Australian Labor government threatens Signal encrypted messaging system

Mike Head

Meredith Whittaker, the president of the foundation for widely-used global Signal encrypted messaging app, has said it will shut down the system in Australia if forced to hand over its users’ encrypted data to the country’s political surveillance agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO).

Signal app icon on a smartphone [AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato]

Whittaker gave an interview to the Australian newspaper today, clearly responding to demands by ASIO and the Albanese Labor government for the not-for-profit Signal Foundation to first create, and then provide, a so-called “backdoor” mechanism for them to access the data of users.

This push by the Labor government was first revealed publicly in April last year. That month, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese held a joint media conference with ASIO chief Mike Burgess and Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Reece Kershaw to accuse social media companies of refusing to “snuff out” supposed “extremist poison” by handing over access to their users’ data.

The Labor government’s moves are now threatening the existence of a vital encrypted communications platform. Signal, a free, open-source service, is used by millions of people worldwide to protect their privacy and free speech, shielding their communications from government, spy agency and corporate surveillance and data collection.

Whittaker told the Australian that Signal, which is funded largely by donations and grants, is relied upon by “millions of people in Australia” alone.

She said Signal would take the “drastic step” of leaving any market where a government compelled it to provide a means of accessing its data, saying that would create a vulnerability that hackers and authoritative regimes could exploit, undermining Signal’s “reason for existing.”

The Signal Foundation’s stated mission is to protect free expression and secure global communication through open-source privacy technology. Its value, as an end-to-end encrypted service, is that it collects virtually no user data and makes it difficult to discover others on the platform.

Whitakers explained that Signal has no “backdoor” means of accessing its users’ communications. “You could come to my house, put a gun to my head, saying, ‘give me the data.’ I could not give you the data. You would have to shoot because I don’t have it. I don’t have access to it,” she said.

“Our commitment to end-to-end encryption, maintaining robust, technically guaranteed privacy for everyone who uses Signal never wavers. That’s the reason we exist. Our ability to make good on that commitment, for the people of Australia who depend on our services—often for very high stakes communication where there is real risk involved—does face threats from legislation.”

Whittaker said the forced creation of any “backdoor” would make Australia a “gangrenous foot” for Signal globally. “If you undermine it in Australia—the human rights workers, the journalists, anyone using Signal in Australia—it suddenly creates a weakness for anyone else they are talking to…

“It is very serious, because a backdoor in one part of a network that is interconnected across the world undermines the entire network that becomes the vector through which the privacy of people’s communications can be attacked.

“And for many people, private communication is the difference between life and death. A regime that has power over you and can see what you’re talking about—can see what you’re co-ordinating with your fellow dissidents, can see materials that you are planning to blow the whistle about, the stakes could not be higher.”

Whittaker said government and intelligence use of AI increased the danger. “Ultimately, we’re talking about the ability to sustain fundamental human rights in the face of industrial and government pressure that has metastasised surveillance across our core infrastructures over the last few decades.”

ASIO and the other Australian intelligence agencies, with their US, UK, Canadian and New Zealand partners, operate as part of the global “Five Eyes” mass surveillance network. This worldwide web is now focused on the Trump administration’s aggressive trade and military confrontations, especially with China, which Washington regards as the major threat to US hegemony.

As the thousands of secret US documents published by US National Security Agency (NSA) whistle-blower Edward Snowden and by Julian Assange via WikiLeaks showed, the Five Eyes partners intercept the communications of millions of people around the globe, routinely exchange data about each others’ citizens, and also supply cyber warfare facilities and targeting information to their militaries.

Snowden and Assange also revealed how the US and its allies carry out coups, organise regime-change operations, orchestrate military interventions, assassinate people and initiate public disinformation campaigns.

In 2020, at the behest of the first Trump administration, Australia’s previous Liberal-National Coalition government introduced legislation to expand the powers of the country’s intelligence network to obtain and share encrypted communications with the “Five Eyes.”

That was in addition to the anti-democratic Assistance and Access Act coming into effect that year, with the Labor Party’s support. That Act allows intelligence and police agencies to issue “technical assistance notices” or “capability notices” to compel cooperation from technology companies in building in “backdoor” access.

Such measures are invariably portrayed by governments and the media as efforts to crack down on “terrorists” and “child sex predators,” yet those activities are already closely monitored by international police agencies, which also have vast interception powers.

