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OzLog: Unlimited Private Data Retention For Australia?
AHuxley writes "Australia would like to follow the EU down the 'European Directive on Data Retention' path. Law enforcement agencies may have the option to request a log of all a users of interest telco usage without any review or time limits. From the article: 'The proposal — known popularly as ‘OzLog’ — first came to light in June 2010, when AGD confirmed it had been examining the European Directive on Data Retention (PDF) to consider whether it would be beneficial for Australia to adopt a similar regime. The directive requires telcos to record data such as the source, destination and timing of all emails and telephone calls – even including internet telephony.'"
And very often if there is even a small advantage to doing so. The plus side of having a national policy and laws is you can have some sort of a framework governing the use of the retained data. The downside is that most of these laws just encourage big brotherish behavior
Given that it's Australia, the data will be in an incompatible format, the people acessing it won't know what any of it means and the system that is supposedly gathering the data will be just making the shit up.
If you really want to know what we are up to just buy it from china.
That in Europe data retention is only for a finite amount of time, and can only be used to investigate major crimes, e.g., murder and terrorism (the real kind, not the US kind). Recent rulings by European courts confirm this (no IP addresses should be given to investigate copyright infringement).
This puts a lot of private information in the hands of telephone companies and internet providers. I doubt their security is going to be very good. Anyone with any private information that could be of use to anyone else had better be encrypting it. This would bu businesses guarding their companies trade secrets, people in the public eye who could be implicated in scandals, or any political group with enemies. In the UK they recently had a scandal where the papers were tapping in to phones to get stories. Imagine what a government or maybe just a senior person in the intelligence agency could do with this information. They can often have their own agenda these people which isnt always in the public interest.
If I use Gmail, can my isp trace to whom I send emails ?
These guys are creating a network with waited relationships between us all.
If he is classified with a threat lever of 0.9 and my link to him is valued as 0.7 which is figured out by the frequency and timing of the emails and my relationships to other members he is related to that means I am a threat level of 0.63.
Bogus email accounts simply end up with very small threat levels although a bogus email account would carry some weight on account of the fact that you created it for a particular purpose.
If google can complete the search box in real time as we type, I am sure a tiny budget is required to calculate all out weightings.
Oh, you mean the very same EU Data Retention Directive that has been condemned by the EU's own data protection authority, slammed by legal experts and is currently under evaluation within the European Commission and which, after being found in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in Romania and staggeringly overpowered in Germany, will probably be either restricted so severely it will not matter much anymore or, if enough political pressure can be built in time, completely taken back.
Yeah, looks like a winner to me to introduce into your country now.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
These surveillance and data retention laws are a violation of civil liberties and freedoms. There is no need for government to capture and retain all voice and most data traffice of common users. It's obscene and could only be justified if the person/persons being monitored have committed or are engaged in serious criminal activites. These laws treat everyone like a criminal or terrorist. Sheer insanity. Where will it end ?
Sorry, I don't agree.
Precisely because computers are so good at data, a smart operator can bust the junk pattern and then filter it all out. The basic idea is that I-BigBro don't care about the sum total of your calls, I care about whether particular hotspots get hit at all. Put simply as an example, you can have 88,000 pages of data but the filter in Excel will sort it all up and a "known terrorist phone number" is there.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This will affect those stupid enough to use their ISP's email address, and call on their normal landline or contract phone.
Others will use IRC channels, (occasionally) instant messaging, cycle through disposable or free web-mail accounts, use pre-paid no-contract mobiles using forged details, or just keep bribing those handling the data - just as they've done before.
In fact this really is just theatre with a few headlining arrests to come... (which will be arranged through the previous wiretaps, investigation, and existing lawful methods)
"We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run over." - Aneurin Bevan
The bottom line with government is ALWAYS money. These endless, consistent expansions of government are justified with anything but profit, but behind the curtains, the goal is EXACTLY profit.
Government is a business -- only the money they spend isn't theirs, and they take their revenue by force. But at the top of the pyramid, it doesn't matter where the money goes or whether you "succeed" or "fail" in your "initiative". What matters is that the money passes through your hands, giving you a chance to exploit that cash flow for personal gain.
In the business of government, ALWAYS follow the money.
You do NOT have a right to commit a crime and calling your drug dealer is NOT something that society wants you to get away with.
If society wanted people to be able to commit crimes, it wouldn't have created the police and spend billions on funding for it. It would simply have kept anarchy. The police instead have been given powers to track criminals down and this has always meant powers to track people and communication. Why should your phone logs NOT be available after a court order has been issued for them?
That is the problem with this entire debade, you got complete and utter nutters who somehow thinkt that the general public is on the side of criminals in their cat and mouse game with the police and is rooting for criminals to get away with crimes.
Allt he provisions of "innocent until proven guilty" and provisions against illegal searches are there to protect the innocent, NOT the guilty. Saying you don't want the police to be able to find out about your crimes might work on some of the /. populace who have lost all touch with reality but it just hampers people who really care about privacy of INNOCENT people.
I think that reasonable people who agree that crime should be punished but that we don't want to create an uncontrollable police state, that we should focus on creating proper procedures with check and balances for dealing with our changing society. Log internet data the same as call data already is but make it that the police must get a warrant for a limitted time that will become a matter of public record after a set time so we know who was investigated and why so we can see if it was for legit or illegitimate purposes.
But just a blanket pardon for all criminal behavior, that will never fly and any party that is associated with such claims will loose in an election because once again, no matter what some here might claim, the average citizen does NOT think it right for you to call your drug dealer.
And if you want to live in a society with no rules, Somalia is that away. Have fun, nobody here will miss you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
just draw the attention of the authorities and other parties?
Make the data available to the people being monitored. Be super up-front about it. If people don't like it, they will use other ways to communicate with each other.
Most of the time they are using network analysis. They want to know the numbers/webpages/profiles you connected to, and correlate them with the data of the people on your social network. This allows them to know if you're a civil rights terrorist and plant drugs in your house during a raid.
As always. :-\
How much of these log requirements are privately being driven by Data Storage Companies? Just think about it a little bit. What businesses benefit from policies, rules, and regulations that require logs be kept around? 1+1+1+1+1+...+n = a bunch of hdd space being consumed.
You're not thinking backwards enough. The way to poison that kind of surveillance is to have your dial-a-random-number engine dial terrorists when you in fact have nothing to do with them.
Good luck getting people to use your 'dial every number on the terror-watch list' program to cover up their call to the guy the buy some blow from every now and then.
With Europe's increadible laws protecting personal privacy of data, this seems to go in exactly the other direction. It's like there is us and them and we are the government and we know whats best, on one side and the other, no one should have your data, you should be protected (but not from us). These are hard philosophies to resolve together consistantly.