Slashdot Mirror
2 Year Data Retention For Australian ISPs
freddienumber13 writes "Following similar acts passed by foreign governments, the Australian government is now seeking feedback on its plans to bring into law the requirement for ISPs to retain user data for up to 2 years. They're also seeking changes to the law that would allow undercover ASIO agents and its sources to commit crimes which would include, for example, hacking into your computer."
I hope our pollies' blatant disregard of anything other than what will make them the most popular will contrive to prevent this from being passed!
Also, first.
People say the USA is bad, but Australia seems to have the most draconian internet legislation I've heard of.
This is US policy by proxy. The US pushes foreign governments into doing stuff like this in return for "cooperation", especially trade agreements.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
From crikey.com.au
"The final terms of reference for the inquiry match the proposals sent to the committee by Roxon, and include the controversial 2 year data retention proposal long urged by Attorney-Generalâ(TM)s bureaucrats. However, the committee has now also published a discussion paper prepared by the Attorney-Generalâ(TM)s Department to commence the inquiry, outlining the rationale for three types of proposals: those the government wants to progress, those it is considering, and those it is merely seeking views on."
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House_of_Representatives_Committees?url=pjcis/nsl2012/additional/discussion%20paper.pdf
I've got a counter proposal. what about forever ?
Orwell's 1984 was supposed to be a warning Ms Roxon, not a guidebook for you.
As far as I've heard (don't take this as stone-cold facts) is that small amount of Marijuana is legalized in Australia, as well as growing it. Or at least ignored by the law. (For personal use etc).
So this blows my mind, I actually thought that Australia was an amazing country to live in, if you ignore all the deadly animals, enormous spiders and godzilla-like snakes.
Who are the weasels who think up shit like this ? I'm reasonably certain that if any citizen obtained the communication history of any other, they'd be thrown in jail.
When these moronic wombles (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP7CDvQULXw) get the sack, Australia will be a better place.
Don't worry the privacy invasions will be totally random and you may sue them afterwards http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/asio-settles-out-of-court-over-botched-raid-case/2005/11/01/1130823210697.html
With police like these, who needs criminals?
Asking for feedback? You know what that means? It means that if you are Australian then you really ought to tell them what you think about this. Ideally before the end of the month to be sure that your feedback can be read before the hearings start.
"Modernise and streamline ASIOâ(TM)s warrant provisions" means fixing these perceived problems:
naturally, there are solutions proposed for all these issues !
>This is US policy by proxy.
That it is, and if it's not direct, it's a wink and a nod, because our politicians can then turn around and tell us here in the states that we need to "harmonise" with our trade partners, and thus things like SOPA and Lamar Smith's recent shenanigans by chopping up SOPA into smaller bits and getting the pieces passed.
It's a gigantic circle jerk with nobody's actual rights, or even opinions, being considered except those of the media companies and the statists.
Just wait for Romney to be elected. The fix is in.
--
BMO
So much for a fucking democracy. Virtually none of us want this and yet it'll still get passed.
And what the fuck is going on here: the same politicians who want all of our secrets are keeping mum when it comes to themselves:
Web snooping policy shrouded in secrecy
No Minister: 90% of web snoop document censored to stop 'premature unnecessary debate'
How the FUCK did we end up in this bizarro world?
>This is US policy by proxy.
That it is, and if it's not direct, it's a wink and a nod, because our politicians can then turn around and tell us here in the states that we need to "harmonise" with our trade partners, and thus things like SOPA and Lamar Smith's recent shenanigans by chopping up SOPA into smaller bits and getting the pieces passed.
It's a gigantic circle jerk with nobody's actual rights, or even opinions, being considered except those of the media companies and the statists.
Just wait for Romney to be elected. The fix is in.
--
BMO
Not only is everything the fault of Republicans, this is even true when the things happening are in other countries *and* when State is run by liberals and the administration and Senate are run by Democrats. Unbelievable.
and not ASIS and CIA in the first place...
