Australia Wants To Join The Snooper's Club: Why That's Bad For All Of Us
from the everybody's-doin'-it dept
They say that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on, and the same seems to be true about Internet policy: the bad ideas spread like wildfire, while the good ones languish in obscurity. Snooping on the Net activity of an entire population is the latest example: now Australia wants to join the club that currently consists of the US and UK, with Canada waiting in the wings. Here's part of the EFF's excellent summary of what the Australian government is proposing:
Last week, Australian Attorney General Nicola Roxon submitted to Parliament a package of proposals intended to advance a National Security Inquiry in an effort to expand governmental surveillance powers. In a 60-page discussion paper, Roxon calls for making it easier for law enforcement and intelligence agencies to spy on Twitter and Facebook users, which would likely be achieved by compelling companies to create backdoors to enable surveillance. The proposals also revive a controversial data retention regime. And an especially problematic proposal would go so far as to establish a new crime: failure to assist law enforcement in the decryption of communications.
That last part is clearly modeled on a similar provision requiring encryption keys to be handed to the police on demand found in the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Surprisingly, that was passed back in 2000, but it is only now that most people are waking up to the ridiculous nature of its measures. As Rick Falkvinge explained in a recent post:
You’re not going to be sent to jail for refusal to give up encryption keys. You’re going to be sent to jail for an inability to unlock something that the police think is encrypted. Yes, this is where the hairs rise on our arms: if you have a recorded file with radio noise from the local telescope that you use for generation of random numbers, and the police asks you to produce the decryption key to show them the three documents inside the encrypted container that your radio noise looks like, you will be sent to jail for up to five years for your inability to produce the imagined documents.
In that same column, Falkvinge makes a crucial point:
The next step, of course, is that the citizens protect themselves from snooping -- at which point some bureaucrat will confuse the government’s ability to snoop on citizen’s lives for a right to snoop on citizen’s lives at any time, and create harsh punishments for any citizens who try to keep a shred of their privacy.
This is precisely what is happening in the countries that are bringing in blanket surveillance of their entire populations: just because this is now becoming technically possible, so the argument goes, we must implement such schemes because otherwise terrorists and pedophiles will take advantage of technology in ways that will make their discovery and arrest harder.
But just because something can be done, doesn't mean that it should. Exactly the same argument could be made about installing CCTV in everyone's home: with the falling cost of cameras, and the availability of the Internet, that's now a realistic option. It would also ensure that those same terrorists and pedophiles couldn't use advanced technology like curtains to thwart the forces of law and order.
And yet nobody would seriously suggest bringing in such a scheme, because it is recognized as a step too far, and that there are other ways of catching criminals without recourse to such extreme measures -- using traditional police and intelligence techniques that aren't dependent on deploying technology, but build on basic human skills and professional experience. So why is it suddenly acceptable to bring in the digital equivalent of CCTVs that record our every online move?
One reason is probably because governments can point to each others' plans to show that "everyone" is doing it, which means it is "obviously" a reasonable thing to do. That makes the latest announcement of snooping plans bad not just for Australians, but for everyone else too, since it bolsters the argument that total Net surveillance is the new normal.
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Filed Under: australia, privacy, snooping, surveillance
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Speaking Of Australia & Spying ...
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Cameras in homes
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Re: Cameras in homes
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Re: Re: Cameras in homes
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'someone did this' CRY CRY CRY
someone said this ... cry cry cry..
someone disagrees with you,, CRY CRY CRY..
you dont like something,, CRY CRY CRY..
did you fall on your head as a young child ??
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Mike did not write this blog. I guess you missed that!
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Nigel
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I guess, if everyone thinks your a joke, you might as well act like a clown..
Masnick, do you ever reflect on what you have 'achieved' in the past years ?? what impacts you have made, if you have made a difference ?? improved anything, contributed anything (positive ??). or sold many 'crystal balls' ??
I guess you simple dont consider these things, if you did, you might just realise what a complete waste of oxygen you have been LOL.... but I do not think you have much ability in the consideration department.. or in having an original thought or idea.. no for masnick it's "cut, paste, cry".... rinse and repeat...
