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Inside Australia's Data Retention Proposal
bennyboy64 writes "New details have emerged on Australia's attempt at getting a data retention regime into place, with meeting notes taken by industry sources showing exactly what has been proposed. In a nutshell, the Australian government wants Internet service providers to keep anything and everything they have the ability to log and retain for two years 'at this stage.'"
... I have to say that this is nothing but seriously scary.
(Hopefully 'voted out of office'...)
No sig today...
Well the hell is going on in Australia lately??? Seems like every few days it is yet another article about YMBB (Yet More Big Brother). Does the populous want this stuff or did a new political machine take over or something?
From TFA:
"I think they're being a little bit cute when they say they want the source and the destination IP addresses for internet sessions [while] saying 'we're not really asking for web browsing history' "
My mind wanders to Mark Twain's, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court":
"Verily, I cannot make it out. Ye've just said ours are the higher, and with the same breath ye take it back."
Seriously, the more that world governments try to push these proposals, the more demand there will be for robust anonymity online. Whatever data they collect will eventually be used against the citizens, and when citizens start seeing their friends in legal trouble, they will start looking into ways of preventing the same from happening to them. It will become a cat and mouse game, and if the game is allowed to continue long enough, we may see things turn violent (e.g. what happens in countries like China).
Palm trees and 8
I'm betting Seagate dropped some serious $AU to get this passed.
Bring on the next election. What is worrying is these 'crazy' ideas that keep getting pushed around- and its always the same old selling point A) Evil-Terrorists or B) Save the innocent children. Really, if this is so 'unimportant' why the hell would you want to keep this data for 2-3 years (let alone the time frame the article suggests for the law enforcement agencys are asking for)?
Slackware- Its not just an OS; its a lifestyle
Keep sending an email from yourself to yourself every day, it doesn't have to have anything in the message, but it will waste the capacity of the ISP's logging hard drives having to log all the details of the email like time sent, from and to etc. etc.. The faster their drives fill up with garbage the faster they will burn through their profits, and maybe pull their fingers out of their backsides and protest against stupid laws.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I get the idea that this is only a fear tactic, there's no way they could go through all that information. Even still, it is an invasion of privacy.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
As seems typical with this government they don't think through the consequences of their laws (or proposed laws). A good law should:
1) Feel guilty if I break. (not applicable in this case cause it is a proscriptive law)
2) Solve a problem.. In this case it will just lead to more off shore services, encryption and obfuscation in existing communications. This will just lift the bar so that a warranted tap will no longer be likely to provide anything useful.
3) Hurt the bad guys more than the good guys. This just lifts the cost for everybody and depending on what the ISPs need to do to collect this data then it may effect performance.
4) Be technically possible.
I've got a plan with a static IP so my ISP doesn't do any transparent proxying so they don't automaticaly get my URL history. I'm running my own mail server so they don't get my email information. I trust them becuase I know they couldn't afford to be bothered.
So the ISP is going to have to start doing deep packet inspection on all my traffic to pull out these bits of information to log. That starts to get expensive and intrusive to their operations and my bill.
If we start to use more TLS on our smtp connections then they just won't have the information to log.
If they are logging URLs then I'd be tempted to do my backups with encrypted data in the get request. Can't be compressed and can't be used. This sort of attack with expensive noise could be implemented on a lot of websites... Say google with their stance against the Australian governments stupidity put more hash codes in their URLs. It would make the hard drive manufacturers rich trying to supply the ISPs fast enough.
I don't know too many Australians, so this is anecdotal, but they don't seem to be very active politically. As the old Kiwi joke goes, it takes 21 Australians to change a lightbulb, one to hold the bulb and twenty to drink beer until the room starts spinning.
So in summary Australians may have some free speech as long as it is saved and logged in such a way that the Australian government can study it in detail and decide if punishment is in order for speaking freely. Excuse me, my girlfriend is a little bit pregnant.
that doesn't make it suck any less.
This clown Conroy's views are not representative of the general public (I didn't vote for him </python>)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Seriously, I really want to know who this privacy commissioner is who is all alarmed about Google accidentally capturing a few packets of data in a one time drive by operation and then deleting them, but who is perfectly ok with logging every single email recipient and every web site accessed. How can this person even functionally operate in the world when they are so schizophrenic?
Australians hardly ever vote for parties with silly names. I propose the form a a coalition with other parties with civil liberties in mind and drop the silly names. We also have The Australian sex party. They get bugger all votes because "working family's" won't vote for a single issue party or a party with a silly name.
I know it is frustrating but it is one of the issues that we face and that is one possible solution. It also concentrates the civil libertarian vote to gain more power.
Actually, the single issue parties are great. It lets people that care about that particular issue vote that 'party' in at number one. The preference system lets you select the other large parties in descending order of who else you'd actually prefer to win.
If, for example, the Pirate Party somehow won the seat in that electorate, the nominated candidate would probably just turn it down. But, even if they don't win, the vote would show that any other candidate that stood for that same issue would have a commensurate increase in their own votes next time around.
The Pirate Party is confusingly named. What they stand for is extremely well reasoned - ie. they're NOT about completely abolishing copyright legislation and making piracy legal. It'll be interesting to see if they get enough members to register as an official political party before the next election.
It makes me wonder whether the ministers concerned are large share holders of Hitachi and Seagate maybe?
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I never said they were bad partys but that average voters don't vote for them because they perceive them to be wasted votes. Hence why I suggest they should form a coalition to pool their issues into one voter block and garner more power for the issues they care about.
The trick with the preference voting system that we are lucky enough to have in Australia, is that there are no 'wasted votes' in the same sense that happens when you only get to vote for a single candidate/party. So there is no downside to voting for your 'idealistic' party first, followed by labour/liberal in the order that you prefer.
It's a shame that people still don't understand the tremendous benefits you get from being able to number the candidates from 1st to last. This is one of those benefits.
I read this great article about how stupid this new law will be. http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=10589