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Australian Spy Agency Seeks Permission To Hack Third-Party Computers
New submitter LordLucless writes "ASIO, Australia's spy agency, is pushing for the ability to lawfully hijack peoples' computers — even if they are not under suspicion of any crime. They seek the ability to gain access to a third party's computer in order to facilitate gaining access to the real target — essentially using any person's personal computer as a proxy for their hacking attempts. The current legislation prohibits any action by ASIO that, among other things, interferes with a person's legitimate use of their computer. Conceivably, over-turning this restriction would give ASIO the ability to build their own bot-net of compromised machines. Perhaps inevitably, they say these changes are required to help them catch terrorists."
I am an Australian. Assume this passes. How can I harden my computer against being used as a node in an ASIO botnet?
The only thing I can think of at the moment is to use Linux and make sure I've closed all uncessary ports...?
What else? I am not a security buff. Encryption doesn't seem particularly useful, since the problem here isn't that ASIO is accessing our files (although they would probably definitely be doing that too), but that they're using our bandwidth and processing resources.
Last time when we talk about Soviet Union and/or China and/or Cuba and/or Iran and/or North Korea or East Germany, or any of those countries we used words like "ROUGE COUNTRIES" to describe them.
And they deserved it, for those countries never about the human rights of their citizens, and those countries spied on their own citizens.
Nowadays, countries that are supposed to be "FREE", such as Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United States are becoming more and more like those rogue states.
What the fuck has happened to the spirit of "FREEDOM" of the free world?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Ever since terrorism became such a huge problem in Australia, ASIO have been unable to catch a single terrorist. So hampered were they by a lack of access to my computer, they have been unable to foil a single, credible terrorist plot. In the last decade or so, an attack by terrorists has been imminent, at any moment, I expect to be attacked by terrorists. The lack of an actual attack, the lack of any suspicion of an actual attack, the lack of any identifiable group with any plausible reason to attack, the lack of any identifiable person associated with any group planning to attack, these are simply indicators of how clever these devious, brown people are. If only someone would use my computer to hack into theirs, then Australians would know the reason for the constant stream of messages telling us to fear.
It sounds like you need to brush up on your own history classes -- unless they were in the US, in which cases they made some important omissions. Such as the fact that England started shipping its inmates to Australia only after the American Revolution made them lose their favorite penal colony. Prior to then, many punishments for criminals consisted of them having to spend several years or their whole lives in the US.