Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Considering Ratifying Cybercrime Treaty
waytoomuchcoffee writes "SecurityFocus has a new article on the Council of Europe's "Convention on Cybercrime". The U.S. has already signed the treaty, but it has not yet been ratified by the Senate (although President Bush has written a letter urging the treaty's passage). This treaty, among other items, would require the U.S.
to "cooperate with foreign authorities" in conducting surveillance on American citizens who have committed no crime under U.S. law, but may have broken another country's law (selling historic Nazi posters on Ebay? Germany might have you wiretapped), prohibiting the "production, sale or distribution of hacking tools", whatever that means (would Nmap be illegal?) and require the U.S. to pass laws to "force users to provide their encryption keys" and the plain text of their encrypted files. Canada is a signatory as well."
nothing.can.stop.me.now
I remember when the US was trying to get a guy out of Australia (can't remember who or find the article - sorry) and people said that the US would never do anything like release someone who had comitted a crime over the internet, breaking a law in another country.
Proves you wrong.
Canada is a signatory as well.
There! Happy now? Slashdot finally mentioned Canada, but it turns out you're a bunch of facists like the rest of us. W00t!
Do they have to find evidence on you first? I mean, they won't just go around asking for everyone's encryption key, so that they can find the evidence can they?
Encryption are the walls of my digital home. Anything I encrypt is private property. I feel this might set a very bad precedent if we are required to give the gov't our encryption keys..
The net is like the wild-west.. with no laws or very little.. I think we are coming to an end of that time, soon we will need corp authorization to write e-mail and have to pay to put any content only.. sad day. Also, how.. realistically could we even provide them with our encryption keys? Also couldn't they be used for political gain??
Why should they cooperate for something that's not a crime in America? Should they cooperate if, say, the Saudi police were investigating you for putting pictures of your girlfriend in a bikini on your web site, for example?
The simple fact is this law would be nonsense, but a great way for the US government to harass Americans: you can't legally harass a US citizen? No problem, just ask your mates in Germany to ask you to do so.
Can't go to the USA, Europe, Canada, Mexico, Australia or China.
Well, I guess if Russia doesn't work out for us liberty loving types we can always head for Mars.
Beep beep.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
This really doesn't sound like that bad of a bad thing...
:)
- If you're selling Nazi-era items on eBay, you might as well just put "Offer void in Germany and where prohibited by law, bids from such places will be disqualified." in your description. You just can't sell that kind of stuff to Germany, so don't even try.
- The encryption keys issue sounds fair to me. If you have the keys to an encrypted file and you refuse to decode it and a judge issues a warrant for that data, you have to turn it over or pay the penality for obstructing an investigation.
- The NMAP issue seems like one of FUD to me. The word "hacking" is nowhere in the actual text of the document. Of course, Slashdot would run a story that debates a treaty with a link to the treaty language itself because we reject all government actions without even needing to read what they're proposing.
If one is arrested under any charge and found to have tone dialers, packet sniffers, port scanners, etc. one can be found to be in posession of "hacking devices." (This has happend in the past to Bernie S and others.) Essentially the government has no real evidence of any crime and uses it as a catch-all or as a way to increase sentence time. The annoying part of this is that sysadmins use sniffers and scanners quite often as part of their job. It would appear this "treaty" is just to strengthen previous laws and help to catch those evil hackers...er um hopefully not sysadmins?
:(){
Why should they cooperate for something that's not a crime in America? Should they cooperate if, say, the Saudi police were investigating you for putting pictures of your girlfriend in a bikini on your web site, for example?
If you did so from within Saudi Arabia, sure. In order to break the laws of a another land, you have to be there at the time. Otherwise, their laws don't apply to you.
It seems that this whole notion of using treaties for anything other than marking out jurisdiction over the lands and seas, or codifying who gets what at the end of a war is a huge threat to a nation's sovereignty, and, in a democratic country, the ultimate sovereignty of a country's citizenry.
