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Australia Called Out as Willing To Undermine Human Rights For Digital Agenda (zdnet.com)
A report from AccessNow has asked Australia to change its course and lead the way in serving as a champion for human rights instead of against. From a report: Global human rights, public policy, and advocacy group AccessNow has called out Australia for its lack of focus on human rights as it adapts to the challenges of the digital era, with a report from the non-profit saying the country should instead be leading the way in serving as a champion for human rights. "Australia should be a global leader in serving as a champion for human rights, such as the right to privacy and rights to freedoms of expression and association," AccessNow said. "Unfortunately, Australia has taken actions that indicate the nation is willing to undermine human rights as it adapts to the challenges of the digital era."
In Human Rights in the Digital Era: An International Perspective on Australia [PDF], AccessNow says that as the digital world continues to develop, and technology increasingly becomes an "intimate part" of daily lives, Australians are facing a choice. "The country can either continue to be a testing ground for policies that undermine privacy and security in the digital era, or it can be a champion for human rights in the digital age, leveraging its relationships in the world to raise the standards for the next generation," the report says.
In Human Rights in the Digital Era: An International Perspective on Australia [PDF], AccessNow says that as the digital world continues to develop, and technology increasingly becomes an "intimate part" of daily lives, Australians are facing a choice. "The country can either continue to be a testing ground for policies that undermine privacy and security in the digital era, or it can be a champion for human rights in the digital age, leveraging its relationships in the world to raise the standards for the next generation," the report says.
>> Australia Called Out as (thing) by (random aggrieved group)
Clearly, Australia needs to clap back before the Internet gets broken.
Australia has a horrific human rights record, after the slaughter of the aboriginal peoples and confining them to a small area makes the way the USA treated the Native Americans look downright hospitable by comparison.
That’s a content free post. Better headline "Advocacy group offers vague complaints"
1. Government recognises people have a right to protect their comms and sees this as a good thing.
2. People will all be criminals by dint of using strong encryption anyway
* People will continue to use strong encryption regardless of what the law states. Strong laws against crypto will simply drive comms underground, making it more difficult for everyone to communicate and for righteous law enforcement efforts to be successful. We are headed for doomsday as regards the Internet/WWW. More and more people want to control it for money, power, fame, etc. While the lure of "free" services has been a major coup for companies like Google, Facebook, the damage that *will* come is yet to be seen. Everyone with a modicum of technical sense knows there is an information sharing superhighway between governments and these companies. I've long suspected that the "sham" of pretending to fight governments over "private" data is just for show. What with secret courts and warrants, would we even know for sure, even with warrant canaries? If your truly private data is in the "cloud" on a machine that *you* do not control, it can no longer be said to be private, even if encrypted. Somehow, someone, in some way, will be able to own your data given enough time and effort, especially if you become the target of a state actor.
Human ones. Did you not read the summary?
The actual article tells me that the rights under discussion are things like the right to not have the government use biometric data (e.g., "face recognition"). I'm not sure that this is widely recognized as one of the fundamental human rights.
I know that some people on slashdot might be able to have some interesting ideas on this.
So I was thinking about it and thought I would pose the question.
Is there a difference between the right to freedom of speech ( which is to say the right to say what you want without punishment or restriction).
and
The right to use public broadcast equipment like the internet to exercise that right.
Specifically I'm thinking about the internet as a tool that amplifies the effects of ones actions. As another example of what I'm pondering , few people argue against the right to self defense, although most people would put limits on the power and strength of that defense. As and example most people would think it wrong to defend yourself against a knife attack by spraying a machine gun into a crowded room.
So, given the amplifying power of the internet over speech, making every careless statement a broadcast to hundreds or millions with all kinds of possible unintended consequences. What if any reasonable limits are there to speech on the internet or are they identical to the normal limits put on speech , like 'not inciting to riot'.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Australia has a horrific human rights record, after the slaughter of the aboriginal peoples and confining them to a small area makes the way the USA treated the Native Americans look downright hospitable by comparison.
