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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.
Oh I think "we" did... "we" being our overlords - they read 1984 as a howto guide.
Andy Warhol got it right / Everybody gets the limelight
Andy Warhol got it wrong / Fifteen minutes is too long.
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.
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.
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
Because most of the voting populace believe telephone to be a real communication medium and email, chat and texts just some toy for the youth.
Because the vast majority of people is inherently short-sighted. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
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
Indeed, at least they said "the Aussie equivalent of the SEC" which wil still leave anyone not in the US or Australia clueless.
Damn it, people EXPAND ACRONYMS! Especially obscure acronyms that are the same as tech or science acronyms. If you're talking about cops, don't say "LEO" because to us, an LEO isn't a law enforcement officer, it's low earth orbit. To the one or two of us who don't live in Australia, an ASIC is a chip.
Gees...
Free Martian Whores!