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New Leaks Threaten Human Smuggling Talks and Lead To Hack Attacks On Australia
cold fjord writes "Indonesia is threatening to cease cooperation with Australia on human smuggling as a result of further Snowden leaks published by the Guardian and other papers over the weekend. The leaks involve reported use of Australian embassies across Asia for signals intelligence as well as reports of intelligence operations by Australia and the U.S. in 2007 at the U.N. climate change conference in Bali. (In 2002 a terrorist attack at the Sari club in Bali killed 240 people, including 88 Australians.) As a result of the revelations, various groups are reportedly taking revenge, including claimed or alleged involvement of the Java Cyber Army, members of Anonymous in Indonesia, and possibly other hacker groups. They are attacking hundreds of Australian websites. Among the reported victims are Queensland hospital, a children's cancer association an anti-slavery charity, and many more."
It's not the leaks that threaten these talks. It's the espionage that threatens the talks.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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The attention is all the pay he ever wanted.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
"Indonesia is threatening to cease cooperation with Australia on human smuggling as a result of further Snowden leaks
... Soo, Indonesia was previously helping Australia with their human smuggling operation? In either event, what does having your corrupt officials mismanaging things have to do with ceasing humanitarian endeavors? This is like saying "After we got busted doing evil things, we're going to just go all in on that whole evil thing, while insisting that you spying on us doing our evil things is wrong and you should stop."
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It should be noted that 'people smuggling' isn't related to slavery; it's the politicised term for the people who help refugees get to Autralia. The efforts to stop people smugglers are about the current Australian government's (xenophobic) anti-refugee policies; they're the result of domestic politics, not a cooperative effort to stop human trafficking.
Hey, give Anonymous some credit here! At least they're going after Canberra this time and not Vienna!
"Java Cyber Army"? Really? Shouldn't they use the best tools for the job and not restrict themselves to just Java? I mean, Java's cool and all, what with write-once-run-anywhere and the nifty Spring Framework, but-
:)
-Wait, you mean the other Java, don't you.
Yeah, ok, that makes more sense.
From TFA:
When he was questioned about what action Indonesia would take against Australia, the foreign minister [Dr. Marty Natalegawa] said: “One of them obviously is the agreement to exchange information, exchange even intelligence information, in fact, to address the issue of people smuggling."
Basically, Indonesia is leveraging the disclosures to force Australia to agree to exchange intelligence information to address the problem of human trafficking. Nowhere in the TFA says that Indonesia is going to cancel the talks with Australia over this. Australia broke the trust, its up to them to fix it.
This certainly sounds like an attempt to go "Hey! You! Undecided people! Snowden is totally the bad guy because of this! Ignore the other stuff!" Of course, nothing in the real world is ever as simple as (person X) is the bad guy and (person Y) is the hero, but we need a narrative. We need to stick people into archetypal categories with heroes and villains, and episodes/chapters with clear resolutions and unambiguous morals.
The Java cyber army promised to smash the Australian internet. I doubt they would have to try too hard. It's already pretty terrible!
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
>Guy Fawkes' Day.
You mean 'Bonfire Night'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonfire_Night
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
It should be noted that 'people smuggling' isn't related to slavery; it's the politicised term for the people who help refugees get to Autralia. The efforts to stop people smugglers are about the current Australian government's (xenophobic) anti-refugee policies; they're the result of domestic politics, not a cooperative effort to stop human trafficking.
It's not actually xenophobia when you attempt to enforce your national borders.
The situation between Indonesia and Australia is similar to the situation between Mexico and the U.S., where the Mexican government in some cases actually busses illegals to the U.S. border in order to aid their illegal immigartion into the U.S.. While most illegals are economic refugees, the bussing mostly involved "undesirables" in Mexico, which included Mexican criminals, but more frequently were refugees from Guatamala and El Salvador, which Mexico preferred to make "not their problem". PBS did a documentary on this a while back:
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/beyondtheborder/immigration.html
The "cooperation" being negotiated in this case is primarily dealing with people using Indonesia as a transit point, and less so export of Indonesian "bad apples", just as with the U.S. (although Indonesia will happily export locally grown Al Qaeda to get rid of them). A significant number of these come from the Middle East, including a large portion of them from Iraq, and to a lesser extent, Lebanon. Here are some examples:
http://www.niqash.org/articles/?id=3308
http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13920705000600
One of the agreements being negotiated has been buying unused boats which could be made sufficiently seaworthy to get from Indonesia to Australia:
http://qz.com/118198/australias-election-frontrunner-thinks-buying-broken-indonesian-boats-will-stave-off-asylum-seekers/ ...but it benefits Tony Abbot's opponents to find ways to undermine that plan as much as possible, and it benefits Indonesian politicians to be complicit in that, and seize on any excuse, lest the illegal immigrant refugees end up stuck in Indonesia instead (Indonesia doesn't want them either). So at this point, it's largely an argument between the mostly empty regions of Australia and the more densely populated regions (analogous to the red state/blue state U.S. division that had Arizona enforcing immigration laws that the U.S. federal government would not).
