Australian Gov't Seeks To Record Citizens' Web Histories

An anonymous reader writes "If you thought the Australian Government's Internet filter project was bad, think again. They have a new project — they are examining a policy that would require all Internet service providers to log users' web browsing history and email data such as who all emails were sent to and from. And that's just the start. Telephone calls, mobile phone calls, even Internet telephony. It's all in there. Looks like 1984 was a pretty prophetic book." Several readers also point to ZDNet's coverage.

Comments

HTTPS -- default

[martijnd]

When do we finally make the move to a fully encrypted internet? An unencrypted internet made sense in the days that CPU power was expensive and there were no good encryption libraries. Both these problems were solved a decade ago.

The block seems to be the current idiotically expensive SSL certificate business.

The first step would be for the web browsers to add a "low default security" level : user signed certificates are accepted as "normal" connections without throwing up big errors and don't give much of an additional indication.

Expensive SSL certificates can continue to give the "feel good" level of indication by showing the name of the verified company.

Re:HTTPS -- default

[ledow]

That won't help the wider picture - that only helps the web, the principle is the problem, not the practice. Once they start blocking / monitoring websites it's only a matter of time before bypassing that filter becomes an offence and/or they branch out into other traffic.

You're actually looking for a complete P2P, SSL network to overlay the Internet and provide the security of connection. And as Tor demonstrates - at the moment - that's hard, slow and doesn't protect people's privacy unless they do *everything* right.

Seriously, it's what's needed... some form of P2P, traffic-sharing, encrypted "darknet". It's the only way to stop government sniffing your traffic, choosing what websites they approve of and/or downloading things you might otherwise not be allowed to. Ideally, someone should build a little matchbox-sized device that just anonymously routes data from peers over secure connections via wifi, Tor-like, mesh-networking, with auto-routing, auto-discovery of wireless networks and internet connections, etc - with some QoS of course so no one peer can flood the others out. It's possible now with some embedded device that just accepts all wifi connections and joins them to a CloudVPN / Tor kind of deal. Spread enough of them around a town and you can bypass the traditional Internet entirely, transporting encrypted data over it when necessary, using any connection to another box of its kind that it can find otherwise. And it only takes one person to join to a physically-foreign network and the whole place will be able to contact the world (albeit slowly in that contrived example).

A mix of Tor, CloudVPN, mesh-networking, Kismet, P2P software.

I've said before, it's only a matter of time before "The Internet" becomes nothing more than an infrastructure to carry data for such a network - like back in the old days. The routers won't have any clue what data they are actually routing (always was a breach of layering to have them do that anyway), they just provide the fastest paths to the intended recipient. "The Internet" becomes a backbone network for a kind of global VPN. I'm not talking tomorrow, but give it a few decades and that will end up happening. As it is, we have to encrypt anything sensitive / useful anyway. Before you know it, every protocol running on the Internet will be encrypted (already true for certain things like certain SMTP, chat, web, filesharing, remote shell, etc.), so it's just a matter of lumping them together into a single VPN-style connection. Then "The Internet" returns to its original purpose - providing routes to other places and transmitting data that you don't necessarily know its origin or destination.

As a nice by-product, eliminates things like protocol-based bandwidth-limiting too.

Somebody fill me in here

[Hadlock]

What banner is flying over this huge censorship push? What is the general public's thoughts on all this? Usually with this sort of absolute censorship you have a particularly powerful head of state like in Russia, Iran or North Korea. Australia still has free elections (to my knowlege). Here in the USA we had a bit of tightening here and there security-wise with 9/11, but Australia doesn't seem to have any sort of dictator-to-be, nor do they have any significant terrorist threats or major overarching foreign policy that would require them to keep an eye on dissidents. Usually someone can point to some major speech by a prime minister or president outlining an "improved security policy" for the welfare of the country against some outside boogeyman, but from what I can tell, Australia is tightening it's grip on everything for censorship's sake.

Re:I'm more afraid of the government

[molecular]

Do you mean...

1.) your fear the gov't more than you fear the terrorists and pedophiles
2.) you are more afraid of the government than pedophiles and terrorists are

?

Secretly?

[Sasayaki]

Abbott has refused to speak out against the net filter. Secretly, I would say he quite likes it and will go along with it.

Secretly? (Disclaimer: I have posted this before, but it's worth restating)

Tony Abbot visited humble Darwin city recently and it was there that I personally got to ask him, in his public question and answer time, the following question (roughly remembered):

"The Internet is an important part of the lives of many young Australians, as well as Australia as a whole in this modern age- what do you think of the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's plan to censor the Internet?"

His answer began:

"Well, I'm afraid I'm probably going to disappoint you..." and yes, unfortunately, he did.

Paraphrased his answer was: "Stopping child pornography is extremely important to me and the Liberal party and therefore, if we can prove the censorship plan doesn't work, we will oppose it; but only *this particular thing*. We will continue to seek effective means to block 'filth' (his word) from entering our country any way we can. If the filter works, we will support it."

Basically the message I got from his reply is that Tony Abbot believes that the filter will work "well enough" and is too much of a hot potato to oppose politically. The subtext I personally divined from his answer was a little more chilling; that the filter didn't go far *enough* for his tastes, and that he'd personally rather a complete whitelist than a blacklist. Therefore, speaking as a card-carrying Liberal... if you think that voting for the Liberal party in the next election will make the filter go away, you are sadly mistaken.

On a side note, the fact that he himself is an extremely religious man probably doesn't help a great deal, since it seems that too many politicians tend to "trust God about these things" when it's abundantly clear that God knows sweet F-A about the Tubes and how they work.

Re:Okay...

[muckracer]

> virtually no-one is interested in developing the technologies neccessary to make a secure web a reality

IPv6. It already exists and would/could cover a large chunk of your legitimate concerns. Problem is...the switch-over is taking ages... But it's something you can advocate/implement from your end without waiting on other's.

Re:Okay...

[durrr]

I have a 100gb encrypted container that i don't know the password to. I forgot it two days after making it but decided to keep it around on my harddrive on the basis of "in ten years i can bruteforce this in two hours"
It's like an accidental time capsule and should in no ways be illegal.

Re:Okay...

[Anzya]

Hm, using a a bank on the internet without encryption could be interesting. I almost hope that they do ban encryption. Could be fun. Just give me some warning so that I have time to make popcorn :)