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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 .....
What is it with governments and wanting to spy on every citizen, just because the technology might allow for it? So much for them being our democratically elected representatives. That's apparently only when they need themselves some votes. Once they got them, they turn around and basically become enemies of the citizenry. Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
But why? It can't be just the lobbyist money.
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.
Americans please take note, this is what happens when you elect conservatives.
To fill in non-Australians on what happened, a few days ago the Australian government launched a massive campaign "to fight terror" which involved 800 police across 3 states and resulted in 16 arrests. All of these people just happened to be Muslim.
The government made a big song and dance about it but what they didn't say is that 15 of the 16 were released without charge. The 16th man was held because they found a broken taser and 4 unused shotgun rounds in his house. He went to court 2 days ago and the judge with a brain released him with a misdemeanour charge (a fine, no criminal record).
So this operation has all the hallmarks of a false flag to get bad laws passed on a wave of fear based support... Lo and behold, this appears in parliament.
America will have elections before we do, we didn't learn from Canada and the UK... Please dont make the same mistakes as we did by voting in the other guy because we hate the current guys. It always ends up worse.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Be aware that Australia is an arm of the ECHELON or "Five Eyes" spying network, also known as AUSCANNZUKUS (for its members, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US). As long as laws exist in any of these countries allowing total internet surveillance, they can simply hand over any information gleaned to the other four parties.
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.
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.)
That's a very US-centric view of the terms "left" and "right." Broadly speaking, the left tends to be more liberal (power to the people) while the right tends to be more conservative (power to those already in power.)
Of course how those views end up being delineated changes greatly from country to country and across time. In the current US, the government is the only significant entity that even claims to be "for the people" so its unsurprising that the left down there is in favor of larger government. The right tends to favor corporate/economic power because that's what rules the roost for the most part.
But in terms of the rest of the world, the left and right are not always defined the same way as they are in the US. Up here in Canada for example, the right (ie: Harper currently) just loooooves expanding government power. Oh he's all cool with deregulating industry and letting them trash our environment and economy, but at the same time he's attempting to tack on all sorts of new government powers with little responsibility or oversight, including legislation very similar to what TFA is talking about (he's on his third or fourth attempt at ramming that crap down our throats so far.) The left on the other hand tends to focus primarily on the unions. They generally beef up existing social programs of course as you would expect but most of their focus tends to be on expanding the power of unions (as an indirect "for the people") rather than the power of government.
And obviously I'm talking in huge generalities.. even Harper's managed to accidentally do some good here and there. Very few things are ever black and white when they affect millions of people who all have differing views on everything.
I would say the world is going more lefty, with governments consolidating their power bases and censoring/silencing criticism. It's the left that wants to grow the size of government and have it spy on/manipulate as much of peoples' lives as it can. It does this under the guise of benevolence, of 'caring' about the plight of some group, real or imagined, varying by context. The right wants smaller government and more liberty for the individual. [...]
May I ask which country you are from? When I look at the political spectrum here in Germany, then it is the 'right' wing who simultaneously wants to a) eliminate social services, b) massively grow 'the government' wherever law enforcement and the military are involved and c) put everyone and everything under complete surveillance. It is the left end of the spectrum who wants a leaner government in most departments and strong protections and safeguards for privacy.
Right and left does not (exclusively and universally) mean what you think it does.
Rudolf Hess edited Mein Kampf. He was the very first grammar nazi.
I voted for the current government. Why? Because of the fiasco with the previous government changing leaders every 10 minutes and some proposed legislation (by the current opposition) I didn't -- and don't -- agree with.
The problem from my point of view is that I voted to try and make the best of a bad situation. Unfortunately, both major parties seem to have the same policy ideas! So, shit, they may as well be the same party. How can we elect leaders when they all seem to have the same ideas (well, once elected)? So, as mentioned I am part of the problem (because I gave them my vote) but what is the solution?
Anyone would think that we're a country led by the USA rather than a Commonwealth country of Britain. It's stupid. And this all started with the Free Trade Agreement. Personally I'm sick of the USA sticking their nose up other people's arses, but I'm out of ideas on what to do about it.
Just putting this out there for fellow Aussies. Fire this up in a VM and you're good to go.
https://tails.boum.org/
Yes, I know it's not perfect and possibly contains bugs, but against the proposed Aus Govt surveillance, it's a very quick and easy workaround.
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
The corporatist oligarchy that funds and promotes both parties is hardly invisible, except to the willfully blind.
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
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.
For example reporting on the crackdown of the past few days would probably fall under it. Reporting like the articles that exposed the TSA's practices of make-work and unprofessional conduct could fall under it, if the prosecutors happened to feel like it.
I'm not given to quoting historical figures as a rule, but I'll make an exception now:
Have they really considered the costs and benefits of this little gag-law? Are their "Special Intelligence Operations" that fragile that they come apart when people report about them? I can't imagine it.
The real danger is the secrecy with which these privacy-violators operate. Even if they were miraculously staffed with Spock-like analysts pure of all malevolence, they would drive the country off a cliff by avoiding the corrective of public accountability.
Suppose Australia outlawed all clothing and curtains, put every square centimeter under public surveillance with open online access, published all bank statements online, restricted the use of passwords only to verify authority for transactions, and recorded all conversations, whether in person or electronic, for public review. It would be a different village, and individual liberites would need to be protected from taboo rather than intrusion, but it would still be a society, susceptible to being changed by its inhabitants.
Instead, Australia's One-Way Mirror of Control will reduce Australians to a slave population controlled by a paranoid elite. The pyramids and monuments will be magnificent and the leaders all superhuman geniuses concerned only for the welfare of all, and you'd better agree if you hope to eat another meal.
There is a small-government strain of the American right, and especially a lot of small-government rhetoric, but in terms of actual policies, the Republican Party generally expands the size of government (and faster than the Democratic Party does, though they also do). The three post-WW2 presidents who expanded government the most are: Nixon (R), LBJ (D), and Reagan (R).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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.
They do not have the same equal opportunity TO SUCCEED, nobody does.
They have the same equal opportunity TO TRY to succeed and not be discriminated against by the government, be treated equally under law. Your society destroyed that concept.
You can't handle the truth.