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Australia Plans More Spying on Citizens
sg_oneill writes "The Australian Electronic Frontiers foundation report that the Australian Government is looking at introducing changes to the Telecomunications Interception Act giving Government Agencies (NOT just police!) the power to intercept email, voice mail and SMS messages without a warrant. Considering the concurrent proposals to introduce legislation to allow banning of organisations suspected of terrorist links, am I the only one suspecting Australia is about to have a whole lot less political parties?" I think our most recent Australia spying story was about the Australian government spying to win elections.
just utterly stupifying to me that a gov't would allow such acts.
Yeah, that would be bad. Unfortunately, in this case it's not that the government is just allowing it, they are committing the acts!
GnuPG
That's not it at all. Yes, we're all aware that interested parties can intercept our Internet communications. The issue is whether it's ethical for them to do so, particularly when the interested party is the government of a democratic nation which, in theory at least, accepts the traditional Western notion of political liberty.
I raise this point because I think John Howard (the prime minister of Australia) is Australian for Hitler.
As an Australian, I agree, in a qualified sense. In his mind it's OK to suspend or abolish democratic freedoms in order to ensure that people he doesn't agree with can't be heard or be politically active. (Another example from recent history is Nixon -- government "by any means necessary", legal or illegal).
For many years Queensland under Joh-Bjelke Petersen had a law, intended to stop street marches, that banned the public assembly of four or more people if such assembly had not been previously cleared by the police. It looks like we're moving back to those days... along with John Howard's racist issues on immigration (lock up the non-white illegal immigrants), we should soon be the new old South Africa, if you know what I mean.
deus does not exist but if he does
Here's what you don't understand - it's not John Q. Hacker on a joyride down the superhighway that we're talking about - it's the GOVERNMENT. It's a huge bureaucracy that has the ability to collect this information, store it, retrieve it, and use it to profile what kind of person you might be- all without your knowledge or consent. You have no idea who else is using it, when, or for what purpose. As such, the repercussions can be much more severe and long-lasting. Basically, we have government agencies using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to turn themselves into the equivalent of the KGB.
Why does everything involving security/privacy have to come down to the same tired, inapplicable old refences to 1984?
Explain to me how the reference is inapplicable. As I recall, having *gasp* actually read the book, surveillance of individual citizens by the government and control of the populous through manipulation of all news and history was precisely what Orwell was writing about and feared would come to be in the future. So, now that governments throughout the Western world are rapidly enacting measures that enable far greater surveillance of their own citizens and chilling effects on free speach we're just supposed to shut up about it. We should retire the reference to 1984 because you think it's tired and overused, despite it being entirely on-topic to the discussion at hand? Maybe we should ban Kafka from the discussion, since he too voiced a number of poignant and applicable ideas regarding the nature of justice, beaureaucracy, and power? If Orwell is spinning in his grave, it is because governments throughout the western world are interpreting his novel as a howto guide for building morally bankrupt, totalitarian states rather than as a warning against such things.
You seem to be mixing up what's technically possible and what's legally possible. It's technically possible for them to listen in on your phone conversations or tap you room, but it's not (normally) legal, and the terms of service of my provider mention nothing about reading the contents of my emails (they do have the right to track which web sites I go to, and possibly the addresses of emails, but not the content of them).
It's not about whether your emails are secure, it's about whether your government has the legal right to read them.
What is the greek word for a question that answers itself?
Your question "...when is the last time some major criminal or terrorist organization used e-mail to contact someone" is exactly the point. They haven't. So why facilitate government looking at everyone's a-mail?
Your assertion that it's far from the worst that a government could do, though strictly accurate, is meaningless in this context. But this is not a good thing, particularly given the Australian government's previous record of illegally using wiretaps to augment their election bids and political decisions.
