owned corporation, which might be subject to
politically-motivated interference;
(4) service availability might be withdrawn for political reasons;
(5) because the content is in clear, Singtel could conceivably
differentiate its service based on content, e.g. it could block
messages containing seditious or pornographic words (images would of
course be much harder). I suspect that Singtel may well do precisely
this in its retail services within Singapore, so why not in its
wholesale services as well?
The military have multiple networks available to them. (I can't
believe that its operational communications would be dependent on the
Optus service?).
Business and private users are in a less happy position. Firstly we
have few choices; and secondly we seldom know which wholesale
bandwidth provider our retail ISP uses.
Remember when the multi-connectivity of the Internet was largely
mythical for us, because there were so few international trunks to
and from Australia? Several of the multiples have just been
compromised.
I'm with Kerry Stokes on this one. He said something like: 'I'm not
against foreign investment; but I am against foreign power
investment'.
-- Roger Clarke http://www.anu.edu.au/people/Roger.Clarke/Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA Tel: +61 2 6288 1472, and 6288 6916 mailto:Roger.Clarke@xamax.com.au http://www.xamax.com.au/
Visiting Fellow Department of Computer Science The Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 AUSTRALIA Information Sciences Building Room 211 Tel: +61 2 6125 3666
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