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ASIC Seeks Power To Read Your Emails
nemesisrocks writes "ASIC, Australia's version of the SEC, has called for phone call and internet data to be stored by Australian ISPs, in a submission to the Parliamentary Inquiry into mandatory data retention. Not only does the authority want the powers to intercept the times, dates and details of telecommunications information, it also wants access to the contents of emails, social media chats and text messages."
Sorry, I am not a native English speaker, and a quick web search does not yield anything on the word "Inquity". Can somebody explain the word?
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
According to Harry Seldon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hari_Seldon), if a people begins as a prison colony it must necessarily end up as a police state. It's inevitable.
Do they even comprehend the amount of data this will be? This is just one step away from recording all telephone calls as well. 1984, we didn't learn anything.
Encryption of all your Internet comms has been recommended forever and a day, but the bulk of the population hasn't bothered so far because the "postman opening letters" hasn't been very overt and in the public eye.
Now that the politicians are all in the game of demanding their "right" to monitor everything, perhaps it's time that people will respond by finally encrypting everything and telling the police state advocates to sod off and stop terrorizing the population.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Wouldn't it be cheaper to close down the Australian stock exchange? Or just monitor the people who actively trade?
Not that this will prevent people from encrypting messages, or passing insider messages face-to-face.
Dear Australian Government,
I am having a yard sale next weekend. In order to achieve fair market value for the more valuable goods, I have implemented a closed bidding system. I am worried that some of my neighbours might game the system by discussing their bids and making backroom deals. I am seeking the power to log their phone calls as well as access to the contents of emails, social media chats and text messages.
Sincerely, John R. Citizen
So in effect:
1. You're only innocent because you haven't committed a crime yet
2. Thus they capture your data and store it
3. After you've committed your crime, the data is there to prosecute you
4. They've justified with reverse time causality.
5. Ergo time travel is real.
And if you don't commit a crime? Well obviously you haven't YET committed the crime that justified us putting you under surveillance in the past. So you must be a super cunning criminal. We'd better keep your data longer than 2 years, otherwise it might break the time-space continuum.
That's what it amounts to, calling everyone a criminal and using that to take away their right to privacy.
ASIC is an absolute joke.
Their failure to act borders on the laughable, and now they want to read our private communications, presumably so that they can .... wait for it.... yet again, do nothing.
Australia, you used to be cool. What happened, bro?
Never mind frog boiling, they've just tossed the toad of liberty into the seething cauldron of totalitarianism and slammed the lid.
Seriously, guys, you're even making Soviet UKistan look like a shining beacon of individual rights now. Poor show.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I was actually excited from the title, fabricating a custom chip to do this. Then the summary quickly dispels that.
Fear is the mind killer.
ASIC is the Australian Securities and Investments Commission. The SEC is The Securities and Exchanges Commission.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
The Securities and Exchange Commission is the authority that oversee the stock and securities exchange market in the US, ASIC is the Australian equivalent.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
Well, it's already begun, but it's another interesting example of how the police state develops. In an established democracy it's kind of difficult to simply introduce something akin to the Stasi - that worries people.
The trick is to grant unreasonable powers to a group that doesn't appear to have much to do with the average citizen (such as ASIC), or instead give it to a group with what people see as a very specific remit to act only in certain areas (TSA). In the case of ASIC, why should the average guy in the street worry about those stock exchange guys having this power - it's not as if they'll be using to snoop on regular guys. With the TSA, turning airports in to constitution free zones, people are fine with that because they think it's only happening in airports, when in fact they're spilling out in to other aspects of transport. Get people used to presenting documents at airports, train stations and state borders, and before long you'll be able to stop them anywhere and do it. Same with intrusive physical searches. When stopped on a random road, the patriotic dad will proudly hum "God Bless the USA" as his daughter allows a former Wall*Mart shelf stacker with a badge to get his hands down her pants in the name of security and freedom.
Asking for such a broad and patently unjustified ability to snoop has no place in a modern democracy. Ship them out to an embassy near to a country such as North Korea or Iran - in the hope that they'll defect to a place where their Orwellian urges can be sated.
