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Australian Government To Widen Spy Agency Powers, Again

Posted by timothy on from the we-know-what's-best-for-you dept.

An anonymous reader writes "It seems the Australian Government has a fondness for expanding the powers of the domestic spy agency, ASIO, be it for hacking into servers or tapping citizens' phones. Now the plan is to make it easier to engage in economic and industrial espionage, as well as on groups such as WikiLeaks."

14 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Was going to post a long comment but... by LongearedBat · · Score: 2

    ...the list of risks would be too long and fairly obvious about allowing an "agency almost unfettered discretion to determine when and how 's powers may be used to gather information about people's activities".

    1. Re:Was going to post a long comment but... by errandum · · Score: 3, Insightful

      But... Don't they already do this everywhere?

      It's just that here there is a law saying that they can, but it is already done in almost every civilized country...

    2. Re:Was going to post a long comment but... by rtb61 · · Score: 2

      Let's be honest these changes to the law are more likely to do with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap and as a 'er' partnership, the uses and abuses the US put it to, also drag in the Australia government.

      Perhaps the US is taking a step back from 'for profit' contractor intelligence which tends to fulfill the need of generating more profit for the contractor than having anything to do with the truth, to seeking aligned intelligence partnerships.

      Of course there is also, how exactly do you word keeping a eye on foreign computer and software corporations owned by or with strong ties to their government. When say a foreign government seeks via it's connections with regional corporations to insert say 'Trojans' in hardware of software, to enable all sorts of nefarious activities and sometimes these activities can be derailed for private for profit purposes.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  2. Put another liberty on the barbie... by Mr+Bubble · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

    Police and intelligence agencies are tasked with a mission. Like ever other profession, they want to get better and better at what they do. They will always push for more weapons, more power and more of a role in our society. It seems like they won't be satisfied until we all live in glass houses - everyone, that is, except them. I am a fairly optimistic person about the future, but this is one of the issues I don't see a way out of because the only antidote is an engaged citizenry that peacefully, but persistently pushes back and that demands their rights. Unfortunately, the citizenry is half asleep on their couches watching cop shows.

    --
    "The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
    1. Re:Put another liberty on the barbie... by c0lo · · Score: 2

      Unfortunately, the citizenry is half asleep on their couches watching cop shows.

      Having to pay mortgage at a 7.8% rate is tiresome.

      --
      Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    2. Re:Put another liberty on the barbie... by Wolfling1 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      We already have far less rights than the Australian population knows. They generally tend to believe that they have the same rights as Americans. We have no Miranda (sp?). We have no right to our homes. Australia has no concept of an illegal search or seizure. Evidence cannot be excluded for these kinds of reasons.

      The weakness of our constitution is part of the problem. The 'man in the street' (or man on the couch) wouldn't have to be so active if we had a half decent constitution. This doesn't mean that we can all sit on our collective backsides and do nothing. It means that there would be more opportunity for civil libertarians to challenge stupid laws.

      Let's face it. Most of us don't really know much about politics and the law. And most of us don't have the will to fight these battles. The purpose of a constitution is to protect the rights of the folks who are less capable of protecting their own.

      I'm certainly not promoting the American constitution. I think we could do way better than that one. Problem is that we're not trying to... and until these little issues become big enough to seriously threaten a government, change is unlikely to happen. The last time a referendum was passed in Australia was 1977, and the content was largely inconsequential to our rights.

      A poster on /. recently brought to my attention that it was narcissistic to fear the loss of liberties. It made me think about that really hard - and after all is said and done, I'm inclined to agree. Excessive police/ASIO rights are unlikely to ever cause problems for me because I'm not a criminal. I'm not even close to being a criminal. This one is not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Let it go.

    3. Re:Put another liberty on the barbie... by dakameleon · · Score: 4, Informative

      We already have far less rights than the Australian population knows. They generally tend to believe that they have the same rights as Americans. We have no Miranda (sp?). We have no right to our homes. Australia has no concept of an illegal search or seizure. Evidence cannot be excluded for these kinds of reasons.

      I would have hoped that you declared your self to not be a lawyer. I'm not a lawyer myself, but Australian legal rights aren't so far gone as all that. If the police are questioning you with the intent of using the information as evidence in court, they do warn you along the same lines as the Miranda rights. (in any case, Miranda was more about the fact of police having to inform about rights than the rights themselves.) You get two calls - one to family or a friend, and another to a lawyer. I don't know where you get the no-right-to-our-homes, and there's certainly a concept of illegal search, seizure and inadmissable illegally obtained evidence. Where do you get these stories from?

