Australian Gov't Seeks To Record Citizens' Web Histories 354
An anonymous reader writes "If you thought the Australian Government's Internet filter project was bad, think again. They have a new project — they are examining a policy that would require all Internet service providers to log users' web browsing history and email data such as who all emails were sent to and from. And that's just the start. Telephone calls, mobile phone calls, even Internet telephony. It's all in there. Looks like 1984 was a pretty prophetic book." Several readers also point to ZDNet's coverage.
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:4, Informative)
When do we finally make the move to a fully encrypted internet? An unencrypted internet made sense in the days that CPU power was expensive and there were no good encryption libraries. Both these problems were solved a decade ago.
Encrypting everything solves only part of the problem.
Big brother can still see which sites you visit, how much traffic is going on between who and who talks to whom.
It also doesn't give you anonymous publishing.
There's solutions for that, though, like http://freenetproject.org/ [freenetproject.org] which comes with a considerable resource penalty, but offers a solution for anonymous publishing.
Of course it's full of kiddy pr0n, that's the other side of the medal... take your pick.
"I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she's too young to have logged on yet. Here's what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?'"
--Mike Godwin, Electronic Frontier Foundation
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Informative)
Bare boobs and bottoms makes Jesus cry (Score:5, Informative)
> "I think that it makes sense to try to ensure that the homes of Australia aren't invaded with pornography via the internet," said Abbott. "On the other hand I don't want to see wider censorship and I don't want to see the internet destroyed as a tool for people's education or as a tool for people's businesses." Talk about fence sitting.
> What it came down to was a question of whether it was technically feasible, according to Abbott. Yet he wasn't willing to air his thoughts on the matter. "I just don't know enough about it at this stage to have an opinion on that," he said.
http://www.zdnet.com.au/abbott-drawn-into-filter-debate-339300089.htm [zdnet.com.au]
Given his conservative position on everything else he ever talks about, I'd say he *does* have an opinion on it... but he wants to cash in on the Rudd protest vote. At the end of the day we get to choose between two political parties... near identical... both headed by conservatives who like the idea of a net filter to stop the unwashed masses looking at boobs and bottoms, and to get them back into church. Pic related:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2010/03/31/tony-abbott-and-political-catholicism/ [larvatusprodeo.net]
http://www.abc.net.au/compass/s1362997.htm [abc.net.au]
http://www.cathnews.com/article.aspx?aeid=19151 [cathnews.com]
Already in place in EU (Score:1, Informative)
Not to say that this doesn't suck or anything, but in the EU, all isps are obliged to do this and much more already.
- Log url history.
- log phone contact history
- log mail contact history
- Obliged to introduce CP filter. Filter can be expanded for other 'illegal' websites.
- Log banking history.
And to trump that:
- Obliged fingerprint scans for id cards.
I guess that the 'sample DNA at birth' card will be played within a year.
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:5, Informative)
It is possible for a man in the middle to attack https. The only way around it is for certs and keys to be transported by sneakernet.
But now customs can search us for "pornography" so (sneaker+747)net can't be entirely relied on
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm more afraid of the government (Score:2, Informative)
I'm all for righteous outrage, when it's deserved and reasonable. We don't have nearly enough information yet to leap to the pitchforks, so far all that's been said is that the government is reviewing the European system. I read a really good article on Global Warming which made a fantastic point - the constant exaggeration, hyperbole, and raw sensationalism does more to harm a cause than anything else. If we're serious about making positive social change shouldn't we be doing our utmost to avoid this level of hysteria in discussion?
I'm genuinely interested by people's extreme reactions - is there a better compromise availible given the fact that there are reasonable problems arising from internet use in the present day.
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:5, Informative)
I just noticed after reading this post that https://www.slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] doesn't encrypt. It just redirects to the non-encrypted version.
We're screwed if even the technical sites don't support encrypted connections.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
ISPs and telecoms providers already store details of email, net phone calls and browsing history for 12 months.
RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000)) requires encryption keys to be handed over, or plaintext provided, on penalty of up to two years imprisonment.
The political rundown... (Score:5, Informative)
This political stance is part of the ALP's general move to social conservatism.
Unfortunately, this is the way that Australian politics is moving. We have a two party system, the ALP (Labour, notionally the "Left") and the Coalition (counterintuitively named Liberals and the country-oriented Nationals who are notionally the "Right"). The ALP is currently in government, but the balance of power is held in the Senate by one vote usually exercised by a couple of minor parties, Family First (ultra-right ultra-socially conservative), a couple of independents and the Greens (left wing progressive, but the government mostly refuses to negotiate with them). Usually it's down to the Family First Senator to decide whether a given piece of legislation passes the Senate or fails, and he's revelled in the power of his role. So the government has expended a lot of effort in wooing the Family First Senator, which has caused a slight move towards the right and towards social conservatism.
However, the ALP has apparently decided that the best way to get votes is to, as much as possible, be almost exactly like the Liberals. While they were ready to do something about Climate Change before the election, they have largely done nothing (because it's too hard). While they spoke about the importance of funding public options, such as public schools and hospitals and so on, they still haven't done anything about the massive and disparate amount of funding that is given to the private option. While they say that they say that they're against government misuse of public funds to advertise ahead of the upcoming election, several million dollars have been spent on exactly that purpose (noting that, in this case, I agree with the expenditure, but even so it is a Coalition thing to do).
