Australians to Increases Surveillance Powers?

Anonymous Coward writes to tell us The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that new laws being presented to parliament this week would allow police and spy agencies additional power to monitor communications of people not suspected of any crime. From the article: "Under the changes, police will be able to tap the phone calls and trace the emails and text messages of third parties to suspected crimes. Police will have 45 days to monitor a person not under suspicion in the hope it will lead them to the person or people they do suspect."

Comments

Decline of the West?

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

There is a sense in which the decay of organization and government issues in one selfsame behaviour: the will, at all costs, to maintain power.

“Democracy,” too, was a catchphrase of Communist tyranny; whither our democracies appear to be degenerating.

Freedom?

[lennart78]

And another victory for Bin Laden and co. Everytime a Western government implements laws like these, he comes a step closer to achieve his goal: Undermining Western civilization, economics and politics, and that without incurring any cost, be it monetary or people.

Re:Freedom?

[babbling]

This has nothing to do with terrorism. "Terrorism" is just the excuse that they are using to implement these laws, in the same way that "piracy and viruses" are the excuses that Microsoft are using to take control of peoples' computers away from them.

The US, Britain and Australia are basically just locking down the world as quickly as they can. I don't think anyone really knows why they are doing this, but the "to stop terrorism" excuse is obviously bullshit. It's unlikely these governments are naive enough to think that these measures will really stop terrorist attacks.

I know these things make it easier for the governments to monitor/control their people, but I don't think that is the full story. There's no reason why a government would really want this much control.

Governments everywhere, and political terror

[Morgaine]

1984 is creeping up on us from every corner of the planet. Australia isn't particularly special.

In the UK, we're well on our way to being followed in our every move, our freedoms being "allowed" only if we carry the necessary papers, checked, validated and scanned in everything we do, and so on.

What it comes down to is this: politicians everywhere are scum. They don't work towards a better and freer life for ordinary people, but purely for their own self-aggrandizement and political power. And since it seems that they can achieve nothing without creating new laws, the public is continually being imprisoned within ever thicker legal walls and shackled with ever tighter legal chains.

"The Fight Against Terrorism" is of course used as the current excuse. In reality, the actual daily terror here is coming from the politicians and the police. Nobody worries on a daily basis about a true whacko blowing up the underground (because the likelihood is low), but everyone worries about being jumped on by a dozen police officers on the grounds of "looking suuspicious". God, that must be easy work for the police, looking for people with shifty eyes. And I really pity the poor blokes with beards, or those who look slightly middle-eastern ... clearly candidates for terrorist recruitment in the eyes of the police here.

I don't think that this is going to change any time soon. You know why? Because people are dumb, and watch too much TV, and believe the messages that the politicians and media are feeding them.

It's sad times indeed.

Re:Governments everywhere, and political terror

[_Hellfire_]

And since it seems that they can achieve nothing without creating new laws, the public is continually being imprisoned within ever thicker legal walls and shackled with ever tighter legal chains.

Agreed. The problem with the constant creation of new laws is that after a while, everything becomes illegal. This means that the execution of justice now rests not with the judges and magistrates where it belongs, but with the police, whose original function is to simply arrest law breakers and bring them before the legal system. Since everything is illegal, the police must decide who to arrest and who to ignore, so in effect, they are deciding who is guilty and who is innocent. This merges back the explicit separation of the legal and enforcement arms. A state where the police function like this is called a police state. It's not the fact that they will arrest you for breaking some obscure law (which is probably unlikely), it's the fact that they can.

The terrorists have won

[MikeRT]

For Americans, at least, from Wikipedia:

With respect to terrorism definitions, for example, section 802 of the Act created the new crime category of "domestic terrorism." According to this provision, which is found in the U.S. criminal code at 18 U.S.C. 2331, domestic terrorism means activities that (A) involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the U.S. or of any state, that (B) appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion, or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping, and (C) occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S.

Terrorism of all kind is about influencing the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion. Rather than mass deport people from "problematic" countries like Saudi Arabia, they'd rather screw all citizens and resident aliens alike. Turks and Albanians aren't very prone to hardline Islam compared to Saudis. Most Albanians are so supposed to be quite chill about Islam. Why restrict them when it's the Wahabi Saudis who are causing the bloodshed and spread of terrorist ideas in foreign mosques?