And since then?
Wanna buy a shirt?
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The guests being hospitable to their hosts.
Something is very wrong here.
But it is true that Canberra acts as if the aboriginal population did not exist.
They also don't care much about what ther voters think of their policies.
The Aussie government has still not dealt with the fact that tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were outright kidnapped from their families for a variety of purposes.
What exactly does "dealt with" mean?
It took a band, namely Midnight Oil, to hammer this stuff into the consciousness of the Aussie public, and most still ignored the blatant atrocities.
Hooray for consciousness! Problem solved, right?
Okay, I read TFA for you guys, you can thank me later.
They are worried about privacy and freedom of speech/association. In particular the government is trying to bring in some anti-encryption laws that would mandate backdoors and step up domestic surveillance.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's a prison colony, actually. The government can't break the habit of tossing the residents' cells.
Have gnu, will travel.
It started when they took everyones guns away...and now, the govt will start to progress a bit further to take more freedoms/rights away from the populace.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
I've never heard of a 12 step program that involves admitting that someone 50+ years ago had a problem, but OK, we got your step one covered. What's step 2?
Let me guess: "gimme money"?
Assange is an Australian citizen and he personifies the intersection of Human Rights and the "Digital Agenda".
Now that Sweden has dropped its case, he should be free -- except that the British government now insists on prosecuting him for bail violations (and then extradite him to Trumpistan).
It would be simple under existing treaties for the Australian government to step in and BRING HIM HOME to face a relatively fair trial for whatever he is alleged to have done.
Manus Island. Tampa Incident. Nauru. SIEV-X. Stolen Generations. New Norscia. Child imprisonment in the Northern Territory. Two strikes laws, also in NT. Thursday Island. Pacific Solution. Peter Dutton. Deporting of Australian children with tenuous NZ connections under terrorism laws. Timor Gap bullying. Failure on every social indicator for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
That should help bring you up to date.
There's more, but this is a start.
It started when they took everyones guns away...and now, the govt will start to progress a bit further to take more freedoms/rights away from the populace.
You are bang on right. After the Port Arthur massacre a wave of legislative changes began, starting with the aggregation of the parliamentary voting system in the lower house to corral voting preferences to the major parties. It's been all down hill since then.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well, more recently their treatment of foreign residents, legal or not, is completely shameful. The way a dual citizen can't be an MP, for instance - what's that about? The withdrawal of health care from permanent residents. The treatment of refugees. The - exile is the only word that really seems to fit, for minor criminal offences, of people who've been legally resident in Australia for 20 years or more.
(To clarify: imagine someone who came to Australia from New Zealand in 1993, aged 3, who is now convicted of, let's say shoplifting. That person is now sent back to New Zealand, despite never having lived there as any kind of autonomous person.)
None of these look to me like the actions of a country that gives a flying fuck about "human rights".
No it didn't.
It started when pine gap was opened in Australia, well before they "took our guns away".
(Sidenote: you can still get guns in Australia. It's actually not that hard to get a license if you want one)
Australia's value to our allies isn't just our elite special forces troops (I understand our SAS have a particularly good reputation for their work, but I'm sure the same could be said of a few other countries). It is our unique position in spying on the southern hemisphere. See, Australia started out as a listening post covering Asia, but over the past few decades we've actually got very good at it; and now in a global world while everybody is passing laws that say "you cannot spy on your own citizens", Australia's a great ally to have, since we'll gladly spy on (for example) UK citizens and hand everything we find over to the UK spy agencies... same with the US.
Most Australians who want to educate themselves are well aware of the activities of our clandestine SIGINT forces, but the thing is as a population we JUST DON'T CARE.
If you care to read what Snowden made public, you'll see Australia's involvement in international surveillance is more than just peripheral.
Also, if you do read what Snowden made public, you may very well come to the conclusion that most Australians have: These changing laws are just legalizing what's happening in secret anyway. It doesn't matter if it's legal or illegal, it's going to be done in secret; so you may aswell make it legal.