Even on issues where you'd expect the ALP to be starkly different to the Liberals, nothing. Refugees are still being treated as lower forms of life, just as they were under the previous Coalition government. The ALP has gone out of its way to foment a war between itself and the Education unions by subjecting teachers to extraordinary public criticism (without actually putting up the funds and the political will to fix problems from above). Welfare recipients are still being hounded and stigmatised for the fact that they could possibly be cheating the system (even though the vast majority aren't) with no talk of improving the system and helping welfare recipients themselves to reduce their imposition on society. On and on and on, there is increasingly less difference between the ALP and the Liberals.
The Coalition has responded by going further and further towards the right. They've elected Tony Abbott as their leader, because the last leader had the gall to negotiate with the ALP on an carbon emissions trading scheme (which subsequently dropped like a stone in the now hostile Senate). Tony Abbott is one of the most conservative politicians currently representing Australia. He approaches politics from the perspective of his own highly religious Catholic upbringing and lifestyle, doesn't believe in anthropogenic climate change and is really quite keen to return Australia to the 50's in respect to how we treat anyone who isn't an Anglo-Saxon white Male of upper-middle (or higher) socioeconomic background and being above the age of 35.
Unfortunately, the ALP's strategy is going to bite them in the ass. No Coalition voters have been wooed over to the ALP side, but, now that both parties are on the Right or the Far Right and well and truly entrenched in conservative politics, many former ALP voters are turning to the Greens or other alternative parties. The Greens now have a swing in their favour of between 7 and 9 percent, mostly taken from the ALP, and other smaller parties are enjoying smaller swings in their favour. It's likely that the Greens will hold, themselves, the balance of power in the Senate (because Family First aren't likely to have a Senator elected this time around) but we could have a situation where Greens could get electe
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Already in place in EU (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, but a number (at least 3, might be more) of EU countries have already thrown that out as unconstitutional and are taking the fight back to the EU to get it thrown out on a EU level.
Uhm, no. The EU does not prevent members from implementing this but it is not required in any way. A lot of EU states don't have this and don't have plans to implement it. If you live in a country where this exists, well that sucks, but don't blame the EU.
Well, duh, would be a bad bad world where your bank doesn't have your history on record. They could just change your balance without anyone noticing. At least the treaty to live-stream it to the USA was killed by the EU parliament.
Re:Already in place in EU (Score:2, Informative)
URL history logging is not required by the directive. There is no EU-wide network filtering requirement. The German implementation of the data retention directive has been sacked as unconstitutional by the highest German court in the most assertive way: The law is nullified from the start and any data previously collected under it must be erased immediately. There is a network filtering law in Germany, but it has been suspended for one year and in the meantime has lost a lot of support (the election for which the conservative party raised the topic is over).
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
The EU data retention directive was pushed principally by the UK government [ffii.org].
Re:Okay... (Score:4, Informative)
RIPA (Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000)) requires encryption keys to be handed over, or plaintext provided, on penalty of up to two years imprisonment.
I've always been curious how this works if you simply respond "I don't remember".
As I understand things (I studied law at the University of Slashdot, so beware!), they assume you are lying, and bang you up.
No doubt you could appeal and appeal and appeal, all the way to Europe human rights court. The law sounds very unfair, and would the UK government really let it go all the way? Would they want their law ruled as unusable, or would they rather just have it to threaten? With enough delays in the appeals process, you could spend quite a bit of time in prison anyway before either getting a court to say no, or before the crown dropped the case.
Is the purpose of the law to get keys off people, or to stop people from wanting to use encryption at all?
In Sweden... (Score:5, Informative)
And not long ago, the Swedish police talked to the current government, and told them that this law is giving them problems. Since no ISP wants to loose customers, a lot of them have stopped storing the information about who gets assigned what IP number when. So even if you know beyond any doubt what IP address has been doing illegal, you cant find the person "owning" the IP address.
And also, people are learning to encrypt their traffic, and to use anonymising services (proxies and/or TOR). Together with the ISPs not storing much information for long, the end result is that the Swedish police have lost the ability to track people who distribute eg child porn on a massive scale.
The Swedish politicians were warned of this potential development before the law was passed, but seem to have chosen to not listen. And now they are left with a population that has learnt to conceal itself on internet, so that even if they remove the law, the police will still be left trying to deal with anonimised and encrypted traffic....
I think the Australians would do good to talk to Sweden before they take any steps they cannot untake later....
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Informative)
>>>As I understand things [if you claim you forgot the key], they assume you are lying, and bang you up.
Yes and after I eventually got out of jail, several politicians who voted "yes" to support this stupid law would suddenly turn-up dead. If I'm going to serve time, when I'm innocent of the crime, then somebody will pay the consequences for my lost life. - "From time to time the Tree of Liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Revolution is its natural fertilizer." - Thomas Jefferson, founder of the Democrat Party, author of the Declaration of Independence.
Re:Somebody fill me in here (Score:3, Informative)
He's got some facts, mixed up with a lot of bull. Adelaide does have a few important marginals, but the Family First Party (Protestant right, Australia's version of the Christian lobby) are most popular in safe Labor seats, where they are still far less popular than the Liberals (centre-right to almost FFP, with a very few classical liberals), and the Greens (centre-left to far-left, although the parliamentary party is more moderate than the members) are more popular than the FFP, and tend to get a significant protest vote.
Also, the worst Senator of them all, Sen. Fielding, is a Victorian FFP senator, who has long been in favour f the filter