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Australia Privacy Your Rights Online

Oz Govt Pushes Ahead With ISP Customer Data Retention 67

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the security-through-rampant-privacy-violation dept.
angry tapir writes "The Australian federal government is pushing ahead with reforms that could see consumers' information kept on file for up to two years by ISPs. This could include the data retention of personal Internet browsing information which intelligence agencies could access in the event of criminal activities by individuals or organizations."
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Oz Govt Pushes Ahead With ISP Customer Data Retention More

Oz Govt Pushes Ahead With ISP Customer Data Retention

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  • Wow! Teetering on the edge! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was sent to a parliamentary committee for public discussion! We all know how productive and fast moving those are!</sarcasm>

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sorthum ( 123064 )

      Sure, but that's still far closer than it should be to becoming law.

      • Don't kid yourself, the security forces have been monitoring for years, Carnivore started in 1997. I don't think many people have qualms about the spooks looking for nutters with explosives from their IP traffic.

        Its just time to start opening the data up to regular law enforcement agencies so that they can openly take to court all you criminal copyright thieves and put you in jail. Because we all know by now that 'home taping kills music' and that copyright infringement is 'Terrorism' or 'Pedophilia', just ask Hollywood or the RIAA.

        You might feel that this is a little excessive, especially as the next tier of petty bureaucrats to be given access to your traffic will be Local Government and Social Service droids. Don't kid yourself that the Sheeple are going to object to this, after all it will be done to catch 'Terrorists' and 'Pedophiles', and anyway Facebook will be telling them what to think by then anyway.

        Isn't it weird how we fought a cold war for half a century against totalitarian communism and now we are becoming totalitarian democracy's.

        Its a bit disappointing.

        • Re:Wow! Teetering on the edge! (Score:4, Funny)

          by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @06:39AM (#40140587) Homepage

          copyright infringement is 'Terrorism' or 'Pedophilia'

          Let's see...

          By copying music, you are creating more playable media.
          Therefore the copied music will be played more often.
          Which means more people will be exposed to the copied music.
          This will result in more people bying the music they just heard.
          By definition, copied music is music that has already been released in some original form.
          People are now buying music by artists that already released music.
          They don't equally increase spending on artists that have yet to release music.
          It is within reason to assume current children will want to make and release music in the future.
          Therefore, copying music is basically screwing children.
          Copying is pedophilia! It is logically proven.

          Now as for terrorism...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by tnk1 ( 899206 )

          Just, for God's sake, don't wake the Sheeple!

  • Conclusion of the report... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hey_popey ( 1285712 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:08AM (#40140283)
    We see an increase in SSL connections to Sweden.

    • Re:Conclusion of the report... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Sorthum ( 123064 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:14AM (#40140323) Homepage

      Or tor. Or VPN endpoints overseas. Or ssh tunnels.

      I don't really see how legislation can reasonably expect to keep up with technological innovation.

      • Re:Conclusion of the report... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by k(wi)r(kipedia) ( 2648849 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @06:40AM (#40140589)

        But this can be done. Ban all encrypted traffic not specifically authorized by the authorities. This way, the first SSH/VPN connection to somewhere, and the cops come knocking at your door. Those using Wifi will be limited to plain HTTP, enough for the feeble (Facebook people) to post and check their accounts.

        The big "trusted" media companies can be granted exceptions for their DRM in exchange for having server-side monitoring software (backdoors) installed in their systems.

        The passive Pirate Bay-style of trying to run circles around government Internet policies will fail in the long run, unless accompanied by some sort of active political resistance, be it Net-only site "black outs" or flesh-and-banner street protests.

        • I haven't tried it, but I don't see any immediate technical hurdles to writing a web service to do torrent-like file transfer over HTTP

          No, if they wanted to control this, then they'd need to lock down the client properly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing [wikipedia.org] would be the way to do it, ensure that only 'proper' commercial organisations could write software that could be installed on the average PC.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        Or tor. Or VPN endpoints overseas. Or ssh tunnels.

