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Australian Police Spying On Web, Phone Usage With No Warrants
New submitter i-reek writes "Australian police, along with government agencies, are accessing phone and internet account information, outward and inward call details, phone and internet access location data, and details of IP addresses visited of Australian citizens, all without judicial warrants . In the last two years, some states have shown an increase of more than 50 per cent in these surveillance authorizations, which can be granted by senior police officers and officials instead of a magistrate or judge."
Does anyone know if Canadian Minister Vic Toews (of #TellVicEverything fame) has been on vacation to Australia recently? It's the DREAMLAND of every politician that's "firmly on board' with the US IPR agenda:
- draconian copyright law, drafted by US special interest groups
- strict enforcement with all options on the table
- and now warrantless spying on all citizens, including "government agencies"!
Oh wait... Where am I?
Like trying to run twenty sprinklers off of one garden hose.
It must be revenge for the humiliating thrashing they got over the 18+ video game issue. But all joking aside this is some serious shit.
So, as an Australian I know complaining about this is going to do jack. So how can we protect ourselves?
As far as I can see, getting an Ipredator account (an encrypted VPN straight to Sweden) allows you to bypass the Australian system completely. All they know is "You have an Ipredator account." You can use Skype to do your telephony through the VPN and it, too, becomes obsficated and encrypted as well.
Now, doing this will basically protect you from most things. If you're looking at 4Chan, or weird arse but legal porn (mmm, mechophilia), or prank calling Christian Weston Chandler or whatever, yeah, you're basically safe.
Don't think that you can DDOS whitehouse.gov, though, or make bomb/assassination threats, or look up kiddy porn or whatever. If you piss off the FBI there's really not a lot, in the long term, you can do to avoid pound-me-in-the-arse prison.
I wonder how long Ipredator/etc will be legal for Australians, or if it remains legal but simply using it will get the attention of ASIO.
Years? Months? Maybe it already does...
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
I mean what threat is or has Australia ever faced???
I don't think such levels of monitoring can be justified.
Phone all your friends, and remind them, "Don't say the word BOMB! Remember, don't say the word BOMB! Whatever you do, never, ever say the word BOMB. And don't say ALLAH AKABAR Never, ever say ALLAH AKABAR. And expeciall don't say BOMB and ALLAH AKABAR in the same sentence. The whole thing will BLOW UP in your face. And really never mention the KORAN either. And never put them all in the same sentence, like KORAN blah blah BOMB blah blah ALLAH AKABAR! Now quick, call everyone and warn them, at least once a day, NOT to say KORAN BOMB ALLAH AKABAR!"
... Can get you put in prison. And imagine the spin put on this: Technical Slashdot User Enables Child Pedophiles To Avoid Prosecution!
It's like saying driving lessons cause vehicular manslaughter. Or Viagra causes rape.
My question to the people who allow this kind of searching, without warrants or oversight, is... if it's so easy and cheap to bypass and avoid, and even modestly technical people can google for "How Do I Shot Anonymous Internet?", then whyare you really doing it?
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Police being able to do this things by themselves without having to ask for permission is the hallmark of a Police-State. Rather obviously not body can really want that. The judicial oversight is exactly there to prevent such things from happening.
Note that I do not blame the police. They are just trying to do their job well. But exactly because of that, they are unsuitable to define in which cases this is appropriate and in which case it is not. They have the wrong incentives and the wrong perspective. Which, again, is not really avoidable and not their fault. And therefore somebody else, namely a judge, that has no stake in the actual outcome, needs to decide on this.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If the government begins to act outside the rule of law, it becomes a tyranny and loses all claim to legitimacy. Citizens of that country might not feel ready to take up arms to correct the situation, but they are certainly justified in slipping the constraints of law in likewise fashion. In other words, if police and government officials think it's mete to surveille private citizens without the sanction of law, then citizens are justified in surveilling those police and government officals, and their families, and their neighbors, etc. without the sanction of law. The tools and technical means are within nearly everyone's reach these days.
