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Australian Parliament Approves Email Snooping
brindafella writes "The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper, reporting on a legislative change last week, says 'the [Australian] Government will have 12 months to access communications not only between the B-party and the suspect, but also between the B-party and anyone else. If you have unwittingly communicated with a suspect (and thereby become a B-party), the Government may be able to monitor all your conversations with family members, friends, work colleagues, your lawyer and your doctor.' The Australian Parliament's major parties combined to pass an amendment to the Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Act 1979."
Seriously these politicians have just gone plain loopy and it's all because the labour party has gone into a tailspin.
State labour in NSW (where Sydney is and the biggest state) has been unable to fix Sydney's transport problem and keeps closing roads around new tollways stuffing up public transport...not to mention they haven't been able to improve a constantly deteriorating health care system. Federal labour can't get enough votes to put up any serious opposition and the opposing party has a majority in both houses. The young labour party has recently been in the papers for calling for conscription - a total about face on their previous postion. Recently the labour party also did an about face on their position regarding forcing ISPs to filter pornography (and are now in favour of this with all of its technical problems). What's more they have personality issues within the party (nothing new in politics but this is when a party has to band together to survive).
I'm an Australian who feels I have zero representation. Not one politician here is even trying to make this country better...not even for the votes.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
This is typical of the current government's attitude to privacy and telecommunications. The Telecommunications Act already allows for seizure of computers and other equipment when it is 'connected with' offences under the Spam Act, for example. There is also evidence that the government has been confiscating and destroying personal computers without a warrant when they contain 'sensitive' information.
All of this is part of a broader lack of accountability, due process and transparency that is becoming part of the culture of Australian lawmaking. There is a good article on the subject here.
For those from more sensible countries, supposedly democratic Australia currently has the following features:
1. One party entirely in control of both houses of parliament
2. No bill of rights, either legislative or constitutional
3. Legislation allowing for the arrest, detention, and interrogation without charge of persons not suspected of any offence if they may have information that is somehow relevant to a suspected terrorist offence; the onus of proof is reversed so that the person being interrogated must prove that they do NOT have any such information.
4. One of the highest rates of phone tapping in the world
5. Unelected bureacrats empowered to spy on Australians with no parliamentary oversight to speak of
6. Several semi-secret US intelligence bases operating on our soil
7. New crimes of sedition for exercising free speech in a manner that encourages the overthrow of the government
8. Troops in Iraq despite over 80% of the population opposing our involvement before the war
At the moment we also have an extremely disturbing rise in racial and religious intolerance, which in my opinion is in no small part attributable to the federal government's policies and fearmongering on those issues. But of course, this doesn't stop us selling weapons-grade uranium to China because they weeeeally promise to use it for civilian purposes only.
Read Pynchon.
I'm increasingly feeling like Australia is caught in a rapid downward spiral. Every week it seems like they've chipped away another little bit of our privacy and liberty. To call the country a ship without a rudder is an understatement - the rudder came off years ago, we're now taking on water, the captain's roaring drunk and half the crew have lost their minds. The standard of living in Australia is generally pretty high for now, but I just can't see it continuing. The problem is, where else is there to go?
I foresee the rebirth of Fidonet except possibly using Wi-Fi.
Just start a chain letter to everyone you know and make sure to CC all the politicians so they will also be subject to monitoring. Let them know they have now become a B-party. If every politician becomes a B-party to every citizen they may reconsider their actions.
The excuse for all of this is "the rise in global terrorism", well if that were really the reason then the terrorists have won, they have fundamentally changed our societies.
The reasons are deeper than that, terrorism is an excuse that is brought out as a bogey man to try to provide justification for further infringements of civil liberites. The Tony Blair, in the UK, is now pushing an act that will allow any government minister to change almost any bit of legislation without having to bother to pursuade parliament to agree.
We will suffer for sleep walking to a state where unelected civil servants have the power to snoop on us without any real oversight. This will be abused by these civil servants for their own personal ends.
You thought that Russia 20 years ago was bad - we will have it far worse.
With the six degrees of separation thing, and careful choices of 'suspects', they can probably get a 90% surveillance rate by declaring only a couple of thousand primary targets.
In other words, as far as I can see, the Australian Parliament has just decreed that the government can read all the email it likes, whenever it likes.
If I were in charge, and unscrupulous, the first person I'd declare a suspect would be the chief of the opposition party.
This does not surprise me, as an Australian I can say that I've definitely noticed a slide into a very right wing agenda here. The current government is right wing and has an absolute majority in our parliament, meaning they can pretty much pass any law or any bill they want without the chance it might be vetoed by opposition parties.
I've been out of Australia for quite some time, I've found there to be quite a contrast to the Australia I left more than a year ago. I arrived back here just a couple of days before the Cronulla Race Riots. Since then our leaders have been spouting racist generalisations. There has been a large police crack down, the muslim community have made many claims that they are being unfairly targeted, I can personally verify this as on two occasions I've personally witnessed police unfairly targeting muslim men. I've also noticed since the riots (where our flag was used as a symbol of racial hatred), many police cars have had Australian flags mounted to their cars. I can't help thinking this is a sign of solidarity with the rascist mob.
I really don't even know how these riots could have occurred without police complicity. We have Racial Villification Laws here in Australia, that if they were applied that day could have been used to arrest most of the mob that day before any violence even began.
And with all this, in the background we have our detention camps in which whole families including children have been kept in detention. There have been cases where children have basically grown up in detention.
Unless there's a big turn around here I think the future for Australia could be something straight out of Huxely's Brave New World or 1984.
I guess we should have kept watching TV...
Now, since the attention whores (politicans) figured that Internet is more interesting than they are and that people don't watch them on TV anymore, they're trying to get our attention back by fucking with _our_ Internet.
Considering s/he's posting about how nobody honest needs privacy, it's kind of funny s/he posts as AC...
Something to hide, probably.
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me