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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.
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
Well, unfortunately it's not that simple.
Here in Oz we have a choice between the current party who have a particular bent towards nanny stating but otherwise aren't too bad, the Liberal party who are no longer liberal and seem to support the idea of moving back to the 1950's, xenophobia, conservative religious values, privatizing things even the US hasn't privatized, and bending over backwards for big business(and is also a direct continuation of the bugger we voted out last time), and the Greens, who are one of those parties who have a lot of really good ideas, but who are also raving lunatics.
So we have the choice of giving up our freedom, giving up our freedom, or giving up everything else in exchange for our freedom. It's not a whole lot different than the upcoming US election except that our lunatic fringe party is on the left whereas your lunatic fringe party is on the right.