ChinWag Will Obey the Laws of Mathematics

Despite our Prime Minister’s recent comments that “the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia” and that they believe that it’s apparently possible override the mathematical principles behind encryption with legislation, we at ChinWag would like to assure our users that we will continue to be bound by reality.

ChinWag exists to provide free and open communication tools for Australians, hosted and maintained in Australia. As such we may at some point be subject to theoretical future legislation that compels us to provide access to any messages that transit through our servers. We will cooperate as far as we are legally required to do so in such circumstances. While we do not explicitly set out to log or store user messages in general, some user-selectable options will preserve copies on our systems.

With this in mind, we strongly recommend the use of client software that supports end-to-end encryption. Conversations, ChatSecure and Gajim for a start, are all good clients that have the ability to enable OMEMO for secure communication on a one-to-one or group chat basis. If you do this, we just cannot provide access to your unencrypted messages to anyone, and no amount of legislation will change that.

If you have questions about how this might affect you, and how you can secure your messaging, feel free to discuss this in our (unencrypted) Lobby channel in a general, abstract and theoretical way and we’ll do our best to provide non-committal and vague but informative answers.