So basically, politics, not Snowden.
Lets also be clear what "human smuggling" means in this context: Illegal immigration. Indonesians (and others) trying to enter into Australia illegally by any means possible in search of a better life. The Snowden leaks have exposed how the spy apparatus is being used for industrial espionage. This includes and is not limited to being used to maintain political favor with corrupt Indonesian officials in order to maintain cheap access to resources by Australian and other foreign companies. There are already a few previous examples of such immoral exploitation to the detriment of the poorest classes in this region. Running the spy network being for economic advantage in the region only helps guarantee that people will be forced to immigrate illegally to find a better life.
Who would benefit from the lack of a Western presence in Indonesia to counter human trafficking (and the terrorism that comes with it)? It wouldn't be ordinary Australian, Indonesian, or American citizens, but would be human traffickers and terrorists that benefit from a lack of oversight. By asking the question "cui bono?", Snowden's disclosure can be proven to be harmful to ordinary people - in at least this case.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Except when it extorts things to stop a crackdown on illegal acts.
Snowden is still a patriot, but Freedom is never free.
If you don't understand that, realize it's 1984 right now.
And you're all Serfs.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Here in the US, we've been watching our constitutional freedoms infringed increasingly. I don't like to say "eroded" or "removed" because the constitution doesn't guarantee our freedoms so much as it prohibits the government from infringing on them. So let's always keep in mind what the constitution was written to do. Our freedoms are declared and government is limited. They are breaking the constitution. That's the short of it. And at the moment, we're not seeing anything suggesting they are going to stop. That's one problem that's not getting solved yet.
But one that the whole world should be concerned about is what the US and others have been doing to the world lately. Thanks not to Snowden (because there are many other whistle blowers telling us the same things) but to the US government itself and all of the attention to the issue it has inexplicably drawn to itself and its activities. If there wasn't such an uproar from government charging him with high crimes, Showden and his trickle of information would be forgotten and complicit nations wouldn't have to pretend to be outraged.
Well thanks to all of this, the world is seeing what has been going on and the US and many, many US companies and allied nations of the US are all "toxic." Already whole nations are seeking to route around the damaged networks tainted by the US, its allies and business partners. We're seeing polarization of other nations which are resulting in their distancing themselves from the US and its allies. For that matter, the US allies are distancing themselves from the US.
So the world's problems with the US and its allies are being solved. The middle east can no longer rely on the US to fight for Israel's or Saudi Arabia's interests under ridiculous pretexts. And without the US banking system dragging the world down with its endless watering down of the currency, the rest of the world stands a better chance at a faster financial recovery. So all that is good.
That just leaves us poor Americans in Soviet Amerika... Please have pity on us and prepare to receive refugees from this former first-world leader? It's going to be a much longer and more difficult road to recovery for the US.
There is no heroic position in providing information that *will* help terrorists.
Any terrorist who was too dumb to realize that this sort of spying was probably going on, is too dumb to worry about.
Read your own reference. As it is Nov 5th, it is "Guy Fawkes Night" in the UK, the traditional term for it.
I notice that the UK media tends to refer to it as "Bonfire Night". That is merely for political correctness, because historically it was an anti-Catholic night. Guy Fawkes was part of a Catholic plot to assassinate King James I, and it is his effigy- the "Guy" - that is burned on the bonfire.
Queensland isn't Canberra. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't miss and hit New Zealand with accuracy like that.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yes. The people who are ACTUALLY doing the dirty deeds are not responsible. The guy with the flashlight showing the world the truth is the real problem. Taking sides in an issue is not justification for military action. If you believe that then you must also believe that Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor is justified because the US was providing weapons to France which was affecting Japan's campaign during WW2 prior to the US's direct involvement. Please don't tell me those are two very different things. They aren't except for which side you are apparently on.
