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.
HTTPS -- default (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
The block seems to be the current idiotically expensive SSL certificate business.
The first step would be for the web browsers to add a "low default security" level : user signed certificates are accepted as "normal" connections without throwing up big errors and don't give much of an additional indication.
Expensive SSL certificates can continue to give the "feel good" level of indication by showing the name of the verified company.
Somebody fill me in here (Score:5, Interesting)
What banner is flying over this huge censorship push? What is the general public's thoughts on all this? Usually with this sort of absolute censorship you have a particularly powerful head of state like in Russia, Iran or North Korea. Australia still has free elections (to my knowlege). Here in the USA we had a bit of tightening here and there security-wise with 9/11, but Australia doesn't seem to have any sort of dictator-to-be, nor do they have any significant terrorist threats or major overarching foreign policy that would require them to keep an eye on dissidents. Usually someone can point to some major speech by a prime minister or president outlining an "improved security policy" for the welfare of the country against some outside boogeyman, but from what I can tell, Australia is tightening it's grip on everything for censorship's sake.
I have to ask... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Interesting)
Encrypting sender and recipient is hard and in the summary it's clear that it's mostly sender and recipient that's being recorded. Who's talking to who is more important for data mining than what you're actually saying to each other.
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
You will never see "us" making some move as changing something this big from one day to the other (see IPv6).
We see groups of people doing it for themselves though. There's a lot of darknets out there already.
But now my darkest prediction: you will soon see news along the lines of "UK/AU/EU/US/... outlawing private use of encryption" (except some exceptions like banking). Control-freaky governments will likely try to pull something like this off (in the name of the children and against terrorists, or course)
Maybe they'll use a softer version and just make it a valid suspicion if someone encrypts more than xx% of his traffic. They'll do ad campaings saying: "He who has nothing to hide, doesn't need to use encryption".
What can we do about this kind of an attack on our freedoms?
Not much except become politically active, I assume. There's already the pirate party all around europe and I assume they will be getting a lot more exposure in the media when governments try to pull that kind of shit. They already made an impact in germany, ridiculing and largely disabling the stupid "stop child port by DNS-lookup filtering" idea and the people behind that idea.
I just have to quote Benjamin Franklin at this point:
Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
Re:Somebody fill me in here (Score:1, Interesting)
> What banner is flying over this huge censorship push?
They're trying to sell it as a way to protect people from accidentally accessing "unwanted" material.
> What is the general public's thoughts on all this?
Near universal condemnation from the general public, although that's not done by an independent survey. Anyone who knows anything about the technology involved hates it.
> Usually with this sort of absolute censorship you have a particularly powerful head of state like in Russia, Iran or North Korea.
The censorship would not be absolute, but rather trivial, according to reports. Mostly its the principle that offends me, and the extremely large waste of public funds to implement it.
> Australia still has free elections (to my knowlege). Here in the USA we had a bit of tightening here and there security-wise with 9/11, but Australia doesn't seem to have any sort of dictator-to-be, nor do they have any significant terrorist threats or major overarching foreign policy that would require them to keep an eye on dissidents.
Free elections do exist, but they're only free in the sense that we can choose weather an insane person or merely a crazy one will run the country. Both major parties are pretty poor choices, imho.
> Usually someone can point to some major speech by a prime minister or president outlining an "improved security policy" for the welfare of the country against some outside boogeyman, but from what I can tell, Australia is tightening it's grip on everything for censorship's sake.
Nah, its all those paedophiles. And corrupters of children. Also murderers of unborn children. As well as those pesky people that have the gall to believe that just because because someone doesn't want to live isn't a sign that they're crazy (and therefore their death wishes to be ignored).
Or discussion of any of the above. We wouldn't want the *children* to get the wrong idea, would we?
Also, people can complain about any website, and if the complaint is upheld, the site will go onto the blacklist.
Re:I'm more afraid of the government (Score:5, Interesting)
Do you mean...
1.) your fear the gov't more than you fear the terrorists and pedophiles
2.) you are more afraid of the government than pedophiles and terrorists are
?
Re:Pointless.. yet again. (Score:1, Interesting)
Oh and despite what you think ISPs are routinely hacked, individual accounts are hacked more frequently, and presumably customers private data was frequently taken. This is systemic to coroporate environments - it's cheaper to manage the fall out of a problem than it is to invest in security in the first place. Worst was that management took the view that too much security would actually attract hackers, and preferred rapid heroic responses to fixing things that get pwned than actually making it more robust in the first place. I spent more than a few late nights nuking compromised servers from orbit. Later there would be a report of a 'technical issue' causing customer data to be lost other than what could be revived from tape.
I wonder how much internet identity theft is actually rooted in this kind of silent theft from ISPs.
Now if ISPs were to log everything going back a long way, and have this data poorly secured (as they may just do), this is set up for a serious clusterfuck.