If ASIS and CIA have enough boots on the ground overseas, they'll eliminate the need for a large ASIO/FBI which can do domestic monitoring.
If the politicians castrate ASIS and CIA's ability to operate overseas in terms of manpower and/or rules of engagement, the foreign threat is not hampered abroad and can translate into a domestic threat by virtue of immigration and tourism. That makes a job for the ASIO and FBI, which means more power at home, which means the politicians have a real power infrastructure to use for their benefit.
This is also why the Romans kept the legions abroad and required them to disarm in Italy...
People say the USA is bad, but Australia seems to have the most draconian internet legislation I've heard of.
This is US policy by proxy. The US pushes foreign governments into doing stuff like this in return for "cooperation", especially trade agreements.
Hear, hear...
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Lets have TOTAL TRANSPARENCY in government first (let's call it wikileaks diplomatic cables on steroids) AND then, and only then can you record any conversation or discussion or action for two or more years of those you govern... Feels different when it's on the other foot doesn't it...
But I am in a somewhat safe liberal seat and writing to Steve Irons is likely to get no response or some sort of canned response about how important this is for the security of our nation.
>Not only is everything the fault of Republicans, this is even true when the things happening are in other countries *and* when State is run by liberals and the administration and Senate are run by Democrats. Unbelievable.
Currently it's the fault of the Republicans but we have had people previously like Senator Disney (aka Hollings) and Sonny Bono. Remember them? It all depends on who gets bought the most. The one needing to be bought this time just happens to be Lamar Smith since he runs the Judiciary Committee.
But what I was referencing in my closing statement about Romney was the foreign policy people he's got as his advisors and future members of the Cabinet. He's got the entire board, except for one obvious person, from the Foreign Policy Initiative, aka PNAC II. You think bullying American influence is bad now under Obama? Just you wait.
--
BMO
Classic fishing, choose the person you want to arrest, then fish till you find something to arrest them for. In the UK we have a catchall law, the 'extreme porn' law, that makes it a criminal offence to view porn that is classed as 'extreme' (pretty much all of it except vag penetration).
It's been used several times now to put people away as a side crime after the search of computers and Internet data failed to make a case against the person they wanted to arrest.
Egypt just elected a government, and the military are still basically in power, and the court appointed by the military ruled that Parliament can't meet because some of the members were elected in seats the military decided had to be contested only by minor independents. As if the military can pre-select the people who can stand for election, thus rigging the election the way they wanted.
I've said it before, THE BIGGEST THREAT TO FREEDOM FROM ANY COUNTRY IS MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. The army and spooks, whether its the KGB or NSA or the Egyptian Secret Police or J Edgar Hooover, they ALWAYS end up misusing broad powers like this and taking power out of the democracy.
Why would you put innocent people under surveillance just in case they might do something you don't like in future??
If it's not okay for a private citizen to do, why should it ever be okay for the government to do? I haven't read the article, so unless they mean getting a court order in order to break into someone's computer (call it what it is), then I don't see it as being okay. (I'm not Austrlian.)
Set up a dot matrix printer with continous paper and let it spool down the elevator shaft into the basement. If the spooks come looking for data, point them at the basement door...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
ASIO don't handle domestic intelligence. So the only reason they would crack into someone's computer would be for foreign threats.
...
Just wait for Romney to be elected. The fix is in.
I heard that 4 years ago with Obama.
Hope and Change.
I lost hope and can't afford to make change.
Be seeing you...
http://pirateparty.org.au/
Currently it's the fault of the Republicans
Again, look at who's actually been in charge for the last three years and in control of such things. The baton won't be passed on to the Republicans until they win the next election.
But what I was referencing in my closing statement about Romney was the foreign policy people he's got as his advisors and future members of the Cabinet. He's got the entire board, except for one obvious person, from the Foreign Policy Initiative, aka PNAC II. You think bullying American influence is bad now under Obama? Just you wait.