As I remember from spending the first 30 years of my life living in Britain, it was, and still is called Bonfire Night by British people in Britain. The Guy Fawkes thing is British history and anti-Catholicism has pretty much nothing to do with the sentiment of the occasion across the whole of Britain, excepting some communities in Northern Ireland, where the Protestant/Catholic thing is still an issue.
As with every other country, there is a day where people let fireworks off and set fire to things. In the USA it is July 4th. In the UK it is Nov 5th. For anyone who had their childhood in Britain, Bonfire night is associated with home made toffee, parkin, setting bonfires, lighting fireworks and waving sparklers around. The historical aspects are encoded in tradition, not sectarian hate. The Guy on top of the bonfire is there because that's what people do. A bonfire is incomplete without a Guy. Inertia is a strong force.
The history bit is addressed in schools. Burning the Guy was an appeal to political correctness specifically because the anti Catholicism of burning a pope's effigy no longer fit in with the dynamic between protestants and Catholics which stopped being a thing a long time ago. They stopped burning effigies of the pope a long time ago. So Guy got to fill in the role, even though he was hung, drawn and quartered.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Letting the masses vote doesn't work. Having a free media doesn't really work either. Neither of these things have preserved my freedom. They have only eroded it.
Relative to what? What freedom did you lose when Democracies began to displace other forms of government? Its fashionable now to think that its the end of the world as we know it, and things might suck relative to an imaginary utopia that exists only in my head, but I wouldn't step into a time machine and trade living today for any other period in time.
The thing about dictatorships is that the phrase "I would support a dictator" is meaningless: dictators do not need, want, or benefit from your support. That's what makes them dictators.
Democracies are slow and imperfect because people are slow and imperfect, and often progress comes, as Max Plank observed, when the opponents to progress grow old and die. We fight stupid wars for stupid reasons and thousands of people die unnecessarily, but that pales in comparison to the entire generation of people decimated by World War I. Women have only had the unambiguous federally protected right to vote in the United States for less than a hundred years and for less than half the country's lifespan, and now their vote often decides elections. In one generation popular pressure upon a democracy is having more effect on Freedoms afforded to people of non-heterosexual orientation in the US than in the last hundred years.
Sure, a dictatorship would have been able to settle these matters much more quickly, but the problem with dictatorships is that they rarely settle these matters correctly.
A hundred years ago the technology didn't exist for the government to intrude on my privacy to the degree it does today, but a hundred years ago the technology also didn't exist for me to even be meaningfully informed about what the government did to me or around me and discuss it in a public forum. The freedom of information act in the US is only 46 years old. The internet a bit younger. The wide-spread public internet just about twenty years old.
This is not to excuse the abuses of today. Its to emphasize the abuses of yesterday were diminished or eliminated by people who tried to improve the system recognizing its flaws, not by those who assumed it was irrecoverably broken. The end of slavery in America didn't end all discrimination, but it did end the institution of slavery. That's how progress happens. Every generation makes extremely big mistakes that don't seem like mistakes to all of them. And every successive generation contains the people who will try to reverse those mistakes, but will make their own big mistakes as well. How do I judge whether progress is being made? I ask if there's any other moment in time I would rather live in the history of my country, from 1781 to yesterday, and the answer is no. That's progress.
Well it’s clear that Indonesia are incapable of actually preventing terrorist attacks in their own country against not only its own citizens but against foreign nationals. Someone needs perform surveillance.
... that everyone does it ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
When you can't disprove what someone says you simply assassinate their character by lumping them in with pedophiles, terrorists, smugglers, etc. and claim that the discredited person is providing them aid.
Ain't that the definition of Ad Hominem ?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Last month there was much more of a diplomatic crisis, and then Tony Abbott, Australia's new leader, put in a gold medal performance in the sliding grovel and things calmed down.
If the Indonesians play this well they can use it to get a great deal of advantage with a not yet functioning new Australian government that needs Indonesian support to deliver their main promise to the Australian voters. However this new thing is really just a minor aftershock related to the real diplomatic crisis a month or two ago.
There is no heroic position in providing information that *will* help terrorists.
Publishing a book on electric engineering will help terrorists (they will use it to make bombs). So what? Terrorists are so minor a threat in the grand scheme of things that constantly looking at what can potentially benefit them as a side effect is a very stupid waste of one's time. The important part about Snowden's revelations is that it helps the citizens of all these countries to make their governments truly accountable to them.
