Australia’s Prime Minister tends to be pretty pleased with himself, and plenty of other people seem to think of Malcolm Turnbull as the smartest guy in the room. Perhaps he sometimes he is.* Malcolm didn’t appear so smart, however, when presenting Australia’s proposal to require the tech giants to decrypt their customers’ encrypted messages. When ZDnet reporter Asha McLean suggested that “the laws of mathematics [might] trump the laws of Australia”, Malcolm was unfazed:
The laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.
And yes, the Government’s plan (for want of a better word) is as clueless as Malcolm makes it sound.
We already knew that Malcolm was a scientific clown, an economic illiterate, a coward, a Luddite, an Orwellian thug and a moral midget. So, maybe it shouldn’t be a great surprise when Malcolm also turns out to be an anti-mathematical git.
* If the other people in the room are Peter Dutton and Barnaby Joyce.
*(thinks a few people were left off the list from various flavours of politics).
From a purely philosophical bent, one COULD argue that Mathematics is devoid of laws as it is derived from axioms (Peano and Euclid being amongst my favourites) whereas disciplines such as the “natural sciences” are based on observable phenomena (the meaning of “observable” again being debatable)
However, since many laws of Australia do not seem based on any observable phenomena (assuming of course that logic is also available) then your reasoning remains quite valid.
*(yes, but find clowns of such magnitude (or evilness) in other flavours is a challenge.)