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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"!
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
Oh wait... Where am I?
I don't know, but when you find one (land of the free) let me know!
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!"
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.
I mean what threat is or has Australia ever faced???
Rabbits!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
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.
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