The real overriding fear in ruling circles is that working people worldwide use encrypted messages to discuss and organise, free of government eavesdropping, amid mounting anti-genocide and anti-war opposition, social unrest and political disaffection.

The Albanese government is now escalating this offensive, together with the Trump administration. Last week, on the first business day of parliament after the May 3 election, the Labor government also introduced legislation to make permanent and significantly expand ASIO’s police-state compulsory interrogation powers.

Unprecedented powers to forcibly question people were first handed to ASIO in 2003 during the supposed “war on terrorism.” Under Labor’s proposed amendments to the ASIO Act, these powers will be extended and broadened indefinitely to cover four new war-related fields: “sabotage,” “promoting communal violence,” “attacking defence facilities” and “threatening border security.”

If anyone fails to comply or hand over material, or provides misleading information, they face up to five years’ imprisonment. Those interrogated also face five years’ jail if they tell anyone, except an ASIO-vetted lawyer, over the next two years what has happened to them, thus helping to keep ASIO’s operations shielded from public scrutiny.

Albanese revamped his ministry straight after winning the May 3 election, in which Labor only obtained just over a third of the primary vote. One revealing move was to place a key minister, Tony Burke, in charge of ASIO, as well as the AFP and the Australian Border Force, creating what amounts to a repressive Home Affairs super-ministry.

French Prime Minister Bayrou presents class war budget

Alex Lantier

Yesterday, French Prime Minister François Bayrou presented plans for €44 billion in tax increases and social cuts in next year’s budget. This class war budget would impose sweeping cuts to key social programs to free up tens of billions of euros for the ongoing French and European military build-up and the NATO war against Russia.

This exposes the support of forces like the New Popular Front (NFP) led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon for President Emmanuel Macron in last year’s elections. The NFP allied with Macron, supposedly to block a coming to power of the far-right National Rally (RN) and force Macron to listen to the overwhelming opposition to austerity and military-police repression, like the mass strikes and riots against pension cuts and police killings in 2023. Though the NFP won the elections, Macron named right-wing prime ministers to power—first Michel Barnier, and now Bayrou.

The government the NFP thus helped install is now turning violently against the workers. As European governments slash social spending to rearm, these policies face explosive social opposition in France and across Europe. However, these cuts can only be stopped by drawing the lessons of the bankruptcy of the NFP and building a movement directly among rank-and-file workers and youth, aiming to take power out of the hands of a financial aristocracy that tramples upon the will of the people.

While 91 percent of the French people opposed Macron’s 2023 pension cuts, Bayrou is escalating austerity and diverting a further €4 billion to military spending. Bayrou called for at least €7 billion in cuts via a freeze to pensions and public sector salaries next year, €5 billion in healthcare spending cuts, and billions more from a draconian “reform” of unemployment insurance. He also announced mass job cuts in the public sector and sharp regional government spending cuts.

Bayrou presented two lying arguments to justify his anti-democratic policies. The first is that France, whose sovereign debt has reached 114 percent of its Gross Domestic Product and spends €100 billion yearly on servicing its debt to the banks, has no choice but to escalate the exploitation of the workers. The second is that violent foreign enemies led by Russia give France and its allies no choice but to arm in order to defend themselves. On this point, Bayrou said:

Above all, the main transformation we have lived through is that violence has become a universal law. This change that began by the invasion of Ukraine by the armies of Putin’s Russia, the world has shown it in other ways after October 7, with the drama in Gaza, that the world is ready to explode, and news is regularly reported of similar movements in the seas around China. And we recently saw with the Israel-Iran conflict that this is now becoming a general law, unfortunately, for all the regions of our planet.

One fact gives the lie to Bayrou’s argument for militarism and austerity: France and its NATO imperialist allies are not innocent bystanders in these conflicts but the powers most aggressively inciting up. Russian forces invaded Ukraine in 2022 after the NATO powers armed Ukraine to the teeth for use as a military base against Russia. The Gaza genocide and Israeli strikes on Iran are continuing because NATO countries led by Washington, and including France, massively provide arms to Israel.

Now that the NATO powers have stoked up these conflicts, including by dispatching warships halfway around the world to threaten Chinese shipping lanes, Bayrou cynically argues that France has no choice but to impoverish the workers in order to fight back against the foreign threat. This lie only shows that defending workers’ social rights requires opposing NATO wars.

