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Australia Plans More Spying on Citizens
Posted by
michael
on Sun Jun 09, 2002 01:01 PM
from the jumping-on-the-bandwagon dept.
from the jumping-on-the-bandwagon dept.
sg_oneill writes "The Australian Electronic Frontiers foundation report that the Australian Government is looking at introducing changes to the Telecomunications Interception Act giving Government Agencies (NOT just police!) the power to intercept email, voice mail and SMS messages without a warrant. Considering the concurrent proposals to introduce legislation to allow banning of organisations suspected of terrorist links, am I the only one suspecting Australia is about to have a whole lot less political parties?" I think our most recent Australia spying story was about the Australian government spying to win elections.
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Email is not and never was secure. (Score:3, Informative)
--Blair
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2)
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2)
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2)
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no risk too small about which Americans will do their Chicken Little routine. It's our nature now. We are a nation of cowards.
Listen, all you liberty-lovers. The only way to secure your liberty is through force or threat of force. For example, secession was an acknowledged right of any state in the USA, until Lincoln _crushed_ that notion when somebody actually tried it. Unless you can enforce your actions through force, you are at the mercy of those who can.
We hear a lot about freedoms these days from our government, but it's mostly boilerplate to pacify us while we are transformed into something authoritarian. What central State is not expanding its own scope and power these days at the expense of "the people"?
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:4, Interesting)
"Hold on a minute sir, we're almost done. Gotta make sure 'Aunt Edna' and 'hip surgery' aren't terrorist codewords. Then you can have your mail. Oh, and we're keeping the detergent samples. My socks are dirty...errr...I mean...it's a dangerous chemical compound, and we don't know what your true motives are."
Would that outrage you? What makes email special, such that it's okay for the feds to read that?
Parent
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2)
What about regular mail? Would you be outraged if government agents were waiting curbside when you came to check your mailbox, sorting through your letters from granny?
As long as they informed me beforehand that they would be doing it, and didn't destroy anything, I wouldn't.
Oh, also they would have to make it legal to send non-priority letters via competing companies.
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:3, Funny)
But does any of it matter? Front doors to houses in the US, which are required by law to swing inward, are ridiculously easy to kick/bash in. Does that mean that it should be legal for someone to kick down my door and do whatever the Hell they want in my home? Of course it doesn't. It's also ridiculously easy to kill people (a strong hit to the head alone will do the trick sometimes), so should that be legal, too?
Lots of very bad things are easy to do. That's part of the reason why they're illegal (or, in this case, they're supposed to be). They harm others and almost anyone can do them.
Re: House doors (Score:2, Informative)
Think you fell prey to false authority syndrome.
Re: House doors (Score:2)
Re:This is NOT informative (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's what you don't understand - it's not John Q. Hacker on a joyride down the superhighway that we're talking about - it's the GOVERNMENT. It's a huge bureaucracy that has the ability to collect this information, store it, retrieve it, and use it to profile what kind of person you might be- all without your knowledge or consent. You have no idea who else is using it, when, or for what purpose. As such, the repercussions can be much more severe and long-lasting. Basically, we have government agencies using the threat of terrorism as an excuse to turn themselves into the equivalent of the KGB.
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2)
If it becomes legal for any government department to spy on us, then we have absolutely no defence whatsoever. They take a look, verify that it was done illegaly and then shut you the F up.
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not about whether your emails are secure, it's about whether your government has the legal right to read them.
Re:Email is not and never was secure. (Score:2)
By the same logic that supports this, your phone conversations are not and never will be secure, because they transmit along wires hanging around in public areas, and they are accessible by any number of employees at various different companies.
But here's a news flash for you, people WANT to be able to communicate securely with others. This is necessary for business, this is necessary for personal comfort (you don't want a security guard to know details of your intimate life, do you?), and most importantly, this is necessary for political freedom. You cannot have a free political society when the government removes the right for its people to communicate without its knowledge.
So flash around the technical details about the security weaknesses in the design of the smtp protocol all you wish, the fact remains that there is a social need for commonly usable secure email communication, and until that need is filled, governments need to keep their fingers out of email so that free societies can continue to exist.
For people concerned about this story... (Score:3, Insightful)
GnuPG [gnupg.org]
Re:For people concerned about this story... (Score:2)
Isn't that what the Nazis said about Egnima? The Complancy that went with having an "unbreakable" encryption led to errors in procedure that aided in breaking it.
