Aussie Tax Office Wants Phone Tapping, Data Retention 46
schliz writes "The Australian Taxation Office has called for phone-tapping powers while backing a controversial proposal to force telcos to store web traffic and subscriber data for up to two years. It said such data may be crucial to investigations, with the Commissioner of Taxation previously explaining that the connection between criminals and their finances made them 'especially vulnerable to revenue collection agencies, because of the ability to identify the discrepancy between their wealthy lifestyle and modest tax declarations.' The Tax Office's statements come after this week's passage of new legislation that will allow law enforcement agencies to force internet service providers to store data on subscribers while an official warrant is sought."
Wire tapping (Score:3, Interesting)
A little here, a little there... Pretty soon it becomes a real issue. If the cops can't get you, there's always the department of internal revenue to take up the slack.
Re:The power to tax includes (Score:4, Interesting)
they don't even need to suppress the understanding, they just need the courts to back them on some of these things.
In America, there's Free Speech Zones, the Fourth Amendment is apparently optional in many states, warrant-less wiretapping. All sorts of crap.
Pretty much wherever you go, copyright law trumps everything (and is part of the push for the data retention), "think of the children" gives people reason to bypass all sorts of laws, and terrorism bypasses pretty much anything else.
These things are being eroded fairly constantly. This is just another example of an organization trying to say why their needs should trump any other considerations.
I'm just not sure anymore how much getting the citizenry pissed off would actually accomplish. Overall, we're becoming less free over time. Unless they take away TV, I can't imagine enough people getting angry enough to do something about it.
Re:Wire tapping (Score:0, Interesting)
Hence: bitcoin...