Bayrou’s argument about debt was similarly a lie. France faces a mortal debt trap, he arrogantly charged, as French workers supposedly became lazy and relied on the state to solve their problems: “We have become addicted to public spending. There was no problem, change, obstacle our country faced—sanitary, climate-related, energy, or family issues—to which state officials and the citizenry did not react with a single response in their mouths: to turn to the state.”

Bayrou refused to explain how this has occurred. Referring to historian and resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s celebrated work Strange Defeat, on the French general staff’s stand-down amid the 1940 Nazi invasion of France, he said: “I won’t go over again the question of public finances and the long history of this strange defeat, as Marc Bloch said in another epoch. For over 50 years, our country, whatever political tendency was in power, has not presented a balanced budget. … I believe it’s the last stop before the edge of the cliff and being crushed by debt.”

In reality, responsibility for the surge in France’s public debt to 114 percent of GDP lies not with the working class but the bourgeoisie. France’s debt surged in the years after the 2008 economic crash and the 2020 outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The European Central Bank printed trillions of euros of public money and loaned it to European governments, who spent it overwhelmingly in the form of bank bailouts of the super-rich.

This led on the one hand to the consolidation of a grotesquely wealthy French capitalist oligarchy, led by figures like Bernard Arnault or François Pinault with net worths of over €100 billion, and on the other, to massive state indebtedness and relentless attacks on the workers.

As this ruling class now claims that saving its wealth requires draconian austerity in violation of the will of the people, it only shows that it is historically condemned and unfit to rule. If its wealth, accumulated through the looting of public funds, is incompatible with social programs essential to the well-being of the population, then it must be impounded. Firms in France and across Europe that benefited from these bailouts should be nationalized under workers’ control, as they are effectively already funded by the public purse.

Such a regime, based on workers’ control of industry and capable of opening the path towards workers’ power and the implementation of socialist policies, is emerging ever more directly as the only practical alternative to the financial aristocracy’s looting of society. Significantly, Bayrou spent a considerable part of his speech insisting that there is no alternative to his policy and that all resistance to the diktat of the banks is futile.

Bayrou cited the 2015 capitulation of the NFP’s Greek allies, the pseudo-left SYRIZA (“Coalition of the Radical Left”) government. SYRIZA’s capitulation to the banks’ speculation against Greek sovereign debt, he claimed, showed that it is impossible to oppose austerity if the state is indebted:

We must never forget the example of Greece. The prime minister a while ago was called Alexis Tsipras, he headed a coalition called SYRIZA, of the left and far left. To avoid the obstacle [of the debt], he called a referendum of the Greek people to officially say no and refuse the spending cuts demanded by the European Union and the IMF. This “no” referendum, Alexis Tsipras handily won it on Sunday, but on Thursday four days later, he was forced to sign everything demanded of him.

In reality, opposition to austerity in Greece was defeated not because the workers could not fight but because of the treachery of SYRIZA and allied union bureaucracies. Like the parties and union bureaucracies making up the French NFP during the 2023 mass strikes against Macron’s pension cuts, they rejected an appeal to mobilize the working class in their country and across Europe to take power out of the hands of the capitalist oligarchy.

Fascist terrorist cell uncovered in Canada’s military

James Clayton

The arrest last week of two active members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF), a CAF veteran, and an Army Cadet trainer in an armed terrorist plot has exposed, yet again, that Canada’s military is serving as an incubator of fascist forces.

Five years after a CAF reservist sought to assassinate then Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and as the ruling class showers the military with tens of billions of dollars in additional funding, far-right activities among CAF members clearly continue unabated.

On July 8th, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) announced the exposure of a fascist cell, allegedly comprised of four men plotting to form an anti-government militia and “seize land” near Quebec City. Marc-Aurèle Chabot, 24, Simon Angers-Audet, 24, Raphaël Lagacé, 25, and Matthew Forbes, 33, face multiple terrorism and weapons offences.

Forbes and Chabot are corporals serving at CFB (Canadian Forces Base) Valcartier with the “Van Doos” Royal 22nd Regiment, while Lagacé was a decorated member of the Army’s Cadet training program. Angers-Audet allegedly left the CAF due to his opposition to COVID vaccinations.

