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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.
I just saw this today at the Guardian
, 73 0091,00.html
Police to spy on all emails
Fury over Europe's secret plan to access computer and phone data
http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903
many scholars argue that without effective guarantees of civil liberties, elections do not constitute democracy, and that a procedural minimum for defining democracy must include not only elections, but reasonably broad guarantees of basic civil rights-e.g., freedom of speech, assembly, and association.
-Democracy 'with Adjectives', by D. Collier and S. Levitsky
The paper I link to (which is academic but pretty accessible - I'm a biologist, not a political scientist) is about military juntas in south america, not Aussies.
I raise this point because I think John Howard (the prime minister of Australia) is Australian for Hitler. A modern Democracy can survive all matter of scuminess, but if this proposal goes through, Australia will need an adjective (such as crpyto or pseudo) to qualify their form of government.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
What about regular mail? Would you be outraged if government agents were waiting curbside when you came to check your mailbox, sorting through your letters from granny?
"Hold on a minute sir, we're almost done. Gotta make sure 'Aunt Edna' and 'hip surgery' aren't terrorist codewords. Then you can have your mail. Oh, and we're keeping the detergent samples. My socks are dirty...errr...I mean...it's a dangerous chemical compound, and we don't know what your true motives are."
Would that outrage you? What makes email special, such that it's okay for the feds to read that?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Although we're constantly told that we're living in a democracy, the reality is that we are not.
.
Most Western "democratic" countries operate a system that involves the election of representatives who are chosen by the people to speak on their behalf in government.
The unfortunate reality is that these representatives are almost always looking out for their own interests ahead of those of the people who elected them. "Power corrupts" as they say.
These representative systems were devised hundreds of years ago when it was simply impractical to run a true democracy and, at the time, they constituted the most democratic solution to the problem of allowing the people to dictate their own future.
Clearly it would have been absolutely impractical to have every citizen voting on every decision related to the running of the country.
But it's now the 21st century and things have changed -- a lot!
Now we have the power to let individuals exercise their own democratic right to have a say in the decisions made by government.
Several years ago I proposed that we now have the technology to implment a truly democratic system that would effectively impose strong checks and balances on the excesses of our elected representitives.
I documented this system (as it applies to the New Zealand political system)
here.
The idea is to acknowledge that an elected representitive is effectively doing little more than exercising the proxy of the voters in their constituency.
Until now, the only real democratic right that citizens had was to elect a different representitive at the end of each term. Now that's a very coarse form of democracy and offers little protection for the public.
My suggestion is that each voter be entitled to withdraw their proxy and exercise it individually if they choose to do so on an issue by issue basis
In the event that a government tries to pass legislation which is not supported by a majority of the voters, those voters can recover their proxy and vote against it.
The technology to allow such a "recoverable proxy" situation can be as simple as a telephone, ATM or Internet connection.
Unlike other proposed improvements to the democratic process which involve cumbersome methods such as regular referenda, this system allows our elected representitives to carry on as normal, exercising the proxies of their constituents-- but simply reserves the publics right to say "no" when that representitive decides to place his or his party's interests ahead of the majority choice of the people he/she has been elected to serve.
Of course politicians don't want a bean of this proposal -- because it would significantly curb their ability to rort the system and remove their ability to place self-interest ahead of the public's right to be democratically represented.
A change like this would likely require a massive outcry by public -- and our politicians would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
What do you think?
If the government becomes 'tyrannical' (whatever that is) then you just accept it.
If my government ever becomes tyrannical (and it's getting pretty damn close), make sure you stay out of my way or you'll get seriously hurt.
Don't tell me the stupid saying of "if guns are outlawed then only outlaws will have guns" because it's really stupid.
How will the law abiding citizens have guns if they're illegal? Won't they be outlaws instead? It may be a stupid saying, but it's true. If guns are outlawed then I will become an outlaw.
Just because a criminal may attack you with a gun (or knife, baseball bat, etc, etc) does *NOT* give you the right of self defense.
State forbid that I should try to protect myself. After all, my body doesn't belong to me, so it's not mine to protect. It belongs to the Almighty State, and if they don't see fit to protect it, who am I to argue?
That's what the police are there for.
Yeah right. The police are useful as a deterent against crime, but they do nothing to prevent a crime in progress.
Just deal with it and talk to the police if you ever are attacked.
Hah! If I live that is. I don't know if you've checked recently, but there's a lot of nutcases out there. Sometimes they don't let their victims live long enough to talk to the police.
The second amendment is there to protect the government's right to bear arms.
Go read the constitution again. The entire document, particularly the bill of rights, is a limitation on the government. The right to bear arms is an attribute of the people. Your statement is a ridiculous as saying the first ammendment is there to protect the government's right to spread propaganda.
Private ownership of firearms is not politically correct in today's society.
Frankly, I don't give a shit about political correctness. It's irrelevant to me. The term itself is a mantra and recognition phrase for the Worshippers of the State.
This isn't the wild west!!
The wild west as portrayed in Hollywood movies and cheap fiction never existed. The real "wild" west of the late 19th century was quite tame compared to the modern day big city. I would much rather live unarmed and defenseless in Dodge City circa 1888 than armed in Washington D.C. circa 2002.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The key ingredient missing from Australian politics is a meaningful level of debate. Otherwise, the political system in itself tends to work quite well, all things considered.
More and more, people seem to be focusing on those issues beloved so much by the media, such as law and order, border protection and the nebulous political hotcake known as "The Bush" (which basically boils down to the higher cost of living in rural areas). As much as I hate to say it, no one has much time for trivial issues such as civil liberties when there are so many other things to be outraged over.
It doesn't help things that, these days, political parties like to present themselves as being totally committed to a given point of view. The effect of this is generally to silence the lower ranks, and of course to neutralise any dissent within the Government to official policies. A similar effect usually happens within the ranks of the Opposition, but currently it *is* split on several key issues, though it's disheartening to see the Government leap on this and shouting out words to the effect that the Opposition is in disarray.
Perhaps we also need some way to mitigate the power of the media corporations. Cynics (or realists?) would argue that these are the entities that really control Australia, and that the Parliament is more or less just a formality. Unfortunately, with the Govnerment pushing to abolish the cross-media-ownership laws (which prevent someone owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same city, *I think*) the largest media corporations could yet become even more powerful.
Talk-back radio hosts are also quite powerful in Australia, and much to my continuing displeasure, they're mostly conservative. People like John Laws and Alan Jones, despite the "cash-for-comment" scandal recently in which both were found to have been receiving money in exchange for favourable comments towards particular organisations, still seem to be doing the thinking for a disconcertingly large proportion of the population.
I don't think any of this is going to change any time soon. I only hope there are at least *some* sane people at the top. Hopefully they can keep things on track until we work out a way to engage the public interest in issues which affect the democracy we seem to take for granted.