That's another point that needs to be considered. The Saudi-funded mosques and schools are Wahabi in doctrine. They're so hardline that they want even the Shia and Sufis exterminated. Why do we let these wild-eyed zealots who preach sedition and actively agitate for treason among our Muslims to operate openly? The best option for the US and Australia alike is systematic legislative and enforcement elimination of Wahabism from our borders. As long as they can continue to operate on our soil, they're an enemy, and their schools are akin to saying, "ok KGB, you can recruit at the Ivy League career fairs."

Re:Pure evil

[RobotRunAmok]

The thing about the Australian government as it stands today is that it's just pure evil.

And from your "blog:"

I've been bored recently, but for some reason I'm too lazy to take the effort to do anything entertaining, like getting my PS2 plugged into my TV again.
I'm really pathetic.

I guess Mr. Howard -- and Messrs. Blair and Bush, for that matter -- is fortunate that they don't make Angry Young Men like they used to.

Re:I've said it before ...

[Narcissus]

I always wonder about the "jilted ex" scenarios... it's not about you doing anything wrong, it's about someone having access to all that data that decides to do something wrong.

If we were tracking everyone, anyone with even a bit of access could decide to track down that woman that left him. Imagine he beat her and so she steals away in the middle of the night. He decides to get even and so tracks her down. Or he decides that you, her new lover, need to be taught a lesson. Or maybe her parents or her kids.

They're the kinds of scenarios I worry about...

Re:I've said it before ...

[Money for Nothin']

What's the person listening in going to think or care of me? Absolutely nothing, because he's never met me.

Oh really? There's no possibility that you would know anybody working in the govn'ts monitoring agency? Or that they would know you (e.g. from middle or high school, if nowhere else)?

How can you be *certain* the person listening doesn't know who you are?

Moreover, how do you know they are not a criminal who has not yet been caught? Suppose they are working in the monitoring agency by day, but go dumpster-diving by night, looking for credit card statements and such. They happen to find yours.

Now, not only do they have a history of your credit transactions, but they have intimate knowledge of your personal life. If you communicate with your son or daughter over the phone or in email, they know where your child will be -- and let's suppose again that the monitoring person is a child-molestor. Then what do you do? *They* know where your child is -- but you don't know that they know this.

At the very least man, if you're going to advocate a privacy-less society, then advocate a Transparent Society, where the watchers can be watched, along with every other citizen.

You cannot trust the lives of you or your family to *ANYBODY* you have not met. *EVER*. For *ANY* reason, regardless of their title or position or certifications. Yet, that is precisely what your position entails.

I maintain (and no less because of your post) that people who say "if you have nothing to hide, then what's wrong with being watched?" are idiots who haven't thought beyond step 1 and whose understanding of government and its historical abuses is severely-lacking. I have yet to find a person who is willing to map out the tree of possible causal paths that grows from a policy like this...

Power Grab

[Paraplex]

I posted this elsewhere:

For the love of god, someone get these politicians a hobby. They have far too much time and money at their disposal.

I'd like to see Blair, Bush, Howard & Bin Laden settle this over a good old game of marbles and leave us out of it.

Who the hell are these twirps? Never met them, never heard a SINGLE intelligent thing come out of any of their mouths and day after day they affect my life. They sit there in these strange black outfits with these weird nooses around their necks arguing about things which are obviously issues of semantics, breaking every rule of intelligent debate & rationalisation and prompting the media beast to artificially inflate these "issues" so that the bored apathetic masses get up in arms and keep them voted in.

We're throwing away our freedoms so the media can make you pay for & drink sugar water.

The extreme views speak in loud, inflamatory soundbytes that serve to sell advertising to gullible viewers: "X is EVIL" "ALL Y DESERVE TO DIE" while the moderate, intelligent, rational view is obscured and diffused by its truthful verbosity and its inherent "unmarketability"

Sometimes I just bang my head against the wall at the complete insanity of it all.