The Kyoto treaty, NAFTA, and all other economic treaties are ways of sneaking in through the back door (in the United States) laws that would never be passed through legitimate means. The House of Representatives is totally left out of the loop, bypassing our most democratically representative body.
Now, apart from economic treaties, the U.S. will play handmaiden to the enforcement of foreign criminal statutes (while other countries do likewise).
This is bullshit!
Politicians are at a loss to know what to do in the face of a world rapidly being transformed by technology, and international communication and commerce; but, in an effort at being seen as "doing something about the problems of today's world" are rushing to pass laws, the consequences of which can neither be foreseen nor easily undone.
And we're the ones who are going to have to live with it.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
if I'm standing across the mexican border, and you are on the US side, and I take you out with a high-powered rifle... and then I head on over to disneyland....
I have broken no US laws, right? Because I wasn't in the US at the time?
Right. You would have broken Mexican laws. The American authorities would arrest you and return you to Mexico for trial.
In Canada, where we don't have the death penalty, we have used this same logic. How can we send a person to the US to possibly suffer a punishment that we don't feel is just?
The US government is being consistent on this. Their arguement tends to be - you committed (or possibly) a crime in a particular country and you should follow that countries rules.
I am not sure I totally agree with this. And it is certainly open to abuse. But so are lots of recent US laws.
is here
Where is that guy who'd die defending what I had to say when I need him?
Okay, for one, at the whim of another government you can now have your privacy invaded due to suspicion of a crime that isn't even a crime in this country. This is giving up our right to due process, the right to illegal search and seizure and probably other stuff I haven't thought of yet. Next it puts people we don't pay or elect in control of our interests.
I don't think our lawmakers and governing folk have the right to sign away our rights via international treaty like that.
um since most "hacking" is done via phone (social attack). do we have to get rid of phones?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
But when it comes to the privacy and free speech rights of American civilians, he could give a shit. Say, why do we have soldiers again?
Funny me, I always thought it was to protect our Freedoms(tm).
Interestingly, there have been long-running court cases which had to decide questions exactly like this. Here in Australia, we had a case where someone on one side of a state border was shot from the other side, and the courts had to decide whose laws it broke.
In that case, the court found that the murder occurs in the place where the death occurs. I'm not sure about US/Mexican law, but it'd be a hell of an interesting case to follow.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Please cite the section that makes it criminal to posess a "hacking device".
This seems to fit the bill:
[Begin Quote]
Article 6 - Misuse of devices
1. Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally and without right:
a. the production, sale, procurement for use, import, distribution or otherwise making available of:
b. the possession of an item referred to in paragraphs (a)(1) or (2) above, with intent that it be used for the purpose of committing any of the offences established in Articles 2 - 5. A Party may require by law that a number of such items be possessed before criminal liability attaches.
[End Quote]
Note that this also applies to passwords and other data. Interesting.
I hear there's rumors on the Slashdots
[...]
I have broken no US laws, right? Because I wasn't in the US at the time?
This is an inappropriate metaphor for two reasons:
1) This story is talking about something that is a "crime" in only one of the two places involved. Murder is a crime in both the US and Mexico.
2) The death ocurred in the US, even if you fired the gun in Mexico. Even if murder wasn't illegal in Mexico, the US would definitely charge you if it could get its hands on you, since the target was on US soil.
A better metaphor for the argument at hand would be:
I go to Amsterdam and buy some marijuana in a store (legally). I come back to the US and get busted for posession (of the pot I bought in Amsterdam). When interrogated as to who my dealer is, I give them the name of the guy who runs the pot bar in Amsterdam.
USA charges guy in Amsterdam with a crime. Does the Amsterdam police force make an arrest and extradite the shop owner?