-- Using the preview button since 2005
That the descendants of a rather cruel attempt of the ultimate prison colony are slowly but surely allowing their own government re-imprison them is mind-boggling. Turns out the most dangerous animal in Austrailia is Ministerus Fascismus
ASIC Seeks Power To Read Your Emails
In best Yakoff Smirnoff voice: "Wow, what a chip!"
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Can anyone explain any advantage to these rules, other than "it makes the cops job easier".
And they casually talk about destroying our privacy (and by association related rights like freedom of expression) not to mention security.. .... just to make their jobs easier..
Imagine if every new road, even out in the desert had to have cameras and microphones, to record not just who drove on the road, but what they were talking about. All installed at the users expense.
And the authorities have complete access to it (without judicial intervention),
Yet somehow that data will remain secure?
Move along... there is no sig here.
Do they have an idea of the amount of data "to be stored"?
Politicians are all the same everywhere. They rule over things they don't understand.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'm in Melbourne right now, I have some popcorn and a small telescope set up. I am waiting for the sky to fall. From all the slashdot reports I have read it should be spectacular. Granted I was disappointed by the great Aussie firewall hype, spent years observing a politician blowing smoke up a freshman senator's arse, but still haven't spotted the mythical beast. No hard feelings though, those long observations made me confident that what I was seeing was just some Machiavellian politics aimed at said senator.
As for TFA, regardless of the merits of the ASIC recommendations, I find it odd that the people who are ferociously against data retention for law enforcement purposes are often the same people who want the law to put corrupt executives/politicians in front of a firing squad. Now I have no delusions that corrupt executives/politicians are not (in general) dumb enough to incriminate themselves, so if they even suspect their electronic comms are being tucked away somewhere for a couple of tax returns then at a minimum they lose the benefit of those comms.
For the most part the "sky is falling"/1984 crowd are of an age where their worldview is driven by how their parents treated them and what they just started reading about on the net in the past 5yrs, they are outraged when they find the world is a messy place. It's like the first time they open their pay slip and start screaming about all the acronyms they don't understand taking a bite out of their hard-earned. It's the shock of moving from a sheltered idealized world paid for by mum and dad, to standing ankle deep in turds like the rest of us. They can't get past the turds, they can't understand why everyone else just shrugs and laughs at them squishing through their toes.
The wild west days of the internet are gone whether we like it or not. Businesses have been coming to the global village for about 15yrs now and they brought the sheriffs with them. It's still a wonderful place but in a different way, it has been domesticated and this generation of urban cowboys need to move on and find their own intellectual frontier.
1984: One of the greatest works of the 20th century, my 1970's government forced me to read it at HS. I went on later in life to read more from Orwell. He was without doubt a brilliant critic of all the major political ideologies. Yet the take home lesson I (eventually) got from reading Orwell's political critiques was best summed up by another Winston - "No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism".
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
They went through quite a few alternative solutions.
1) Ask criminals to copy ASIC on all emails and Facebook messages sent. It's about as effective as what they proposed, and will be way cheaper and less intrusive for the public.
2) Have the Internet burn a daily DVD of the entire contents, which will then be sent to ASIC to be stored in boxes. Estimated physical storage space required for first 3 months: New Zealand.
3) Have vagina-cams installed in all female residents of Australia in case they happen to be naked at the home of someone considering fraud, and positioned in such a way that the camera catches the content of the suspect's screen.
4) Require that all Internet communication stop at the ISP level, who will then print it and send it on to the ISP of the person to whom it's address, with a copy being posted to ASIC.
5) Crime is committed only by the living. Kill everyone.
6) Receive funding to have ASIC agents stationed in every home, to sit behind computer users. Agent will periodically tap the user on the shoulder, and ask "Whatcha doin'?"
Number 4 was the preferred option. Greg Tanzer prefers reading personal emails on his tablet while relaxing in a hotel room full of semi-naked pre-teen girls. Having to carry around print-outs was out of the question.
-- Using the preview button since 2005