In a January 2024 raid on Forbes’ house, the RCMP seized the largest trove of weapons ever found in a terrorist raid in Canada, including “16 explosive devices, 83 firearms and accessories, approximately 11,000 rounds of ammunition of various calibres, nearly 130 magazines, four pairs of night vision goggles and military equipment.” Forbes was arrested at that time, but terrorism charges against the cell members were only laid this month.

Forbes faces charges under the Explosives Act and the Defense Production Act, which “regulates access to military supplies.” Forbes allegedly obtained the weapons—enough for a massacre—from the CAF. Angers-Audet’s role at the Voltigeurs army reserve regiment in Quebec City was to “take care of, adjust and maintain all of the unit’s weapons.”

The plotters promoted right-wing conspiracy theories on social media, many of them directed against Trudeau, a hate-figure for the far right, which blames Trudeau variously for “wokeism,” COVID lockdowns, and increased immigration.

The group began paramilitary training in 2021, less than a year after reservist Corey Hurren’s failed July 2020 attempt to kill Trudeau. The group ran an Instagram account to recruit new members. The RCMP began its investigations in 2023.

The exposure of yet another network of fascists within the armed forces underlines that such forces are being cultivated within Canada’s national security apparatus—where bellicose nationalism, virulent anti-communism, and support for monarchy and authoritarianism are ingrained—and that there is increasing sympathy, if not outright support, for the far right within the higher ranks.

The CAF top brass’ readiness to openly patronize and embrace the far right found expression in the fascistic rant retiring army commander Lt. Gen. Michel Maisonneuve delivered in late 2022 to a Conservative Party convention; and by the notorious standing ovation that the Chief of Defence Staff and other top military personnel gave to the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator and Waffen-SS member Yaroslav Hunka when he was introduced to parliament in September 2023.

At the moment there are far more questions than answers. Why was the fascist cell allowed to continue its operations 18 months after its weapons were first seized? What was the exact nature of the plot and the group’s plans?

In an interview with Global News, the father of Angers-Audet has alleged that the group was infiltrated by “a strange, much older man, about 47 years old.” Who is this figure?

CAF terrorist plotters training mission [Photo: Royal Canadian Mounted Police]

A photograph released by the RCMP showing what is alleged to be the group’s military training at an unidentified rock quarry shows seven men in fatigues, not four. Who are the other three?

To these, and the more fundamental questions which arise out of the discovery of yet another fascist grouping inside the Canadian Armed Forces, the RCMP, CAF and the government have responded with a giant shrug of the shoulders, and some carefully chosen weasel words.

When asked about the discrepancy between the number of men in the photo and the number of charges laid, RCMP spokesman Erique Gasse responded, “We know that, because of the Instagram account, there are more people who are interested in that ideology, and who took part in military-style training. The RCMP does not investigate movements or ideologies. It investigates only the criminal activities of individuals...”

In other words, the fascist milieu in which the four accused operate is much larger, but the RCMP has decided to make an example of the ringleaders only. One can only imagine to what uses those with potential terrorism charges hanging over their heads are now being put by the RCMP. From the milieu of military men with skeletons in their closet have been drawn countless agents-provocateurs and informants.

Although the fascist motivations and modus operandi of the terrorist plotters are plain for all to see, the authorities have gone out of their way to obscure this.   

Quebec RCMP Staff Sgt Camile Habel told the Globe and Mail, “When it comes to ideologically motivated extremisms, it’s not clear cut—so people can gather a few different ideologies and make it their own. I guess the main thing about the ideology is anti-authority is in there. In this case, that is what it was. People can have a range of grievances from across the spectrum.”

For his part, Defence Minister David McGuinty claimed that “The question of extremism is something that’s throughout Canadian society. This is not something that is unknown to armed forces around the world.”

The remarks of Habel and McGuinty are a slander on the working class, and in two senses.

First, there is no mass public support for the fascist extremism that is commonly encountered in the Canadian military and the armed forces of other countries. To the contrary, their views and actions are viewed with revulsion.

Second, trusted ruling class spokesmen that they are, Habel and McGuinty are disingenuously seeking to draw an equal sign between an armed fascist terror plot and what the government and intelligence agencies have also claimed is “ideologically motivated extremism”—opposition to imperialist war and genocide.