--The Rizz
"Researchers have discovered that chocolate produces some of the same reactions in the brain as marijuana. The researchers also discovered other similarities between the two, but can't remember what they are." --Matt Lauer
Requiring that someone provide encryption keys would likely be construed as a violation of a U.S. citizen's Fifth Amendment rights: "nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself." If the hard drive had incriminating evidence of ANY crime on it, then the person would be within their Constitutional rights to refuse to provide the encryption keys to access the data.
From a practical standpoint, "I can't recall" is a very effective three words sentence in such a case. It's not like any of us can honestly say that we've never forgotten a password or encryption key, so the prosecution would be hard-pressed to convince a judge and jury that such a claim is preposterous.
Is that someone who discriminates against people on the basis of their face?
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
At what time? At the time the crime was committed? I think Dmitry Sklyarov would beg to differ with you on that point.
I know god exists. I read it on the internet, so it must be true.
I've looked through this treaty, and it appears that the only explicit mention of encryption is that each participating country must ensure that if they have encryption keys needed to help another participating country, they should hand them over (i.e. Country A got Mr. Baddy's RSA key during an investigation and he is being tried in Country B for another offense. Country A should give the key to Country B to help them). Presumably, the key must be obtained by legal means in country A before it can be given to country B. They also mention that encryption should be used, if necessary, to ensure secure communications between the governments... I would hope this is the case anyway.
This treaty doesn't expand the definition of computer crime really. All it is is a promise between countries that if someone commits a crime in another participating country, the other countries will turn over the criminal. To me, this makes perfect sense-- think about it. If someone from a european nation stole your credit card information, for example, you would want them to be accountable for their damages, even if you were an american, right?
====
Crudely Drawn Games
prohibiting the "production, sale or distribution of hacking tools"
So they are about to ban all computers, eh?
Due to lack of math education, lawyers and authorities simply cannot understand what an universal computation machine is, a math abstraction. So they really want to outlaw a class of abstract algorithms. I would call that idiocy, but I wan't be moderated down troll so I call it ignorancy.
So at the 2024 we who keep around all open source packages ever touched, will be all using Quake 13's "scanning mod" feature instead of illegal nmap...
If it goes really, really wrong with the law, we can always implement a Turing machine with cells represented by file names of silly word documents in a single directory. Written in shell or cmd, it could still be faster than mainframes were 30 years ago.
With that, say HOW one can distinguish DATA from CODE, if one cannot grasp the semantics?
Or example for an underground network: today's sending a tcp packet would be equivalent of emailing little stego message perfectly fitted with up-to-day security content check standards. TCP over email on broadband will be faster then modems we had 10 years ago.
There is only way out: Force authorities to make world a better place for living, not for doing bussinesses only.
There you are, staring at me again.
Well, they might as well round up all our guns at the same time, give us identity chips for our own "security," officially revoke the Bill of Rights, and set up a UN shrine with mandatory attendance, so there will be no more doubt to anyone what they're all about.
Then all the crazies can retreat to the hills with their shotguns and claymores, and finally have that Armageddon they've been waiting for.
I'm not saying that this WILL happen this way, since I think that the powers-that-be are way too subtle for that. They know all too well that a frog will jump out of boiling water, but will allow itself to be cooked if done so gradually.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Yes, and that is a long-standing law. The US has several laws that apply to what happens in other lands. For instance, "Conspiracy to kill Americans Abroad" does not require any action on US soil. The "Foreign Corrupt Organizations Act" prevents Americans from briding people in other countries, and executives from Exxon Mobile were prosecuted and convicted under that law. Drug traffers in Columbia can be extradited to the US. People shooting Americans from inside Mexico are, in fact, committing a crime in America, even though only their bullets (like "their data") ever entered this country.
Sarcasm and hyperbole are the final refuges for weak minds
...has a pretty good idea where all the major nodes are, and the trunks, etc.
With that said, I think it would be quite fair to assume that they have contingency plans that immediately before, or concurrent with a major "crack down" into fuller despotism (a real or staged-real terrorist incident, for instance), they will have enough willing "order followers" to assume physical control of those facilities. All of them. Count on it.