Australians made the choice long ago to be friendly to a surveillance state, there's no going back on that now.
The only thing we can do is take small steps to protect ourselves, like actively resisting the centralization of records (Aussies, unless you want your medical history PUBLIC, please opt out of MyHealthRecord); and adopting technologies which make the life of our spy agencies that little bit harder (like encrypting your stuff, using monero, deleting facebook).
But if you think we could put up a meaningful resistance now, you're delusional.
Not only that, if you see the way we get behind our sporting teams, you might come to realize why we don't resist this.... Aussies rather like to be the best in the world at something. ... even if it is clandestine.
You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it.
And some people are still trying to tell me that something that my grandfather might've done to their grandfather is something that I should apologize for.
That's a really good way of perpetuating inter-generational segregation.
Maybe we should be focusing more on what policies we could introduce today that give children the education and support they need to break the cycle of following blindly in the footsteps of their parents (toward drug addiction, prostitution and domicile in a region with zero employment prospects) and less on handing out cash which supports the cycle and apologies which shift the blame of it toward previous generations' failings.
It is a terrible thing when righteous indignation cripples one to the point where someone cannot use google.
It's a terrible thing when incompetence cripples one to the point that they think "hurr durr use google" is a phrase which can be used to degend any idiocy they personally believe.
"Of course the earth is flat! Use google!"
Thanks tips.
I've been lobbying the Australian government for 25 years on freedom of speech, association and censorship issues. As Australia does not have a bill of rights many really bad laws are attempted here so our populace has to be alert all the time. Unfortunately most don't because, lets face it, it's complicated and frustrating work - exactly what the govt. depends on so they have a path of minimum resistance.
Even though I really love Australia, I'll call my country out for being cunts, bottom line really, because I want our culture to evolve into something better. We're the template for modern covert fascism and I'll explain what I've observed in all those years of lobbying.
Years ago companies used to bring their wares to Australia first because we were a good test market for the US at 1/10th the population. That meant they could test marketing campaigns and product here first and figure out how they would sell it. Now I don't know exactly when it started however I think some clever politician figured out they could do that with political campaigns and when they wanted to legislate a new law they could try the shittiest version here then take it to other 5 I countries and pull out the things their bill of rights would not allow.
The latest version I see in the US is refugees, but we've been being cunts to refugees for years. We completely destroy their lives and when we're done making them wait however many years we send them back to where they came from to get tortured and killed. As an Australian, I have to say, I'm totally fucking ashamed.
I really believed in Democracy and I always thought that countries like ours were places where dissidents running from tyranny could come, I thought Australia was a designated protest zone, because freedom is the most important thing. I hope western countries can fix it because their is a lot of really good things about western culture.
And it's not that the everyday person is a bad person, they're not. However I think the time has come when we wake the fuck up and realise we are being deceived, before all western cultures loose this really good thing we have.
I hope you can see this is not bagging western culture it's trying to save it from being corrupted.
All the best to you.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You had me at Dutton.
The way a dual citizen can't be an MP, for instance - what's that about?
To be fair, that came as a surprise to everyone. Really, though, that's a major inconvenience if you're an MP, but it's an odd one to open with, considering everything else you mentioned, plus all the stuff you didn't.
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To put it bluntly, AccessNow seems to accuse the Australian legislators for not doing their jobs, or being stupid and illiterate.
On behalf of Australia: Yeah, we knew that much already.
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Only the police openly carry guns.
And security guards.
No military style weapons at all.
It depends what you mean by "military style", but yes. Category D includes most non-fully-auto firearms that most countries consider to be "military style" (centrefire rifles, self-loading or pump-action shotguns over 5 rounds capacity, semi-auto rimfire rifles over 10 rounds capacity), and they are available to those who need one for their job such as farmers and professional hunters.
Contrary to what American marketers would have you believe, non-professional sporting shooters don't actually need firearms in this class.
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