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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.
The net is ad hoc. Your email is not and never was secure. You were told that when you signed up for your service or hooked up to your peer. Pretending it's an outrage for anyone to be reading it now is shedding crocodile tears.
--Blair
GnuPG
Our governments are finally beginning to listen to us!
; )
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.
It's good to see that Australia is serious about combatting terrorism. The recent terrorist attacks on Australia in which many, many people were killed present a clear need for anti-terrorism legislation in Australia. In the face of such overwhelming horror on their own home soil, can we really blame Australia for jumping to the conclusion that security is more important right now than liberty? Personally, I think the international community should try to be understanding of the situation that Australia has been put in and try to give them some leeway in their knee-jerk reactions to the horrible atrocities that have befallen them.
But on a serious, more blunt note: Should these people wait for terrorists, and by that I mean ANY TERRORISTS AT ALL, to give a rat's ass about them before enacting broad "anti-terrorism" legislation? Are the Australian people really going to swallow this crap?
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.
Irwin picks the prime minister up by the neck...
"Wow! Look at this beauty! What we have here is a rare Australian Brown-Nosed Prime Minister. Very valuable too, large corporations will pay big bucks for a fella like this one here."
The prime minister starts gagging and choking...
"You're all right, Mate. You're all right. You have to be careful when dealing with these buggers. I don't want to let go of the neck because then he could call his elite guard and then I'd be in a world of trouble. They'd come running and attack me with their projectile defense mechanisms. They wouldn't understand that I'm not trying to hurt the prime minister, I'm only trying to educate the public."
The PM is grasping for his computer, but Irwin holds him out of reach...
"Let's walk over to his computer and take a look at how he survives. Notice the program he uses to search his prey's email and telephone conversations. Very sneaky, but it's that survival instinct that allows him to maintain his dominance in the political jungle. That's why we call him the prime minister. Yeah? OK, I'm gonna let him down slowly, and hopefully he'll be too busy gasping for air to call for help and I can make my retreat."
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?
1984 is hardly only about the USSR, as people always seem to be so comfortable in believing - Orwell had already written a book dealing exclusively with the USSR and its betrayal of socialist principles in favor of continued exploitation in a new form (Animal Farm). A betrayal that Orwell was acutely aware of (remember that Orwell was a socialist and fought for the POUM [independent Marxists] in the Spanish Civil War), but by no means blinded him to the faults of capitalist society, many held in common with society in the USSR. 1984 is not just the 'fairy story' of Animal Farm elaborated, but a much richer, more universally relevant novel that encapsulates a large number of Orwell's theories of history, authority, his fears about the future of society, and to dismiss the novel lightly as being 'merely about the USSR' is to trivialize it and assign to it a datedness that it doesn't merit, especially in the present context.
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.
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.