And for those that say they couldn't run them even if they did, think again. They already have on the books laws that they can use to "draft" you on the spot,for specific work related duties, plus for the assumption of "ownership" of just about anything you can name, and refusing or trying to refuse becomes an automatic serious felony, and the penalities can be whatever the emergency military governor deems them to be. They can be quite severe, BTW. In such a situation it wouldn't requite too many examples to get folks back to the consoles working, and sabotage would be eventually found, leading to some more "examples", and etc.
This government has never been shy of "collateral damage", and this government, either directly or via contracted or coerced proxies, kills people daily and has done so as far back as I can remember.
People really need to read the homeland security act, patriot acts, and the model states health emergency act(there's more, those are crucial to grok though), the latter actually being much worse civil liberties-wise than the previous two, but much less known about or talked about.
As a side issue, as far as I am aware of now, all commercial radio and television stations have government "take over" boxes in them, that the government can activate automatically and remotely and completely control what information is being broadcast. In short, they have the clear potential to have an almost total lock on the dissemination of information on their whim and schedule. Not 100% complete, but so close as to make the exceptions be statistically insignificant. It doesn't take much to see the abuse potential here, of course, It's sold as a public service and they "promise" to be nice guys all the time and not lie or be less than honest, etc. Really. They promise.
uh huh
The above article is a further refutation to those who always spout "eww, that's tin foil hat". The one step at a time, slow boiling frog approach is the technique they use for..well, coming total enslavement to be frank about it, a master/serf technofuedalistic styled society of complete surveillance and control (and exploitation) of your lives. the ancient fiuedalistic system, just with advanced technology. Quite possible, many references showing that's what they desitre broadly speaking, and the evidence shows that is the direction they are headed, ie, history is repeating itself, ni\othing new there, because humans tend to not want to learn from history, it's.... too hard, interferes with day to day life and entertainments and ordinary hassles. So, it gets ignored.
That's their goal, and so far every step of the way that HAS been implemented has also been WARNED ABOUT in advance by people who were told they were wrong, when in fact, they have been consistently correct in this extrpolative position and series of observations and analysis."They" want a form of world government with total control over the population of the planet, and nothing less than that. It's still a ways off,not too far but a ways, but looking back 20 years and seeing how things have changed, anyone may look forward, contemplate it in the fact of a variant of "moores law" being applied to all aspects of technology and governments insatiable use of same, and see what is happening now and their bent, to make a fair assessment of what is coming.
Failure to do so is ill advised, failure to *do something about it while you still can* is suicidal.
example :: under certain conditions, you could consider a hammer a burglary tool.
the problem, most of the time, is the ignorance of the ones making the law and also the ones upholding (and interpreting) it.
now think about nmap, nessus and so on and so on...
hell, even a computer can be seen as a tool for comitting cybercring.
Privacy is terrorism.
of the American Constitution requires that no person "shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself."
In a 1996 paper Greg S. Sergienko explains that in America, the Fifth Amendment would give a suspect the right to refuse handing over encryption keys.
I agree with that analysis.
Therefore, I think that any legislation based on Article 19 of the Cybercrime Treaty would only enable law enforcement authorities to request encryption keys from third parties who run no risk to be prosecuted themselves. Article 19 should not be constructed as requiring self-incrimination.
Lenz Blog
"Last time I checked, it seems the only rights you have in the U.S. are to privacy and to not be offended.
:).
Neither of these are guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution."
Then it is time to make it apart of the constitution. Enough with this penis-vagina anti gay people amendment no one needs, lets get a useful privacy amendment started.
This is what I really didn't like from the summary:
"...pass laws to force users to provide their encryption keys and the plain text of their encrypted files"
That is insane. If someone has documents in which they would be embarrased to have shared (yes, I'm looking at your direction the pro-animal necrophilia crowd) then what business is it of government's that they have them.