You have misrepresented the issue by using emotive language that is not accurate, for example "human trafficking" and "slavery" to describe normal refugees. Thus I see it not as disagreeing that good is good and evil is evil which appears to be the line that you are pushing to shout down dissent, but instead pointing out that reality is different to how you is is being presented by outright liars with a political agenda to push.
So it's not about standing against all that is good, it is just about pointing out that cold fjord is lying.
The leaks have created diplomatic problems that are likely to prevent effective intervention against the smuggling.
Dear Mr. Cold Fjord,
This is INDONESIA that we are talking about.
For years (actually, decades) Indonesia never took the issue human trafficking/smuggling seriously. Whether it be human trafficking/smuggling to Australia, to Singapore, to Malaysia, or to any other place in the world.
Indonesia is a nation which has too many people living on too many island, and the corrupt regime (whether or not it was under Suhartoe or the current one) never place that issue as a top priority.
Furthermore, Indonesia, as the world's MOST POPULOUS Muslim country, has the obligation to spread Islam to kafir countries such as Australia.
In other words, EVEN WITHOUT the leaks from Edward Snowden, the human trafficking/smuggling business would still go on, as usual.
All the so-called "cooperation" from the Indonesian side is utterly absurd from the beginning.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Please, show me the quote in this forum.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Let me be clear whistle-blowers are not threating the peace of the world by speaking truthfully and openly. Were attempting to protect it. By informing people of what is happening.
Realistically, Indonesia is probably not going to do anything adverse against Australia beyond saber rattling - they need Australia more than Australia needs Indonesia.
You're wrong.
They don't need to mount a military attack: just turn a blind eye on "people smugglers" and suspend the import of live stock from Australia for 4-5 months.
I'm still not saying that Snowden is reponsible for this
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Hey, give Anonymous some credit here! At least they're going after Canberra this time and not Vienna!
Well, I fear a situation in which Austria would do something disputable to a country in Asia-Pacific: chances are it will be still Canberra to be attacked.
(hint: look over the distance between Indonesia and Australia or, respectively, Austria).
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
All of this is thin propaganda. Even a short search on the internet will poke a lot of holes in this. I am really surprised that the Australian Govt is actually being a lap dog for the USA in trying to discredit snowden and the leaks. I really hope that Auzzie citizens are up in arms at this.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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Hmmm... What goes around, comes around... eventually....
Are we talking about murder or speeding?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
A dumb terrorist with a suicide vest is still a terrorist with a suicide vest. If he sets if off in the mall by you and your family you'll be dead regardless of his IQ.
Only 1-2 of each 5 man team on 9/11 was fairly bright. The other 3 were "muscle" to protect the other 2 while they did their work. The fact that 60% of the terrorists on 9/11 weren't brain surgeons didn't seem to hamper them in creating carnage.
By a similar token, do you take lazy walks late at night in the bad part of town and simply count on the disparity between your education and intelligence to protect you against a gang of high school drop-out? I doubt it.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The Guardian seems to make the linkage pretty clear.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Isn't that what embassies are _for_?
As I remember from spending the first 30 years of my life living in Britain, it was, and still is called Bonfire Night by British people in Britain.
Must have depended where you lived or in what circle. Around me it was always "Guy Fawkes Night".
So Afganistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka and similar are wonderful places is the people with the guns do not like you? I suggest taking a far more mature attitude instead of writing such childish bullshit. The election is over so we can get back to reality now instead of childish slogans.
It's not the leaks that threaten these talks. It's the choice to engage in slavery that threatens the talks.
But hey, if you can find a way to blame it on the USA then you're just dandy.
No brain, no pain.
Given the roasting that Cold Fjord is getting here, I'm come around to the idea that disagreeing with the consensus on Slashdot is just an exercise in masochism.
So much for that free exchange of ideas, if you 're only going to cop waves of shrill abuse.
By 'biased', are you implying that he's in a role where he has to be even-handed (e.g. a journalist), but is being opinionated?
Since when has having an opinion you disagree with, become a crime?
Please grow up.
Heh... I call it fireworks night :).
I don't think I've ever heard November the Fifth called "Guy Fawkes Night" or "Fireworks Night" more than a couple of times in one day, but "Bonfire Night" all the time, day-in, day-out for weeks at a stretch.
Where in Britain were you living when you hear it called that? Ulster?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"