Re:For people concerned about this story... (Score:2)
This is where the complancy I mentioned comes into play. Is your keychain stored on your hard drive? Do you overuse encryption giving more examples to work with? Are you careless about including a known string such as the same sig line at the end of each message? Does the unencrypted header give important clues to the context of the message? This is the kind of carelessness that allowed Allied codebreakers to work out the key for a given day, carelessness that was due to having an "unbreakable" code.
If you fail to follow good security measures encryption will only delay the time it takes to read your messages, while giving you a false sense of security.
Do Not assume the goal of a codebreaker is just to decrypt one message. His goal is to recover your personal key so he can read all of your messages, and recovery is made easier if part of the message is known, or if the keychain is directly accessed.
Right On! (Score:4, Funny)
; )
What's the reason? (Score:2)
Re:What's the reason? (Score:2)
Most of the workings of government ought to be transparent in any event.
Cheers,
-b
Australians are not the only ones, Try Europe (Score:2, Interesting)
Police to spy on all emails
Fury over Europe's secret plan to access computer and phone data
http://www.observer.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903
Re:Australians are not the only ones, Try Europe (Score:2, Informative)
Fury over Europe's secret plan to access computer and phone data [observer.co.uk].
Procedural Minimum for Democracy (Score:4, Interesting)
-Democracy 'with Adjectives', by D. Collier and S. Levitsky [nd.edu]
The paper I link to (which is academic but pretty accessible - I'm a biologist, not a political scientist) is about military juntas in south america, not Aussies.
I raise this point because I think John Howard [pm.gov.au] (the prime minister of Australia) is Australian for Hitler. A modern Democracy can survive all matter of scuminess, but if this proposal goes through, Australia will need an adjective (such as crpyto or pseudo) to qualify their form of government.
Re:Procedural Minimum for Democracy (Score:4, Insightful)
As an Australian, I agree, in a qualified sense. In his mind it's OK to suspend or abolish democratic freedoms in order to ensure that people he doesn't agree with can't be heard or be politically active. (Another example from recent history is Nixon -- government "by any means necessary", legal or illegal).
For many years Queensland under Joh-Bjelke Petersen had a law, intended to stop street marches, that banned the public assembly of four or more people if such assembly had not been previously cleared by the police. It looks like we're moving back to those days... along with John Howard's racist issues on immigration (lock up the non-white illegal immigrants), we should soon be the new old South Africa, if you know what I mean.
Parent
Understanding (Score:3, Funny)
But on a serious, more blunt note: Should these people wait for terrorists, and by that I mean ANY TERRORISTS AT ALL, to give a rat's ass about them before enacting broad "anti-terrorism" legislation? Are the Australian people really going to swallow this crap?
Re:Ooh... there was a misunderstanding (Score:2)
+sigh+ (Score:2)
+sigh+
Not just emails at stake, regular phone calls too. (Score:2)
Such transmissions are also stored (even if only for microseconds) on routers while in transit. This would possibly make them susceptible to be intercepted without a warrent.
In other words, only pure analog phone messages would require an intercept request. Phone calls that go through digital switches would not.
IANAL, I've just dealt with the courts too damn much.
Oppoition (Score:2, Informative)
Steve Irwin (Score:5, Funny)
Irwin picks the prime minister up by the neck...
"Wow! Look at this beauty! What we have here is a rare Australian Brown-Nosed Prime Minister. Very valuable too, large corporations will pay big bucks for a fella like this one here."
The prime minister starts gagging and choking...
"You're all right, Mate. You're all right. You have to be careful when dealing with these buggers. I don't want to let go of the neck because then he could call his elite guard and then I'd be in a world of trouble. They'd come running and attack me with their projectile defense mechanisms. They wouldn't understand that I'm not trying to hurt the prime minister, I'm only trying to educate the public."
The PM is grasping for his computer, but Irwin holds him out of reach...
"Let's walk over to his computer and take a look at how he survives. Notice the program he uses to search his prey's email and telephone conversations. Very sneaky, but it's that survival instinct that allows him to maintain his dominance in the political jungle. That's why we call him the prime minister. Yeah? OK, I'm gonna let him down slowly, and hopefully he'll be too busy gasping for air to call for help and I can make my retreat."
International political action? (Score:2)
Perhaps Amnesty International [slashdot.org] would be a good place to start?
Amnesty International URL (Score:2)
Time for a change to the democratic system (Score:3, Interesting)
Most Western "democratic" countries operate a system that involves the election of representatives who are chosen by the people to speak on their behalf in government.