      The weakness of our constitution is part of the problem. The 'man in the street' (or man on the couch) wouldn't have to be so active if we had a half decent constitution. This doesn't mean that we can all sit on our collective backsides and do nothing. It means that there would be more opportunity for civil libertarians to challenge stupid laws.

      We might not have a Bill of Rights enshrined in the constitution, but we have 800 years of common law to draw on, given the courts recognise British court decisions as being relevant to Australian laws. Many of the rights you cry poor over have been ruled on in past legal cases.

      Let's face it. Most of us don't really know much about politics and the law. And most of us don't have the will to fight these battles. The purpose of a constitution is to protect the rights of the folks who are less capable of protecting their own.

      The purpose of a constitution is to give a framework for laws to hang on; the fact that Americans have enshrined certain laws in their constitution above and beyond the simple amendment of a vote in parliament is admirable, but a fetishistic obsession with a constitution does not make for easily enshrined laws. No-one expects that the ordinary person on the street would be able to understand all the relevant laws - lawyers have jobs for a reason, and to argue that laws should be simple enough to be understood by everyone is disingenuous in this day and age.

      --
      Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
  3. What?? by c0lo · · Score: 4, Insightful
    TFA

    They will widen ASIO's ability to work with and on behalf of the overseas agencies in collecting what is known as ''foreign intelligence''.

    Collecting data about Australian citizen's on behalf of overseas agencies?

    --
    Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
    1. Re:What?? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      For quite a while now, western countries' spy services have been spying on other western countries' citizens. The data is then traded so that each country's intelligence agency ends up with domestic intelligence data for their own country, while skirting "stop spying on your own citizens so much you assholes" regulations. I am not making this up.

  4. Please bend over... by SirAstral · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You won't feel a thing!

    I no longer feel empathy for enslaved populations. I sit here in the great U.S. of A. and see my fellow citizens taking this shit lying down and begging for more. Worse yet as I try to rally my fellow citizens to try to stop this they all look at me like I am crazy. And when I tell them stories when good ole gubmint oversteps they just look at me like I am stupid, even when I provide them with links from reputable sources. They just say... ah there is more to the story they are not telling you.

    Australia can just go and suck it long and hard, but tell them to leave some room at the feet of their masters, my people with be joining them all too soon!

  5. Same old story, potentially with ramifications by ausrob · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Unforturnately this is nothing new for Australia, and will continue to be the case because Australians are generally quite apathetic when it comes to governance. Generally, it takes an astonishing act to garner much public outrage, which means Australia is a prime location for testing certain legislative prerogatives. The problem (amongst other things) is that it sometimes sets a very bad precedent, internationally. Once such powers are granted in one country, it is often used to justify the granting of similar powers in other countries. This can also apply to copyright, tax (e.g. GST in Australia influenced by the success of the Canadian sales tax model) and much more.

    1. Re:Same old story, potentially with ramifications by dakameleon · · Score: 3, Informative

      You say the tax example as though Australia was amongst the early movers in applying a GST, or that sales taxes are rare enough elsewhere in the world. Hell, NZ had a GST before we did, and it had been proposed nearly 10 years prior by John Hewson. The GST replaced a series of different state sales taxes, harmonising tax arrangements around the country but shifting a huge chunk of power to Canberra through the payment redistribution system that causes such consternation at each COAG meeting.

      Furthermore, copyright is bound mostly by international treaties; between the updates to the Bern treaty and our FTA with the US effectively importing the DMCA, our copyright law is no more "inspired" by others than our adherence to the Geneva convention.

      --
      Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.
  6. What foreign security threats does Au. face? by Animats · · Score: 2

    The last major terrorism incident in Australia was in 1978, and that one is generally attributed to Australia's own security forces. In 1986, somebody tried a bombing, and blew themselves up. There have been some foreign bombings in Indonesia that killed Australians. That's it. There is no significant terrorism problem.

    As for external attack, Australia is an island, has a respectable army, navy and air force, and nobody has attacked since WWII.

    What, exactly, justifies stringent security measures?

  7. you realize the NSA spies on you and feeds it by decora · · Score: 3, Informative

    to the Australian government? And vice versa?