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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."
“Democracy,” too, was a catchphrase of Communist tyranny; whither our democracies appear to be degenerating.
To recap - This is just another assault on privacy by the Liberal Party. It may not pass now, but it will someday, and when that day comes - I'm moving across the ditch to New Zealand
In case you can't tell - I'm an Australian resident
"Sure there's porn and piracy on the Web but there's probably a downside too."
The thing about the Australian government as it stands today is that it's just pure evil. If a report came tomorrow that John Howard likes to kill puppies it would not suprise me at all. The only reason he's still around is due to a generally incompetent opposition.
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.
Doesnt come as a surprise given the following plans.
NSW plans new security camera regime.I think it is safe to say that we are all potential criminals.
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
1984 is creeping up on us from every corner of the planet. Australia isn't particularly special.
... clearly candidates for terrorist recruitment in the eyes of the police here.
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
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.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
It is not about if or if not you have done anything wrong, my biggest objection to such measures is the probability of my personal information being misused. What if a particular company be it defence contractor or government sponsor were to use or personal data for marketing or some other sinister purpose? What if government employees began selling your phone conversations much the same way phone company employee sell your phone records?
Think about the conversations you have and the things you do in private, are you really sure you don't care who is watching, when they are watching and what they are recording? What will happen to such recordings?
The Nazi's used old census papers to track down Jews, imagine what a similar regime could do with all this pre-gathered "intelligence" if they were to ever come to power. Your trust and naivety will be your downfall.
Excuses Are Like Assholes - Everybody's Got One
For Americans, at least, from Wikipedia:
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."
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...
If they do it as dodgely as they do the rest of their law enforcement, she'll be right mate!
For example, your doing something dodgy in your car. Do you a) stick a GPS transponder to it b) follow them 2 cars back in a recently made australian car and match every lane change. While all the while sitting the there with a box on your dash and the both of you wearing suits in the middle of summer?
This is the same as for the internet a) sliding in a rootkit (maybe the could get some help from Sony) b) Continually ping the box with ICMP Echo requests to make sure its there. While outside you somehow notice that your cable modem cord has been diverted through a van with a big:
All
Flowers
Pronto
written in capitals. Seriously though, if I use a decent Operating System and End to End encryption, what have I got to worry about?
"I'm going to f***ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f***ing kill Google"
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...
Is Capitalism Good for the Poor?
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.
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
If you look on Google, you can find information on Wahabi preaching in the US... almost all of it being funded by the Saudi royalty. CAIR is a group that has reportedly been connected to Hamas, and is a leading "Muslim civil rights group" modeled on the NAACP. These groups preach sedition and agitate for treason in our Muslim populations. Eliminating Wahabism from our countries is the only way we can even attempt to integrate our Muslims peacefully and safely.
I can. Bob Brown of the Greens in Australia.
I agree with the basic premise - you can't give unlimited power to other people just because you happen not to be doing a crime today. After all, you don't know exactly how these powers will be used in practice, nor do you know what laws may be passed in future, which you may strongly disagree with and thus ignore in a civil disobedience kind of way.
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.
This, however, seems a bit over the top. I'm trusting my life every day - to the policemen, to the designers and builders of my car, to the other drivers around me, to the people who built the office I work in, the lifts, the maintenance people. Simply by living in a modern social setting you're implicitly trusting thousands of people every day.
Yeah, but Fairfax got rid of a whole bunch of writers, etc., recently. So, unfortunately they will be getting worse, too.
Not Free SF Reader
That was amusing. Shame the mods didn't think so.