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."
Vic Toews (Score:3, Interesting)
Does anyone know if Canadian Minister Vic Toews (of #TellVicEverything fame) has been on vacation to Australia recently? It's the DREAMLAND of every politician that's "firmly on board' with the US IPR agenda:
- draconian copyright law, drafted by US special interest groups
- strict enforcement with all options on the table
- and now warrantless spying on all citizens, including "government agencies"!
The Rule of Law is a 2-Way Street (Score:5, Interesting)
If the government begins to act outside the rule of law, it becomes a tyranny and loses all claim to legitimacy. Citizens of that country might not feel ready to take up arms to correct the situation, but they are certainly justified in slipping the constraints of law in likewise fashion. In other words, if police and government officials think it's mete to surveille private citizens without the sanction of law, then citizens are justified in surveilling those police and government officals, and their families, and their neighbors, etc. without the sanction of law. The tools and technical means are within nearly everyone's reach these days.
Yes, be careful. Don't get caught. The police have guns and you don't yada yada. But if recorded conversations of the chief of police exchanging sweet nothings with his mistress and video footage of an MP jacking off in a porn shop start surfacing perhaps they'll do a re-think of pissing on the public's rights the way they are. Especially if you used a common tagline like "Free Australia" so they all know it's being done for a reason.
Protest Like Canada Did (Score:5, Interesting)
In Canada when the Canadian Securities Minister Vic Toews tried to get warrantless wire taping legislation passed this week Canadians decided to help out his information gathering process by:
Sending the minister responsible our web browsing histories every day.
CC the minister on all our email messages.
Email the minister what we up to are doing several times a day.
Updated the ministers Twitter account with what we are doing.
So much data ran into the Canadian Parliament's servers that they either fell over or were deliberately taken off line. The fate of Bill C-30 is now being reviewed.