One interesting solution to having to hand over your pass keys is provided by the Phonebook Encryption Project. This program encrypts a file to have TWO keys which will decrypt into TWO different files. One key decrypts the file to reveal the beastiality porno, one key decrypts the file for pictures of barney the dinosaur
Also those that say Freenet wouldn't be necessary in North America, I thought the same for the Phonebook project just yesterday. Now I am very glad both Freenet and Phonebook are here.
One interesting solution to having to hand over your pass keys is provided by the Phonebook Encryption Project. This program encrypts a file to have TWO keys which will decrypt into TWO different files. One key decrypts the file to reveal the beastiality porno, one key decrypts the file for pictures of barney the dinosaur
But I don't want to have to re-encrypt all of my lesbian snuff films! Oh well...stupid government. <sigh>
The simple fact is this law would be nonsense, but a great way for the US government to harass Americans: you can't legally harass a US citizen? No problem, just ask your mates in Germany to ask you to do so.
That's right. These evil Germans. During the last years I lived in several different countries, and I can tell you this: The US is most unfree country of all the western countries I ever lived in.
Strictes speed limits, strictes drug laws (no alcohol in public, prison for some weed), longest prison times, broadest rights for law-enforcement (though that is changing), no (my god) nudity, censored TV, worst education (creationism vs. darwinism anyone)... The list goes on and on.
Ironically people here are so brainwashed that they call it "The Land of the Free". What a joke!
So don't quote German law as harrasment (even in case this was just a joke), because they forbid trade of "historic" Nazi material. And BTW if caught trading illegal Nazi materials in Germany, there no fine or jail time, you are just forced to stop it.
Maybe foreign law enforcement will bring some sanity to this f*cked up legal system.
Funny how they'll sigh this thing, but won't agree to stop using landmines ...
...
Yeah, I know they're not related but somehow cybercrime just made me think of landmines
http://www.icbl.org/country/usa/
I have a very small mind and must live with it.
-- E. Dijkstra
I run Uberhacker.Com, a site primarily focused on PHP security. We also run a section in our Forums dedicated to Fighting the CyberCrime Treaty. Please visit the forums if you are interested in the topic, check out the forums and sign up.
Actually, you are bound to US law as a US citizen even when you visit another country. You are required to follow the laws of the country you are in and US law. The information can be found on the state.gov website. There are problems however when 2 laws conflict.
No time to read the article (I'm becomming a good /.er) or most of the comments - finals and such - so I apologize if another has said this. One of the cases I read today is the one Yahoo! filed in response to the French ruling [Yahoo!, Inc. v. La Ligue Contre le Racisme et l'Antisémitisme, et al. (CA, 2001)]. It was only a Cal. case, but the court said something very basic which the feds will have trouble with: even if a person in the US does something on the internet which violates laws in another country, so long as that action is protected in the US (such as under the first amendment), US courts cannot enforce any foreign judgement.
Since treaties are subservient to the Constitution, I think selling Nazi posters is gonna remain a US right.
You should see the equipment to get into a locked house sometime. My personal favorite is a shockwave gun that knocks the pins up and into place. There is also the freezy-heaty gun that freezes the pins in an upward position, then heats the lower pins until they fall into position. Neither of these will allow anyone to know they have been hacked. Then there are traditional lock picking techniques, which take longer. In a pinch, you can always just pound down the door with a piece of concrete, or break a window.
They don't want a copy of your house key because they don't need your house key to get in your house. That data is not secure. Even picks for those nice, safe-looking round locks can be had for about 400 dollars. But what they can't do is break strong encryption. If you put a good system on your computer with a well-chosen key, and make sure there isn't a keylogger installed on your keyboard, or a trojan, or a camera pointed at your fingers... Well, OK, there are ways around it. But after they catch you the only way to open that data is in your head. This violates their whole "hit it with something large until it opens" strategy, so they need that key from you.