The unfortunate reality is that these representatives are almost always looking out for their own interests ahead of those of the people who elected them. "Power corrupts" as they say.
These representative systems were devised hundreds of years ago when it was simply impractical to run a true democracy and, at the time, they constituted the most democratic solution to the problem of allowing the people to dictate their own future.
Clearly it would have been absolutely impractical to have every citizen voting on every decision related to the running of the country.
But it's now the 21st century and things have changed -- a lot!
Now we have the power to let individuals exercise their own democratic right to have a say in the decisions made by government.
Several years ago I proposed that we now have the technology to implment a truly democratic system that would effectively impose strong checks and balances on the excesses of our elected representitives.
I documented this system (as it applies to the New Zealand political system)
here. [politics.co.nz]
The idea is to acknowledge that an elected representitive is effectively doing little more than exercising the proxy of the voters in their constituency.
Until now, the only real democratic right that citizens had was to elect a different representitive at the end of each term. Now that's a very coarse form of democracy and offers little protection for the public.
My suggestion is that each voter be entitled to withdraw their proxy and exercise it individually if they choose to do so on an issue by issue basis
In the event that a government tries to pass legislation which is not supported by a majority of the voters, those voters can recover their proxy and vote against it.
The technology to allow such a "recoverable proxy" situation can be as simple as a telephone, ATM or Internet connection.
Unlike other proposed improvements to the democratic process which involve cumbersome methods such as regular referenda, this system allows our elected representitives to carry on as normal, exercising the proxies of their constituents-- but simply reserves the publics right to say "no" when that representitive decides to place his or his party's interests ahead of the majority choice of the people he/she has been elected to serve.
Of course politicians don't want a bean of this proposal -- because it would significantly curb their ability to rort the system and remove their ability to place self-interest ahead of the public's right to be democratically represented.
A change like this would likely require a massive outcry by public -- and our politicians would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
What do you think?
Re:Time for a change to the democratic system (Score:2)
Very true -- and that's why the Recoverable Proxy (RP) system isn't simply one that relies on having a voter referendum on each bill put before the house.
It is a system that allows the elected representitives to continue their role of making decisions and running the country -- but cements in place a guarantee that the privileges such a position provides are not abused.
For example -- few people would be interested in 99% of the bills that are presented and the day-to-day operation of government would effectively be unaltered by RP. However, there was a bill (such as the one which started this
The mere fact that the government knew that voters had this power of veto at their disposal would, I suggest, cause them to be a little more circumspect when trying to mess with people's rights or pass legislation that isn't necessarily going to reflect the wishes of the majority.
Any government that consistently attempted to pass legislation that was voted down by the population at large would then have to think long and hard about whether they were doing their job properly -- and everyone else would know it.
It's the one thing that's been missing from politics for a long, long time -- accountability!
Good news (Score:2, Informative)
Simple circumvention (Score:2, Insightful)
Well for email thats easy, use a forign web baised email.
Voice mail dont use your telcos "Message bank facility", use an answering machine, or if you like those anoying menues set one up with a modem and a computer.
For sms it's a little harder, if you realy dont want someome looking in on that sort of thing, buy an integrated phone / pda type thingy with GPRS and load up an instant messaging type client that has an SMS portal (ie ICQ) that way you can still recieve sms messages, and you can still send sms messages to phones but your incoming message never get "stored" on an australian server(if your IM is conecting to a forign server). They still pass through aussie servers and telco equipment but they arent stored.
P.S. I'm an aussie and i realy doubt this bill will actualy pass. I was listning to a story about this on the radio and not only are the other partys rejecting most of the bill but i wouldn't be suprised if some liberal party members cross the floor and vote it down
More debate (Score:3, Interesting)
More and more, people seem to be focusing on those issues beloved so much by the media, such as law and order, border protection and the nebulous political hotcake known as "The Bush" (which basically boils down to the higher cost of living in rural areas). As much as I hate to say it, no one has much time for trivial issues such as civil liberties when there are so many other things to be outraged over.
It doesn't help things that, these days, political parties like to present themselves as being totally committed to a given point of view. The effect of this is generally to silence the lower ranks, and of course to neutralise any dissent within the Government to official policies. A similar effect usually happens within the ranks of the Opposition, but currently it *is* split on several key issues, though it's disheartening to see the Government leap on this and shouting out words to the effect that the Opposition is in disarray.
