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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."
Its not an engineering problem. The engineering's been done. We know how to lock shit down very well if we try. The problem is we don't try.
Its really a social problem. Facebook is to your privacy what a post-it note is to your password. And people love them some Facebook (or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever the popular site is this year.)
Until a majority of users start either using privacy measures on a technical level or pushing for privacy protection on a political level, all of the engineering in the world does a big wad of fuck all because nobody's willing (or allowed) to actually use it.
Apple (and Google shortly after) recently decided to lock down their phones out of the box. This is the kind of political push we need -- they're willing to stand up to the government's requests for privacy invasion and at the same time, not significantly impacting day-to-day use of their devices by regular users who only barely know what they've heard on the news regarding the political side of the story and know nothing of the technical side.
Of course who knows how long it will be before some government somewhere decides that this isn't cool and forces Apple/Google to either turn off the default encryption or provide a back door (which is worse really.. hackers are smart and if there's a back door they'll find it eventually -- exposing everyone instead of just those who don't know/care enough to turn on the encryption manually.) China for example doesn't seem like the kind of country that would take "well we can't actually do that" as a valid answer more than once (if that.)
The Murdoch tabloids’ trademark sensationalist coverage of crime, and accompanying campaigns for draconian law-and-order politics such as harsher sentences and more police powers, has always been in the framework of self-righteous claims to be the voice of victims.
Another trademark of the Murdoch media globally is Islamophobia. From Fox news’ hysterical reaction to President Barack Obama’s Arabic middle name, to the Sydney Daily Telegraph’s current anti-Burka campaign, the Murdoch media has consistently vilified Muslims in the name of protecting Western society from terrorism.
In Australia, not only has Murdoch used his media to campaign for anti-terror laws but, in several cases after such laws have been introduced, authorities used the Murdoch media during prosecutions to spread allegations against defendants in terrorism trials. Such allegations cannot be refuted in open court, or spoken about by the accused, because of secrecy provisions in the anti-terror laws.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/n...
It reads like it was written yesterday, but in fact it's a story from 2011, during a previous successful push to whittle away more civil liberties, not just in Australia, but worldwide.
Until us ordinary people can recognise the war being waged against us by the Murdochs of the world, and discover the courage and weapons to fight them, we will continue to lose those few liberties we have remaining.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Or simply an overreaction? I really wonder.
Allowing the security services to *monitor* the whole country looks like a panicky move and leaves the door wide open to abuse.
Curtailing the freedom of speech of journalists and bloggers, as in :
veers into police-state territory, given the vague way in which it's phrased. I think that the balance between on the one hand safeguarding the effectiveness of anti-terrorism measures and on preventing miscreants from benefiting from bloggers and journalists and a general gag-order on the other has been upset.
Oh that's not what it's about. See, Australia's policy on boat-arrival asylum seekers was recently all categorized (and its funding transferred) to the defense department, so the whole thing is now a military operation with a budget put out of sight behind general defense spending (which you can increase effectively without limit or consideration).
Which makes everything about it "operational security". Like you know, the number of boats that arrived, how many sank, where the people are being taken...