In this context this is quite a big deal--a formerly democratic government that uses wiretaps for political ends making it possible for government agencies to have unprecedented acess to communications. These are not law enforcement agencies mind you. In Oz, you need an interception warrant to go after phones and such--only law enforcement agencies can get them. This is subjecting e-mail and SMS to the weaker search warrant, which most govt agencies can get. No, I don't want people with no valid reason looking at my information, thank you.
Learn a bit about Aust govt, and of course your own govt first. The amount of ignorance you've betrayed here truly boggles the mind, but it does explain how governments in democracies can get away with attempting to foist onto us such outrageous law. Go back to your spoon fed pablum, make the soft bleating noises peculiar to your sad breed of electronic sheep, and leave ruling to your "democratic" overlords--since that's how you've obviously chosen to live.
Wanker.
That's a rather narrow interpretation of Orwell's work. Communist Russia may have been the inspiration for Orwell's novel, but the themes he developed in the book are far more general. If the book had been that limited in scope, it is unlikely that it would be as popular as it is today.
Also, the fact that many governments of the Eastern world have already adopted mass surveillance and propaganda/censorship as a means of control does not in any way constitute a valid argument for allowing other nations to adopt equally abusive policies.
There is no risk too small about which Americans will do their Chicken Little routine. It's our nature now. We are a nation of cowards.
Listen, all you liberty-lovers. The only way to secure your liberty is through force or threat of force. For example, secession was an acknowledged right of any state in the USA, until Lincoln _crushed_ that notion when somebody actually tried it. Unless you can enforce your actions through force, you are at the mercy of those who can.
We hear a lot about freedoms these days from our government, but it's mostly boilerplate to pacify us while we are transformed into something authoritarian. What central State is not expanding its own scope and power these days at the expense of "the people"?
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Well for email thats easy, use a forign web baised email.
Voice mail dont use your telcos "Message bank facility", use an answering machine, or if you like those anoying menues set one up with a modem and a computer.
For sms it's a little harder, if you realy dont want someome looking in on that sort of thing, buy an integrated phone / pda type thingy with GPRS and load up an instant messaging type client that has an SMS portal (ie ICQ) that way you can still recieve sms messages, and you can still send sms messages to phones but your incoming message never get "stored" on an australian server(if your IM is conecting to a forign server). They still pass through aussie servers and telco equipment but they arent stored.
P.S. I'm an aussie and i realy doubt this bill will actualy pass. I was listning to a story about this on the radio and not only are the other partys rejecting most of the bill but i wouldn't be suprised if some liberal party members cross the floor and vote it down
Actually, in a case a few years ago in New York City, the courts ruled that police do not have an obligation to protect you against an obvious threat.
The matter arose when a woman had a stalker she knew of, and after a couple of non-fatal attacks, was begging the police for protection. They didn't provide it, and the lady was eventually killed. Her relatives sued NYPD claiming they should have protected her against such an obvious danger.
The courts said no.
It is your obligation to protect yourself. It is the obligation of the police to clean up after crimes have been commited.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
There's a difference between phones (and most other forms of communication) and email. Email is broadcast. Every communication send via email on this side of the gateway reaches my NIC. For my old DSL provider, that was the 252 other people using the same DSLAM as I. I haven't checked yet with my new provider simply because I'm not interested. And it's not just email, it's everything going out over your NIC. That's why we need wider usage of encryption.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
I think your line of thinking is great but as some others have pointed out, those in power will still be able to control public opinion through mass media.
I think the reason we have the government we have at the moment is because they were the ones that influenced that -i beleive large- sector in the community who are not adequately informed about current issues. Because everyone must vote the election results becomes diluted by those uninformed voters.
This can be a great thing if the public is informed, intelligent and active. The problem is a large enough number of Australians do not have that combination of qualities.
The current system would be excellent if people were more educated. What is needed is a more honest mass media that educates rather than sensationalises. Higher Education must be actively encouraged and more places created for people of all economic backgrounds.
// The fastest Alt-Tab in the West