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Australian Senate Introduces Laws To Allow Total Internet Surveillance
First time accepted submitter Marquis231 writes New laws due to be passed in Australia allow intelligence agency ASIO to spy on domestic internet traffic like never before. The Sydney Morning Herald reports: "Spy agency ASIO will be given the power to monitor the entire Australian internet and journalists' ability to write about national security will be curtailed when new legislation – expected to pass in the Senate as early as Wednesday – becomes law, academics, media organisations, lawyers, the Greens party and rights groups fear."
....then you've nothing to fear. Yeah Right .....
I find this interesting. Both major governments have now supported internet filtering or some invasive monitoring in the past. Recently we've had a government decide to go and join the fight in a war we have nothing to do with because ... well America is doing it. Terrorist threats have come immediately after the announcement and then I was absolutely gob smacked to see our prime-minister (probably the current joke of the world) quote word for word the previous joke of the world (Bush) and say the threats are not because of our actions but because "they hate our freedoms".
Now G20 is nearly upon us and our local city is building giant walls around airports, closing down half the city, and welding bins at the train station shut (no joke) because they pose a threat as a potential place to stash a bomb.
And how do our people react?
A statistically significant jump in the prime minister's approval rating
People get the government they deserve. Hey Canada, you guys still taking Aussies immigrants? I gotta get out of here. Because ... you know, ... terrorists and stuff.
What is it with governments and wanting to spy on every citizen, just because the technology might allow for it?
As Robert Heinlein pointed out, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who seek to control others, and those who have no such desire. Governments are comprised of the assholes in the first category, and mass surveillance is all about power.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It would be nice if that were the case. Unfortunately it's hard to see how it can be. The technology industry has a poor track record of deploying truly strong end to end privacy protections, partly because the physics of how computers work mean that outsourcing things to big powerful third parties that can be easily subverted is very common. E.g. my mobile phone can search gigabytes of email from the last decade in a split second and rank it by importance, despite having nowhere near enough computing capacity to really do that itself, only because it's relying on the Gmail servers to help it out.
That same phone can receive calls only because the mobile network knows where it is. How do you build a mobile phone that is invulnerable to government monitoring of its location? It doesn't seem technically possible. The only solution is to ensure that anonymous SIM cards are easily obtained and used, but many countries have made those illegal as part of the war on drugs.
This trend towards outsourcing, specialisation and sharing of data to obtain useful features is ideal for governments who can then go ahead and silently obtain access to people's information without those people knowing about it. I do not see it reversing any time soon. The best we're going to achieve in the near term future is encryption of links between devices and datacenters, but this doesn't help when politicians are simply voting themselves the power to go reach in to those datacenters.
Ultimately the only long term solutions here can be political, and I fear we will need a far longer and larger history of abuses to become visible before the majority will really shift on this. The problem is a large age skew. Older people skew heavily authoritarian, if you believe the opinion polls, and are much more likely to support this kind of spying. Perhaps they associate it with the cold war. Perhaps the old adage "a libertarian is a republican who wasn't mugged yet" has some truth to it. Whatever the cause, the 1960's baby boom means that demographically, older people can outvote younger people as a block, and for this reason there aren't really any fiscally conservative, economically trusted AND individual rights-respecting parties in the main English speaking countries. People get to pick between borrow-and-spend socialists with an authoritarian bent, and fiscal conservatives with an authoritarian bent, so surprise surprise we end up with people in power who are authoritarians.
One berk with a knife takes some swipes at a pair of police officers and twenty years of work by civil liberties activists are done because the tories are shouting and stamping their feet that we are under some sort of attack from eeeeevil terrorists.
I'm sorry, I live in northbridge, inner-city perth. The place is a stabbing range at the best of time. I bet people are stabbing at cops every other day.
Oh no, I'm terrified of brown people, here you go officer , have my rights, I'm too scared to use them!!!!!!
Pathetic.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
"Conservative" means different things in different countries. It even means different things in different US states.
In the USA, "conservative" might mean an advocate of small government and reduced government power, or it might mean a pro-life social conservative looking to restrict abortion or anything in between.
If privacy is a voter's primary concern in the US, it's probably best to vote based on the individual candidate's position than on the candidate's party.