Opposition to government support for Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians does indeed run broad and deep among working people, and that “anti-authority” sentiment truly terrifies the ruling class and its functionaries. By lumping fascists and principled and peaceful opponents of genocide together as “other extremists” and “opponents of authority,” the state both covers up its own role in incubating and promoting fascist forces and seeks to legitimize its repression of social opposition from the working class and left.

The primary purpose of the official line of equivocation and downplaying of an armed, fascist terror plot within the military is to divert attention away from the essential truth: the Canadian ruling class and its capitalist state are increasingly reliant on fascistic and far-right forces at home and abroad to advance the aims of Canadian imperialism and shore up the profits of Canadian capitalism.

The four terror plotters were drawn from the socially backward, right-wing milieu which produced the fascistic, misnamed “Freedom Convoy” in 2022. The Convoy mobilized truckers, police officers and veterans together with desperate and confused elements of the lower middle class against basic public health measures in an occupation of downtown Ottawa and the Ambassador Bridge linking Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario. At the time, the Joint Forces Command, an elite unit within the Canadian military, was so concerned about its members joining the far-right protests that it felt compelled to issue an order not to do so.

As the WSWS exposed at the time, the Convoy was used—until it escaped their control—by powerful sections of Canadian ruling as a blunt instrument to put an end to all public health measures against the COVID 19 pandemic which stood in the way of capitalist profit accumulation. The Conservative Party deposed its then leader Erin O’Toole, who was viewed as too conciliatory to Trudeau, and soon replaced him with the far-right Pierre Poilievre, who had emerged as a prominent Convoy supporter. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, a Trump enthusiast, used his jurisdictional control over policing to delay Ontario Provincial Police enforcement (OPP) of laws regulating protests and harassment to intensify and escalate the crisis for Trudeau in Ottawa. The RCMP, police and military were infested with Convoy supporters, feeding them intelligence and personnel at every turn.

Canadian imperialism has absolutely no problem whatsoever working with avowed Nazis in Ukraine, who have been trained by Canadian officers, and politically defended and armed by NATO governments. These are Canadian imperialism’s own fascists, faithfully doing its bidding. That they flaunt Swastikas and Sonnenrad symbols and distribute Nazi literature is something to be hushed up and denied, because they are prosecuting Canadian imperialism’s war against Russia for strategic minerals, resources and trade routes.

The CAF exists to advance the predatory interests of Canadian capitalism and the profit system, which must necessarily trample on the freedom and violate the human rights of people in countries targeted for violent intervention. “We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people,” quipped General Rick Hillier, the commander of Canada’s occupation force in Afghanistan, in a rare moment of honesty.

Millions have died as a result imperialism’s wars in the Greater Middle East since 2001. As the WSWS reported last week, the Canadian ruling class remains desperate to conceal the war crimes perpetrated by the CAF in Afghanistan while waging a war of neo-colonial occupation. Before his retirement in 2024, the former diplomat Richard Colvin submitted a 1000-page report to his superiors at the Ministry of Global Affairs—which they have suppressed—demonstrating the CAF systematically committed war crimes in Kandahar and that the military command and the Harper government concealed them.

The government of Mark Carney, who has served the financial oligarchy throughout his entire adult life as a central banker and financial consultant, is hostile to any serious investigation into far-right extremism in the military and the Canadian state. This is because it cuts across its agenda and that of the ruling class as a whole.

Central to that agenda is massive rearmament and preparation for global war, with the Canadian Armed Forces—whose budget Carney has already increased by $9.3 billion or 17% just in this fiscal year—paraded before the public as the “defender” of “democracy” and “Canadian values.  

The reality is the Canadian ruling class, like its imperialist counterparts around the world, is turning toward authoritarian methods of rule. Under Carney, it is veering sharply to the right, aligning its policies with the fascist-minded President Donald Trump in the United States, and backing the genocide of the Palestinians by the Zionist regime and American imperialism. The Liberal government is adopting Trump-style domestic policies, including slashing social spending, demonizing immigrants, strengthening the border and criminalizing strikes using a patently illegal “reinterpretation” of the Canada Labour Code . Canadian imperialism hopes this will help it reach a modus vivendi with the would-be dictator in the White House, which it views as the best way to advance its own predatory global interests.

This class war agenda cannot be implemented democratically, which is why the Canadian ruling class will intensify its cultivation of far-right forces both inside and outside of the military. It requires fascist shock troops to supplement state repression in seeking to silence what will inevitably be increasingly radical and determined working-class opposition.