Australian Police Spying On Web, Phone Usage With No Warrants 78
New submitter i-reek writes "Australian police, along with government agencies, are accessing phone and internet account information, outward and inward call details, phone and internet access location data, and details of IP addresses visited of Australian citizens, all without judicial warrants . In the last two years, some states have shown an increase of more than 50 per cent in these surveillance authorizations, which can be granted by senior police officers and officials instead of a magistrate or judge."
So what now? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, as an Australian I know complaining about this is going to do jack. So how can we protect ourselves?
As far as I can see, getting an Ipredator account (an encrypted VPN straight to Sweden) allows you to bypass the Australian system completely. All they know is "You have an Ipredator account." You can use Skype to do your telephony through the VPN and it, too, becomes obsficated and encrypted as well.
Now, doing this will basically protect you from most things. If you're looking at 4Chan, or weird arse but legal porn (mmm, mechophilia), or prank calling Christian Weston Chandler or whatever, yeah, you're basically safe.
Don't think that you can DDOS whitehouse.gov, though, or make bomb/assassination threats, or look up kiddy porn or whatever. If you piss off the FBI there's really not a lot, in the long term, you can do to avoid pound-me-in-the-arse prison.
I wonder how long Ipredator/etc will be legal for Australians, or if it remains legal but simply using it will get the attention of ASIO.
Years? Months? Maybe it already does...
Re:So what now? (Score:0, Insightful)
Or become a member of the party mentioned in the article [greens.org.au]. You know, the one actually calling this out. Not the "I want to be able to infringe copyright" party.
No warrant - No oversight (Score:5, Insightful)
Police being able to do this things by themselves without having to ask for permission is the hallmark of a Police-State. Rather obviously not body can really want that. The judicial oversight is exactly there to prevent such things from happening.
Note that I do not blame the police. They are just trying to do their job well. But exactly because of that, they are unsuitable to define in which cases this is appropriate and in which case it is not. They have the wrong incentives and the wrong perspective. Which, again, is not really avoidable and not their fault. And therefore somebody else, namely a judge, that has no stake in the actual outcome, needs to decide on this.
Re:So what now? (Score:5, Insightful)
why 50 years ago?
I see little diff between ANY country in the modern world, today; when it comes to snooping an spying.
its human nature. the sooner we realize this is NOT a 'what language do you speak at home' thing and everyone is going to be spied on by their local and national govs.
not american problem, not a UK problem, not an aussie problem, not a euro problem. its a HUMAN problem.
humans do a bad job of being fair (by nature). we have laws to try to help our bad side be good. ...but its not working and the bad side of humanity is winning.
world wide!