What new laws are needed to arrest and convict a man that stabs a police officer? Even if its only attempted stabbing? Where is the hole that needs to be plugged with universal surveillance?
... whatever
The corporatist oligarchy that funds and promotes both parties is hardly invisible, except to the willfully blind.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
Reality is quite clear, conservative politics equals exploitative politics and Anti-terror laws equals anti-poor laws. These laws are all designed to protect the rich from the middle class and the poor, laws that you can protect yourself from only if you have sufficient money and laws which can be used to abused anyone who does not have enough money.
The unreality of conservative politics when they are all about conserving nothing, they don't want to conserve resources, they don't want to conserve the environment and they don't want to conserve labour. In fact they want to ruthlessly exploit resources, ruthlessly exploit the environment and ruthlessly exploit labour, yet they bloody continue to call themselves conservatives to hide their true exploitative nature behind a word, a marketing fraud.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The actual libertarians call themselves either anarchists or communists. The 'libertarians' in the US are conservatives. They believe in laws such as property laws which protect the rich against the poor, but no laws which protect the poor against the rich.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
Not to mention, how would totalitarian Internet surveillance help that situation even slightly (let alone help so Goddamned incredibly well to even begin to come close to "justifying" the loss of liberty!)?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The goal is to "catch" people before they commit a crime, i.e. when they are only thinking about it and no-one has been hurt yet. Therefore thought needs to be criminalized.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
A bit more perspective - a high enough alert for the outgoing head of an intelligence agency to make noise about it but not serious enough for him to say on for an extra week in times of trouble.
Pure cooked up chest thumping security theatre.
The world is going neither "right" nor "left", it's going more authoritarian on an orthogonal axis.
No, the authoritarian left (e.g. US Democratic Party) wants to manipulate people through government. The authoritarian right (e.g. US Republican Party) wants to manipulate people through privatized industry. Neither is interested in leaving people alone.
There are those, on both the left and right, who actually do want smaller government and more liberty for the individual, but they are not in power in either major US political party.
Indeed; the only hope is to vote independent, libertarian or green.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Yes, well the devil's in the details. My definition of 'fair' is not the same as the left's. Mine is keep what you earn (or at least 90% of it or so), and allow the meritocracy to operate more naturally.
Right. So you favour increasingly concentrated wealth, the power it wields, and the inevitable corruption it breeds.
Theirs boils down to insistence on equal outcome, everywhere, even at the cost of liberty and bonafide justice.
Completely false.
The "insistence" is on equal opportunities.
The comical fantasy promulgated by the Right, however, is that everyone born into a western democracy inherently has equal opportunities. That the black child born to a drug addicted single mother has the same opportunities in life as the white child born to two high-earning professionals, because both were born in America. Undoubtedly, they will be able to trot out a couple of cherry-picked examples of such disadvantaged children who have, against all odds, escaped their demographic destiny. They might even produce some similar cherry-picked examples of rich white kids whose parents abandoned them after one too many low-level drug charges or car crashes and have sunk into desperate poverty.
But it's just ideological bullshit. Statistics, data and history show the truth. Wealth breeds increasingly more wealth and poverty more poverty, in feedback loops. The best society springs from both of those ends of the scale being curtailed to build a strong middle class. The period of human history with the greatest increase in wealth, productivity and living standards were the few decades post-WW2 - with its high taxes, strong regulations and comprehensive welfare systems - before Thatcher, Reagan and their acolytes' neoliberal cancer started destroying western democracies from within in the name of greed, selfishness, and free-market fundamentalism.
Ideological bullshit is stealing from those who can make it to subsidise those who cannot make it and call it 'fairness' and even insist it somehow promotes 'human rights'.
Theft does not make anything 'right' regardless how you justify it.
Equal opportunities does NOT mean that everybody has to be born in the same household, it means that GOVERNMENT MUST NOT DISCRIMINATE AGAINST SOME TO PROVIDE ADVANTAGES TO OTHERS, which is what you are ideologically aligned with: using force and violence of the government to create discrimination.
Equal opportunities means equality under law and you breed inequality under law.
You can't handle the truth.