That's why they're going for your encryption keys, but not your house keys. It's not because encryption keys aren't sacred, but because your house protection is trivial.
The ______ Agenda
The Ninth goes hand in hand with the Tenth:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
In other words:
The Ninth: Even if we didn't mention them, you have your rights.
The Tenth: If we didn't talk about it, the Feds can't do it.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
I'm not American, so I haven't been through the American school system. But from what I've read, education systems throughout the world tend to push either darwinism or creationism.
I am an American, and I went to High School in a small town in southern New Mexico that made national news in the last couple of years for a big, old-fashioned book burning.
In my high school, we learned darwinism, taught as "theory, not proven". The "not proven" was added in order to avoid offending the parents (and many kids!). Creationism and any sort of religion wasn't allowed in the curriculum at all. I don't know why it was this way, however, because I always thought that presenting both sides of the discussion and discussing it would be far more beneficial to the kids than trying to avoid offending people. But religion wasn't allowed in the school, except for praying before football games, praying before school assemblies, praying before ... (get my meaning?)
My wife and I were discussing the root of this issue tonight, actually. The root of the issue is "should schools be teaching morality?" I think the answer is "yes" (she had to answer yes, too, but I like my reasons better ;) ). I think that much needed education is virtually useless without morality in the teaching. What good is learning history if you don't learn why some part of history is a 'dark time' and other parts were 'good times' and what-have-you? What's the point in teaching about WWII if you don't also teach that Hitler was pure evil, a mass-murderer, and so forth? How can you teach that about Hitler without morality being part of the education? After determining that a school should teach morality, the next and obvious question is, whose morality should it teach? In my honest fucking opinion, the school should try to present both/all sides of a given conflict and the social mores that make up each viewpoint. Saying "the school should teach morality" doesn't necessarily mean the school has to push a specific set of rules down someone's throat.
As far as the correlation between ethnicity and poverty go, I think schools avoid it because it's their own fault. In the US, anyway, that correlation has everything to do with historical racism and little to do with modern racism. Black people, specifically, have been kept poor in many parts of the country by the dominant whites in the area (think Deep South). Now, there's still a lot of racist problems down there, but to my view racism is more of a problem in non-Deep South states, these days. Anyway, black people are generally poor there because their ancestors were kept poor, and property taxes are what funds the schools, so the next generation of black kids grows up in the conditions of the previous generation, and the poor schools fail to provide them with education that would enable them to escape that fate. So it's historical conditions that have caused it, and it's very easy to make the conclusion that "black people are still living in the legacy of slavery in this country" after you've taught the Civil War, Women's Suffrage, the Civil Rights movement, and so forth. But then the schools would have to admit that they've failed in their mission, and there's nothing a school likes less than admitting failure. Hence we have schools graduating thousands of kids that can't read, write, or do math, and saying "look, all of our kids graduate! They all have high grades! We're a good school!"
Blah. The education system here in AMerica is fucked. What have the rest of you lot got? Got anything better? My kids are starting school soon.... (I sincerely hope the Kedutainment package grows nicely, it already teaches more than 12 years worth of schooling in the US)
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Well, for the most part and only in my experience, Darwinism is synonymous with macro evolution and is thought to be antithetical to creationism.