Well, that would explain why the vote flipper phenomena (don't have a good summary of the effect, though it is IMHO probably voter fraud through rigged vote tabulation, but here's a huge collection of discussion, graphs, and informal studies of from that time) was going on in the Republican primaries. A collection of the same old remoras that have been attached to previous Republican candidates would not be promising especially in that light.
Pretty useful for nefarious purposes to have access to the last two years of somebody's traffic...
Identity theft will be impossible to guard against.
The ISPs responsible for storing all this data, need to do it at the lowest possible cost. That always works out well....
The best bit will be the assumption that all this data collected from the ISP couldn't possibly be wrong, incomplete, or misleading.
Framing people for child pornography, murder, terrorism, sedition, etc, will become really really easy -- gain access to someone's LAN, and you can paint a big red X on them that lasts two years!
Aside from coming up with a better system of government that won't use Orwell as a how-to guide, we need to massively ramp up the level of cryptographic protection considered acceptable -- a million orders of magnitude ought to slow the bastards up for a while....
It comes bundled in a nice single downloadable package now.
You get Vidalia, TOR, and Firefox, all preconfigured and ready to go.
Use it ALL THE TIME, not just when (if) you're doing something squirrelly.
Privacy is not a crime.
(heh, and the capcha this time was "despots")
That's fine if everyone else is doing it, but if you are the only one and the feds ask the ISP to provide data on anyone using TOR, you'll stand out and draw attention to yourself.
If you are planning on doing something "squirrelly", I strongly suggest that you encourage everyone else to use encryption... that's what i'd be doing if I was a "drug lord" or something. Hell I'd even finance development of an easy to use encryption setup.
>Again, look at who's actually been in charge for the last three years and in control of such things.
The people in charge of SOPA and such, where all this shit originates, are the Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee which they own. If you watched (I did) the mark-up meeting, nearly every Republican was voting against every sensible amendment. Fortunately it died then, but Lamar Smith (R) is trying to shoehorn the worst of it in pieces now and he's got the rest of the committee behind him. Again, the House Judiciary Committee, which he heads.
It depends on how many Dems can be bought off. Polis(D), Issa(R), and Lundgren(D) and another R that I can't recall right now can't be bought off on SOPA kinda things, but they are in the very tiny minority. If a mutant SOPA can escape the committee and go to the floor, if enough Dems and Repubs (probably won't need to get bought, they'll just follow their leadership) get bought, it could cross Obama's desk and at that point I'd give it a 80 percent chance of signing, because it would be "bipartisan" (puke).
>A collection of the same old remoras that have been attached to previous Republican candidates would not be promising especially in that light.
That's exactly what's been going on. "Bush" never left, because the people who found a patsy in GWB, have found another patsy in Romney. These days of the Republican Party make me pine for the old days of Nixon. Friggin' seriously. Barry Goldwater is probably furiously rolling in his grave.
If an argument can be made that Obama is a patsy, at least he's a patsy for different people.
>voter fraud
Don't fall into the trap of bad vocabulary, what you really meant (and described) was electoral fraud. Voter fraud is the distraction brought up by the usual suspects to distract from the electoral fraud. The whole voter-ID thing is a solution looking for a problem.
And you betcha that vote flipping is going to happen especially in counties that have pure electronic voting (unlike here, where we have scantrons). I'll bet everything I own on it. Pair that with mass disenfranchisement through voter-id like in PA now, and the fix is in. For sure.
Anyway, that is my tinfoil. If you don't like my tinfoil, get your own.
--
BMO
Funny how it always harmonises towards oppressive control.
Let me think of a mod...
Funny? no.
Insightful? no. It's pretty obvious.
Informative? only if you've been living under a rock
Redundant? per the rules, it hasn't been repeated excessively, so no.
Overrated? don't know, probably not. This is a chickenshit mod anyway.
Underrated? Hasn't been already modded down, so no.
+1 "sad and disappointing to everyone who reads it because it reminds them of the reality. I'm gonna take some valium."
--
BMO