        I don't really see how legislation can reasonably expect to keep up with technological innovation.

        Easy way is to limit "overseas" access. Australian limits on Internet were quite ... low - think 10GB-ish. But the catch was that if it was within country, it was "free" and "unlimited" (hence a lot of local mirrors and Steam and other services being colocated there). So any attempts to use an outside VPN mean that you're just using up your quota faster.

        The old

    • Re:Conclusion of the report... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Joce640k ( 829181 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:16AM (#40140331) Homepage

      Nah, what we really need is a program that just sits there all day doing random DNS lookups and loading the web pages...let 'em try and store exabytes of data and try to find anything useful in it.

      • Re:Conclusion of the report... (Score:5, Funny)

        by djsmiley ( 752149 ) <djsmiley2k@gmail.com> on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:23AM (#40140357) Homepage Journal

        Average facebook user tbh.

      • They'll only throw a lot more tax at it to beef up the system and then make those programmes / programmers illegal. You need TRON to fight for the users.

        • They'll only throw a lot more tax at it to beef up the system

          Nope, the ISP will be paying for it.

          If the ISPs have to put their prices up you can bet a few more people might hear about this stupid law. The average Joe/Bruce will accept this in the name of saving the babies so long as it doesn't directly cost him more money. Tell him it's an extra five dollars a month and he might start saying "no".

        • They're already working on it in the US. See Google vs. Oracle, and CISPA.

      • Hmm. DOSing the program with too much data. I like that idea.

        Does anyone know (roughly) what their storage capacity is? I mean, just how aggressive do we want this thing to be?

  • Money Quote (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Namarrgon ( 105036 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:11AM (#40140299) Homepage

    “Crooks and terrorists will just use encryption or secure services to provide nothing but meaningless data - it's Mr or Mrs Average whose lives could be turned upside down by data breaches or bureaucratic spying.”

    Now if only that quote had come from the Attorney General, instead of Electronic Frontiers Australia...

  • What's the problem? (Score:4, Funny)

    by cheekyjohnson ( 1873388 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:11AM (#40140307)

    If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Why is your bathroom door shut, anyway? What are you hiding in there?

    • Nothing, come in and enjoy the smell.

    • To which we respond: "Silly, why are you wearing those clothes? Do you have something to hide? Must be drugs / pirated software / Korans. Now off with them, put on some of this baby oil as we get the camera (for your mugshots, and we will be taking a number of them today) ready."

  • How could they even begin to do this? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Sorthum ( 123064 ) on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:12AM (#40140309) Homepage

    I don't see where it stipulates what would need to be retained. Is it merely header information? A list of URLs (SSL will break this)? A copy of the data itself?

    No matter which direction this goes, it seems to me that it would be very, very easy to overwhelm them with data. Fire off a perl script that connects to $giant_list_of_random_URLs 500 times a minute. Turn it down when you need to do work, crank it up when you go to bed... and you're suddenly costing them an enormous amount of storage while turning their signal to noise ratio into crap.

  • These tools are virtually daring us to vote for "that other little man".

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by jonwil ( 467024 )

      If you think Tony Abbot wouldn't give the AFP and other law enforcement agencies the same deal (i.e. mandatory data retention by ISPs so they can catch the "bad guys"), you clearly dont know Australian politics.

  • Looks like... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 29, 2012 @05:27AM (#40140369)

    I'm voting Greens again.

    • ... because that did so much last time! :P

      I too voted greens. And will probably vote that way again, in the vain hope that somehow, in this safe Labor seat, it makes a difference. Sadly, I doubt it will.

    • So, Labour then. It's getting to be like voting against the Liberals by going National.

    • Say, Bruce, got any crimmos that we need to convict?
    • No, Bruce, can't say as I have. Shall we make some?
    • Bonza idea, Bruce, just toss this month's copy of the Statue book over and let's see who's been up to something that we've just decided is a bit naughty.

    And that's how funding works.

  • Time for everyone in Australia to run a 24/7 web spider that surfs random sites.

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