Re:Somebody fill me in here (Score:4, Interesting)
What banner is flying over this huge censorship push? What is the general public's thoughts on all this? Usually with this sort of absolute censorship you have a particularly powerful head of state like in Russia, Iran or North Korea. Australia still has free elections (to my knowlege). Here in the USA we had a bit of tightening here and there security-wise with 9/11, but Australia doesn't seem to have any sort of dictator-to-be, nor do they have any significant terrorist threats or major overarching foreign policy that would require them to keep an eye on dissidents. Usually someone can point to some major speech by a prime minister or president outlining an "improved security policy" for the welfare of the country against some outside boogeyman, but from what I can tell, Australia is tightening it's grip on everything for censorship's sake.
I'm confused too. I live in New Zealand and to be fair, neither side of the Tasman Sea really understands the thinking of the other country.
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:3, Interesting)
Good point of course.
It would still require a substantial investment in equipment to proxy all the internet connections of all citizens and not slow down things down to a crawl.
The first goal should be to make this kind of "dragnet" approach to scanning the whole internet as expensive as possible.
Secretly? (Score:5, Interesting)
Abbott has refused to speak out against the net filter. Secretly, I would say he quite likes it and will go along with it.
Secretly? (Disclaimer: I have posted this before, but it's worth restating)
Tony Abbot visited humble Darwin city recently and it was there that I personally got to ask him, in his public question and answer time, the following question (roughly remembered):
"The Internet is an important part of the lives of many young Australians, as well as Australia as a whole in this modern age- what do you think of the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's plan to censor the Internet?"
His answer began:
"Well, I'm afraid I'm probably going to disappoint you..." and yes, unfortunately, he did.
Paraphrased his answer was: "Stopping child pornography is extremely important to me and the Liberal party and therefore, if we can prove the censorship plan doesn't work, we will oppose it; but only *this particular thing*. We will continue to seek effective means to block 'filth' (his word) from entering our country any way we can. If the filter works, we will support it."
Basically the message I got from his reply is that Tony Abbot believes that the filter will work "well enough" and is too much of a hot potato to oppose politically. The subtext I personally divined from his answer was a little more chilling; that the filter didn't go far *enough* for his tastes, and that he'd personally rather a complete whitelist than a blacklist. Therefore, speaking as a card-carrying Liberal... if you think that voting for the Liberal party in the next election will make the filter go away, you are sadly mistaken.
On a side note, the fact that he himself is an extremely religious man probably doesn't help a great deal, since it seems that too many politicians tend to "trust God about these things" when it's abundantly clear that God knows sweet F-A about the Tubes and how they work.
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:5, Interesting)
That won't help the wider picture - that only helps the web, the principle is the problem, not the practice. Once they start blocking / monitoring websites it's only a matter of time before bypassing that filter becomes an offence and/or they branch out into other traffic.
You're actually looking for a complete P2P, SSL network to overlay the Internet and provide the security of connection. And as Tor demonstrates - at the moment - that's hard, slow and doesn't protect people's privacy unless they do *everything* right.
Seriously, it's what's needed... some form of P2P, traffic-sharing, encrypted "darknet". It's the only way to stop government sniffing your traffic, choosing what websites they approve of and/or downloading things you might otherwise not be allowed to. Ideally, someone should build a little matchbox-sized device that just anonymously routes data from peers over secure connections via wifi, Tor-like, mesh-networking, with auto-routing, auto-discovery of wireless networks and internet connections, etc - with some QoS of course so no one peer can flood the others out. It's possible now with some embedded device that just accepts all wifi connections and joins them to a CloudVPN / Tor kind of deal. Spread enough of them around a town and you can bypass the traditional Internet entirely, transporting encrypted data over it when necessary, using any connection to another box of its kind that it can find otherwise. And it only takes one person to join to a physically-foreign network and the whole place will be able to contact the world (albeit slowly in that contrived example).
A mix of Tor, CloudVPN, mesh-networking, Kismet, P2P software.
I've said before, it's only a matter of time before "The Internet" becomes nothing more than an infrastructure to carry data for such a network - like back in the old days. The routers won't have any clue what data they are actually routing (always was a breach of layering to have them do that anyway), they just provide the fastest paths to the intended recipient. "The Internet" becomes a backbone network for a kind of global VPN. I'm not talking tomorrow, but give it a few decades and that will end up happening. As it is, we have to encrypt anything sensitive / useful anyway. Before you know it, every protocol running on the Internet will be encrypted (already true for certain things like certain SMTP, chat, web, filesharing, remote shell, etc.), so it's just a matter of lumping them together into a single VPN-style connection. Then "The Internet" returns to its original purpose - providing routes to other places and transmitting data that you don't necessarily know its origin or destination.
As a nice by-product, eliminates things like protocol-based bandwidth-limiting too.
Welcome to nazi australia! (Score:1, Interesting)
WELCOME!.....pls deposit all yer liberties here
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
> virtually no-one is interested in developing the technologies neccessary to make a secure web a reality
IPv6. It already exists and would/could cover a large chunk of your legitimate concerns. Problem is...the switch-over is taking ages... But it's something you can advocate/implement from your end without waiting on other's.
Re:Somebody fill me in here (Score:3, Interesting)
Australian here- It's pretty simple really. (Disclaimer: I've posted this before, but it bears repeating)
We have a political system where, instead of directly voting for a prime minister, we instead vote for our local representative; the party with the most seats gets to elect the prime minister. Essentially.
