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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.
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.
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