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Oz Govt Pushes Ahead With ISP Customer Data Retention
angry tapir writes "The Australian federal government is pushing ahead with reforms that could see consumers' information kept on file for up to two years by ISPs. This could include the data retention of personal Internet browsing information which intelligence agencies could access in the event of criminal activities by individuals or organizations."
It was sent to a parliamentary committee for public discussion! We all know how productive and fast moving those are!</sarcasm>
We see an increase in SSL connections to Sweden.
That means spied records of all innocent people are kept almost half as long as they are in the US!
(I mean, officially. You know those records aren't really going anywhere ever)
“Crooks and terrorists will just use encryption or secure services to provide nothing but meaningless data - it's Mr or Mrs Average whose lives could be turned upside down by data breaches or bureaucratic spying.”
Now if only that quote had come from the Attorney General, instead of Electronic Frontiers Australia...
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Why is your bathroom door shut, anyway? What are you hiding in there?
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
I don't see where it stipulates what would need to be retained. Is it merely header information? A list of URLs (SSL will break this)? A copy of the data itself?
No matter which direction this goes, it seems to me that it would be very, very easy to overwhelm them with data. Fire off a perl script that connects to $giant_list_of_random_URLs 500 times a minute. Turn it down when you need to do work, crank it up when you go to bed... and you're suddenly costing them an enormous amount of storage while turning their signal to noise ratio into crap.
These tools are virtually daring us to vote for "that other little man".
Athy, athier, athiest.
I'm voting Greens again.
Yes, costing the ISP a packet for storage (which they will pass on to you) while the government is free to go on and makes more pointless laws to tinker with the net.
It appears you think that when law enforcement seizes items for evidence that they pay full retail price for the goods instead of just taking it away. The only "charges" in your example above would be the fines or time served for contempt of court or some sort of obstruction.
And that's how funding works.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Today I saw Australia spelled 'Austalia' in an /. title, so I guess that is a good enough reason to use 'Oz' in the title instead, apart from the fact that I don't know an single AustRalian who the word Oz in typeform, we usually type Aus if we're lazy enough but, I know, I know, it's an extra letter and all, it's an extra 33.33% chance that someone might screw it up!
Adelaide TAFE was build as a response to the (then) great increase in Overseas students to South Australia, either to learn English, study at uni or as exchange students.
I was on a "behind the scenes" tour of Adelaide TAFE's IT room, eg, as part of a Linux conference in 2004, where the host quite -proudly- recounted all the details of their "Save Everything" policy & procedures.
"Past is Prologue" ;-/
What's -really- lacking of Australia's public sector use of IT is what the gov't -refuses- to release to the public.
AUSTRALIA HAS A LOT TO LEARN FROM SWEDEN ABOUT GIVING THE PUBLIC WHAT IT'S PAID FOR.
Eg, a talk for Australian Computer Society, given about 8 years ago (in a [tele]conference room, at the top of Adelaide-based EDS corporation's N Tce CBD tower), gov't IT heads had no problems revealing that - even where internal Health Dep't IT staff had informally come up with correlations between known locations of air and/or wather pollution in South Australia and unusually high rates of particular diseases - there was NO CHANCE that they'd "ever" -officially- release such correlations to the Public.
As to reasons for this unethical secrecy (IMO), the IT heads told us that the gov't would be sued by anyone in Real Estate, eg, after prices dropped (in less healthy areas).
Compare to USA, which has on-line registers of places where pollutants are known to be stored and/or where other sources of air / water / ground pollution may be (or have been) spewing toxins over time.
Welcome to Australia, where "she'll be right, mate".. :-/
Seriously, you've obviously got to be well connected to someone who has access to such correlations in order to get any access yourself - either a manager or an IT Guru.
I'm reminded of a recent /. article:
IT Guru's don't always have the Public Good topping their priority-lists... One SysAdmin - with lots of access to the national broadcaster: ABC (a.k.a. "Auntie") - was caught having installed software to sell unused CPU-time to private sector buyers.
S/He -wasn't- fired, but got some training on what was OK & not OK to do with tax-paer IT systems.
I didn't hear whether he had to share any of his "CPU-cycle" earnings with the ABC and/or gov't...?
Time for everyone in Australia to run a 24/7 web spider that surfs random sites.