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Re: Crybaby?
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It's starting to become clear that the ONLY things governments do will that effectively fall under the umbrella of repression.
Sorry, they do one other thing well, they pay the debts of bankers, don't haul their asses in to court when they should be and protect them from themselves, and us. when they do idiot things like Barclays has the past couple of weeks.
And then toss more repression in when people question the wisdom of all of that by occupying a concrete square New York City calls a park.
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about saving banks, you really did not take much notice of what happend at that time did you ?? (pay attention at back)....
If you are going to comment on world events, try to make the effort to get your facts straight first,, there's a good boy..
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I also think the longer term end result will be countries passing laws that state that the internet isn't "private" but in fact "public", possibly because your data is handled by 3rd parties known and unknown, and as a result, they have rights to view whatever.
Privacy, well, that's what you get in your own home, not in a public place.
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What sort of crime? In many cases they look the other way IRL, what makes the tubes any different? Clearly high court low court is in effect regardless of location.
"they have rights to view whatever."
They have rights ... really? How does this work exactly?
"Privacy, well, that's what you get in your own home"
Are you sure about that? You sound as though you are willing to give that up also.
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The problem is that the laws are NOT effective online.
If I ran a business charging people to get in the door so they can take as many copies of copyrighted material as they like, and it was a storefront in New York, I would be run out of business in a short period of time. The laws can handle that. Move the same business onto the internet, run it from a bunch of different places with any number of corporate blinds and misdirections, and suddenly the legal system can't handle it.
However, that isn't really what I meant by "crime is moving online", it's that the internet is the new social gathering spot. Instead of two criminals meeting up to talk about what they will do, or their scheme to make money, they chat online. They exchange text messages, crackberry to each other, trade info on Facebook, IRC servers, use QQ... whatever it is. They have ways to communicate now that are not easily covered by current law. It's much more discrete. In the same manner that the invention of the phone created the need for wiretap laws (because they were not on the book before that), the internet has created certain needs that were not so obvious a generation ago.
As a side note, I also think that the laws generally are not good at covering illegal acts that span more than one country. Quite often, online criminals (including piracy types) use a combination of home country, destination country, hosting country, and the like to make it very hard to prove their fairly obvious crimes. How often do you hear "but he's based in..." or "but the servers are in... " as people who seek to break the law find ways to trip up the legal system. It would be astonishing if the various governments were not looking at ways to reign in and control the internet.
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Sure, here's the password
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Snoop the snoopers
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Re: Snoop the snoopers
and we should look close at all government officials,
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You are, however, correct about the government officials being waaay too powerful and abusing that power to force politicians onto a very narrow path (called bipartizanship at the moment, but it will broaden if nothing is done.).
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But wait, there's more!
**BONUS!!!** Free Hint to clueless lawyer type politician:
Get a life of your VERY OWN, then you won't feel so compelled to watch everyone else's.
And if you act now, you might just be able to toss in a free family!
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never happen in canada
464000 of us in 4 days aint seen any petition anywhere in any nation do that....
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Don't dismiss cameras in your bedroom
With cameras installed in every room of every home we could massively cut down on the suffering (and death!) of women and children.
It will also be easier to locate and apprehend terrorists, internet bullies, copyright infringers, dissenting bloggers and other people we don't like!
In short, cameras in all homes will do what these internet snooping laws do, only better!
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Re: Don't dismiss cameras in your bedroom
YEAH RIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT. Nice over reaction there sherlock.
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Re: Re: Don't dismiss cameras in your bedroom
FBI investigates allegations webcam used to monitor student
http://articles.cnn.com/2010-02-20/justice/laptop.suit_1_webcam-district-court-laptop?_s=PM :CRIME
Laptop Monitoring: It's Not Just In Pennsylvania
http://hothardware.com/News/Laptop-Monitoring-Its-Not-Just-In-Pennsylvania/
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Australia
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Australia snooper's club
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