The threats surrounding child abuse are probably much the same here. A teacher can't even give a kid a ride home anymore without being accused of trying to make a pass at the kid, raping him/her, or whatever. Parents have similar problems. A kid can just say "my dad hit me" and then the dad goes to jail for child abuse, whether it can be proven or not to a jury of his peers. Both of these problems, which appear to be extensions of the same problem, are themselves symptomatic of a much larger problem that infests society at all levels. Political Correctness seems to be a symptom of the problem as well, but I haven't yet managed to peg the problem itself. :(
Education is a big political issue, but it's also an issue where the only real power lies at the local level. A candidate for president is pretty much required to say "better education", but there's ain't jack shit he can do about it. Bush said a lot of that, but as a result of his work as governor in Texas we wound up with a bunch of illiterate graduates. Working in fast food I actually had to teach kids with diplomas how to read #1CB. Not just what it meant, but what the # symbol meant, and what a 1 was, and what a C was, and what a B was. Corporate interests appear to be staying out of education, except to sponsor events (a good thing) and to sponsor other stuff (mostly a good thing, I don't have any bad examples), but since the people ultimately in charge of education are elected officials, the numbers used to show successful policies frequently don't indicate success or failure, such as the HIgh School drop-out rate (frequently affected by factors an elected official has nothing to do with. In Texas, under Bush, this number was manipulated by either handing out diplomas when someone threatened to drop out, as is what happened with my wife, or by writing them out of the books entirely so they don't show as a drop-out). Sucks, don't it? ;)
Math is about the only area that doesn't come under fire, so it's not surprising that math does well, overall. Literature is frequently censored in one form or other (my high school refused to carry some works of Shakespeare, they were lewd, and we actually had to fight to be allowed to watch the 1984 movie). History is selectively censored, with the biggest censorship happening with regards to the Indian Wars and early colonization. Spain is always the bad guy (and maybe they really were, historically, but it's hard to tell when England is also almost always the bad guy, until you get to WWII, and I *know* they weren't always bad guys, historically). Mexico is usually a bad guy, too, and Canada is always just a copy of the US (historically accurate, right? ;) ). Australia actually gets presented pretty badly, too, come to think of it. But the Aussie government's dominance of the aboriginal tribes is usually glossed over, probably to be consistent with our own history in that regard.
American schools suck. They perpetuate a lot of myths, such as the myth that Thanksgiving as a holiday has been practiced ever since the pilgrims showed up on the Mayflower, or the myth that the West was conquered because the so-called Indians couldn't keep their word (this one actually got a lot of attention in High School, but in lower schools it was taught that the Indians were pure scalping evil), or the myth that the Civil War was fought with the altruistic purpose of freeing the slaves (yes, it was fought to free the slaves, but not over altruism, over money instead). The US internment of a whole bunch of Asian-descended people during WWII is generally left out of the material entirely because the material is deemed to resemble the concentration camps in Europe of the time a little too much. Not to mention, we can't have ever been racist in our history, the US does no evil, right? It wouldn't tak
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Yeah. It's really an over-correction. Children need greater legal protection, because they are dependant, and in a more vulnerable position. At the moment though, the balance has gone way too far trying to correct for this.
Education here is decided at the State level, for the most part, which means those policies get greater attention than they would if decided on by the local council. In terms of literature, I don't think the public system censors too much - they do try a bit hard to be "modern", but they don't seem to concerned with censoring lewdness or anything. Even my highschool wasn't, and it was a Christian school.
We've sort of gone the opposite way in regards to history. At least once a year, we had at least one unit that was basically all about how evil us white people were for what we did to the Aboriginals. It gets to the point were people are so sick of hearing about it, it loses any impact it might have had. Our history does skim over any negative side of Aboriginal culture (like infanticide - most early cultures practiced this, including the Romans, so its not just the Aboriginals). I suppose since Australia has so little history, and so little impact on anything outside our borders, there isn't really that much point to extensively re-writing it.
I think out syllabus is pretty good over-all. I just think there needs to be more discipline in the classroom. When shouting at a child is considered child abuse, it's become totally ridiculous. The only method of control teachers have now is intimidation, because its not overt. You can't even have detentions any more, because it inhibits the little darlings' social development. I personnally think we could do with more responsibility, and less social development, but hey.
Another plus Australian schools have is that they seem to be a little less stratified than American schools, in terms of social groups. But, again, the only experience I have with American schools is through a friend who went on exchange, so...
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face