Yes, be careful. Don't get caught. The police have guns and you don't yada yada. But if recorded conversations of the chief of police exchanging sweet nothings with his mistress and video footage of an MP jacking off in a porn shop start surfacing perhaps they'll do a re-think of pissing on the public's rights the way they are. Especially if you used a common tagline like "Free Australia" so they all know it's being done for a reason.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
We're just hearing about this now? Here in the US they've been doing that since at least the 60's.
How does New Zealand compare to Australia in its movement towards becoming a police state? Anybody who lives there care to comment? Tnx.
In Canada when the Canadian Securities Minister Vic Toews tried to get warrantless wire taping legislation passed this week Canadians decided to help out his information gathering process by:
Sending the minister responsible our web browsing histories every day.
CC the minister on all our email messages.
Email the minister what we up to are doing several times a day.
Updated the ministers Twitter account with what we are doing.
So much data ran into the Canadian Parliament's servers that they either fell over or were deliberately taken off line. The fate of Bill C-30 is now being reviewed.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
One sick world, brought to you by the invisible serpents, controllers who dance behind the scenes and suck you into the occult and anti-Christian, anti-God beliefs.
It will only get worse.
Wake up and see:
http://pastebin.com/06yi5zCV
Pretty soon they'll have us paying for canned air, as prices rise the plebs just bump each other's fat assess in their houses to dancing with the stars and other trance enducing shows.
WHAT is PAULA ABDUL doing THIS WEEK?
Which celebrity died THIS MONTH?
You are LOST!
Quis custodiet ipsos custodet.
Who watches the watching watchers?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
As soon as they passed this law back here a few years back it greatly disturbed me for the possible abuse of such things. We are truly an American test tray!
Can we have the word 'and' back please? Stop being lazy.
I wrote my first program at the age of six, and I still can't work out how this website works.
For all those people saying that "the government is acting outside the law" - try reading the law first. Any intercept of telecommunications requires a warrant. Period. The Police can legally access certain information from telcos without a warrant, however, including the subscribers name and address, or a list of phone calls made/received. This does not include, however, the contents of those communications, or "tracking your every move".
The article title suggests Police are tracking cellphone locations and accessing email contents regularly without warrants, but later admits that only data that can be accessed without a warrant only includes "phone and internet account information, outward and inward call details, phone and internet access location data, and details of IP addresses visited, though not the content of communications."
Imagine a lonely ASIO officer assigned to investigate a pretty woman connected to a drug lord. The lonely ASIO officer falls in love with her prettiness and begins to have a co-dependent spying one way relationship with her. Every time she meets a nice man, he uses his unregulated abilities to screw up her relationships. He knows where she is at all times. He knows who she is dating and fucking. He can fuck her life up in all sorts of ways, and find ways to get into her life, and attempt to be her Prince Charming.
When you give people unregulated power to spy, you're assuming these people are infallible Gods. But they're humans, like everyone else, and giving them that much spying power can unleash their human nature and all that comes with it.
Death is only the beginning of your eternal service to Jesus.
Only North Koreans get to escape their masters when they leave earth.
the institutions of control in society have perfected the modern "international terrorism" approach of controlling people through abnormally high (eventually low) cortisol levels, and calcifying the brain and blocking crucial pathways without which it can seem nearly hopeless to attempt to correct the abnormal stress response. but there are some very very powerful antioxidants that we cannot function without which aid immeasurably. specifically glutathione, vitamin C, and co enzyme Q10.
snort the coQ10 before sleep, its great for assisting the genesis and migration of brain cells, you can smell noticeably better after a few nights. eat at least 10grams of glutathione (perhaps first thing in the morning still developing the regime ), at a rate of 1tsp every hr or more if you feel you need it, acidic fruit has plenty of C.
3) profit
In the last two years, some states have shown an increase of more than 50 per cent in these surveillance authorizations, which can be granted by senior police officers and officials instead of a magistrate or judge.
Sooooo, the police are doing something that they are legally allowed to do to catch people that are doing things that are illegal.
Earth shattering...