The problem comes when the two main political parties own almost equal seats, but many seats are "safe" seats. Think Texas. Is a Democrat ever going to be elected in a landslide in Texas? Nah. Is a Republican going to take San Fransisco in a landslide? Nah.
So, politicians focus on the marginal seats. Think Florida, which could go either way.
It just so happens a number of those seats are, currently, in and around Adelaide; a highly religious, conservative city known as "The City of Churches". So, politicians on all sides of the political spectrum are metaphorically sucking our version of the Bible Belt's dick in order to get those precious one or two seats, which means they can keep/gain government respectively.
Which means our current administration is pushing through knee-jerk think-of-the-children legislation while the opposition is basically screaming "US TOO BUT BIGGER, BETTER, MORE KNEE-JERKY."
It's pure horseshit and doesn't represent the will of the Australian people at all.
Not too sure that Adelaide is the bible-belt of Australia - Adelaide actually has a lower than average percentage of Christians than Australia as a whole.
Also, the "City of Churches" isn't due to the high number of Churches.
Taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide
Religion
Over half of the population identifies as Christian, with the largest denominations being Catholic (22.1%), Anglican (14.0%), Uniting Church (8.4%) and Eastern Orthodox (3.8%). Approximately 24% of the population expressed no religious affiliation, compared with the national average of 18.7%, and although ironically the large number of churches in Adelaide has led people to believe this is the source of the nickname The City of Churches [24] it is actually a shortening of its original nickname The City of Churches and Pubs and was changed in a deliberate attempt by the city fathers to clean up Adelaide's image in its early history, mostly since forgotten.
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Interesting)
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".
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
It's like an accidental time capsule and should in no ways be illegal.
Re:Okay... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hm, using a a bank on the internet without encryption could be interesting. I almost hope that they do ban encryption. Could be fun. Just give me some warning so that I have time to make popcorn :)
It will be interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
I never thought of Aussies being like this (Score:3, Interesting)
What the hell? How did they end up under the thrall of their Auntie? Is this where the US is headed?
Let's simplify this (Score:2, Interesting)
Each expansion of government means more money passing through the business of government, and more power that can be leveraged for the next expansion of government. The larger the business of government, the more lucrative and exploitable the business of government for the elite at the top of the pyramid.
There's a reason why every year government costs more, spends more, borrows more, and seizes more power over the people, and it's certainly not because government is getting better.
Did I just imply that the entire business of government is motivated by profit, just like any other business? You're damn right I did.
Best protest vote (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm thinking of voting for the Greens in both houses. But I'm also wondering where to spread my preferences. Other than to the liberals and labor that is...
It's truly a sad period in our nations history when we have choices as abysmal as Tony Abbot and Kevin Rudd.
Re:Pointless.. yet again. (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't understand how this doesn't stop ISPs from doing a man in the middle attack on gmail and using their own valid SSL cert - I mean, it's not like I can't register a certificate for mail.google.com, the majority of legitimate authorized SSL cert providers will let me purchase it regardless.
I know that the security of CAs is not as it should be, but requesting forged certificates for *all* major websites will require a lot of work and more importantly, it will be noticed sooner or later. And then, all major browser developers will block the offending CA.
Or they could invest in buying one of Netronome's high performance transparent SSL proxies (What? Did you really think current SSL schemes are that secure these days?).
Please... SSL is not optimal, but is is not circumvented by such devices. SSL proxys work if you accept them as CA. They are designed for corporate scenarios, where it is a realistic assumption that all clients trust the proxy and accept it as CA. In the given scanario, it is not plausible to assume that everybody will blindly accept those certificats. So the proxy will simply not work.
china, iran... australia (Score:3, Interesting)
assholes of the internet
keep representing australia, up there with the autocrats and the theocrats in the iron fist department. you're awesome
Re:HTTPS -- default (Score:1, Interesting)
I am just dumbfounded by the idiocy of governments. I'm going to go back in time to the 1990s. A little thing called Napster was developed. Probably not the first of its kind and not the best, but it gained popularity. People shared music and the music industry boomed. Then the RIA figured that sales are being lost by some magical math that they are still using today. Artists like Metallica jumped on board to sink Napster.
What happened? The music industry is essentially sunk. Metallica sucks and don't sell nearly as many records as they used to. Napster was replaced by Limewire and The Pirate Bay and a million other P2P networks. Who won? Really, wouldn't it have been easier for the RIA to monitor one place (Napster) than going after millions of people individually? Wouldn't it have been better for the music industry to advance with the new technology? Use Napster as a way to promote new talent? Don't support the activity but use it for promotion behind the scenes. People who like artists and have the money were showing that they were willing to purchase the music still.
So now we can track everyone on the internet. Create a situation as you stated above with a "dark network", or rather much more likely multiple underground networks. And guess who will be there first? The terrorists, rapists, underbelly of society. Why? Cause they can threaten and pay more for it than a normal person. So while the government is looking for enemies amongst friends, the real enemies are free to do as these please. I do not want to trade my freedom for my supposed security.