Perhaps we also need some way to mitigate the power of the media corporations. Cynics (or realists?) would argue that these are the entities that really control Australia, and that the Parliament is more or less just a formality. Unfortunately, with the Govnerment pushing to abolish the cross-media-ownership laws (which prevent someone owning both a newspaper and a TV station in the same city, *I think*) the largest media corporations could yet become even more powerful.
Talk-back radio hosts are also quite powerful in Australia, and much to my continuing displeasure, they're mostly conservative. People like John Laws and Alan Jones, despite the "cash-for-comment" scandal recently in which both were found to have been receiving money in exchange for favourable comments towards particular organisations, still seem to be doing the thinking for a disconcertingly large proportion of the population.
I don't think any of this is going to change any time soon. I only hope there are at least *some* sane people at the top. Hopefully they can keep things on track until we work out a way to engage the public interest in issues which affect the democracy we seem to take for granted.
Re:democratic spirit (Score:2)
ironic perhaps, certainly not funny though
Re:democratic spirit (Score:2)
Just to flesh out the "and then a miracle occurs" steps in the process, I'd replace them with...
Unfortunately, that change makes the process seem less mysterious. The people being shocked is still kind of funny, I guess.
Re:democratic spirit (Score:2)
Re:George Orwell is spiniing in his grave. (Score:3, Insightful)
Why does everything involving security/privacy have to come down to the same tired, inapplicable old refences to 1984?
Explain to me how the reference is inapplicable. As I recall, having *gasp* actually read the book, surveillance of individual citizens by the government and control of the populous through manipulation of all news and history was precisely what Orwell was writing about and feared would come to be in the future. So, now that governments throughout the Western world are rapidly enacting measures that enable far greater surveillance of their own citizens and chilling effects on free speach we're just supposed to shut up about it. We should retire the reference to 1984 because you think it's tired and overused, despite it being entirely on-topic to the discussion at hand? Maybe we should ban Kafka from the discussion, since he too voiced a number of poignant and applicable ideas regarding the nature of justice, beaureaucracy, and power? If Orwell is spinning in his grave, it is because governments throughout the western world are interpreting his novel as a howto guide for building morally bankrupt, totalitarian states rather than as a warning against such things.
Re:George Orwell is spiniing in his grave. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's a rather narrow interpretation of Orwell's work. Communist Russia may have been the inspiration for Orwell's novel, but the themes he developed in the book are far more general. If the book had been that limited in scope, it is unlikely that it would be as popular as it is today.
Also, the fact that many governments of the Eastern world have already adopted mass surveillance and propaganda/censorship as a means of control does not in any way constitute a valid argument for allowing other nations to adopt equally abusive policies.
Re:George Orwell is spiniing in his grave. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The grimmest comment about government (Score:2)
Re:The grimmest comment about government (Score:2)
Actually, I stated that as the NRA position, I merely think it highly probable.
Your pride in having a document defining your rights that lacks a guarantee of free speech and press is misplaced, that's in Part 1...
As an American, I suggest you learn about your system of government before bringing your ignorant whines into a public policy debate.
Your precious Charter can be shitcanned or modified into uselessness any time enough members of Parliament want it to be, after which it needs a "Mother, may I" from the Brits.
Do you really think that Canada would have difficulty getting a UK Parliament to sign off on replacing the current version with a new and more restrictive version friendlier to repressive governments, particularly given RIP and the growth of an Orwellian "surveillance society" as the UK government has approved?
It seems easier than getting 34 independent US state legislatures to sign off on gutting the US Bill of Rights.
Have you read the US Constitution? Or for that matter, your own Charter of Rights and Freedoms?
Since you probably haven't, yours is at http://laws.justice.gc.ca/en/charter/ [justice.gc.ca]
If you had, you might have read the following:
"The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."
Sounds good... until you take a hard look at it. Who defines "reasonable"?
Re:You're a nutcase! (Score:2)
Unbelievable. There's nothing else to say.
You'd be in good company in Australia... (Score:2)
Re:You're a nutcase! (Score:3, Insightful)
The matter arose when a woman had a stalker she knew of, and after a couple of non-fatal attacks, was begging the police for protection. They didn't provide it, and the lady was eventually killed. Her relatives sued NYPD claiming they should have protected her against such an obvious danger.
The courts said no.
It is your obligation to protect yourself. It is the obligation of the police to clean up after crimes have been commited.
Re:G'day! (Score:2)
They all left. Make note of that.