The Australian Government now wants ISPs to record browsing history | Hacker News Reader

The Australian Government now wants ISPs to record browsing history

zdnet.com.au

82 pointsxelfer85 comments

Perhaps too political for HN, but anyawy...

I can't understand Labor's plan. They seem to be going out of their way to alienate everyone who is attracted to voting for them.

They have lost the green vote by dropping the emissions trading scheme. They have lost the "doctors wives" (see last election) with their refugee policy. They have lost most political progressives with the internet filter and now this plan. Even the unions aren't 100% behind them because of the impact of the Super Profit Tax policy.

I can understand that they think that they might lose primary votes to the Greens, say, and then regain them via preferences. But it seems to me that many people are getting to the point where they think that even Tony Abbot couldn't be as bad as this.

(Disclaimer: I'm Australian)

More importantly, Tony Abbot is what he says he is, which makes him more charismatic than Ruddbot.

Using the phrase "is what he says he is" to describe a politician who admitted to lying during an interview on a major nightly news program strikes me as a rather creative interpretation of reality.

Luckily for him actually being honest and consistent is an absolute irrelevance, all he needs to do is give the appearance of being a straight up guy.

Admitted to lying! Yep, the ones who don't admit it are far preferable :)

He admitted explicitly to doing what every politician does, what everyone knows they do, and what Lindsay Tanner did only hours later on the ABC.

It was an unfortunate, clumsy thing to say, but the "gotcha" triumphalism should be reserved for people who don't admit to their failings, not the ones who do.

Kevin Rudd isn't charismatic, but that doesn't particularly matter to me.

Charismatic is the wrong word. Australians, thankfully, have a distaste of charismatic leaders. Any Australian politician who tried to make grand Obama-style orations would find himself unable to finish due to the giggles coming from the audience.

I think it comes down to the personality of Rudd and his need to keep an iron grip on the government. He's got a filthy mouth and temper as shown on several occasions, and he develops all his policies in combination with just 4 ministers.

The fact that the (former) environment minister found out about the dropping of the ETS via the newspaper tells you how centralised the decision making is. Same goes for the mining tax ; developed in secret, behind closed doors and out it comes with a 'my way or the highway' attitude.

My point : I don't think they know what they are doing. They look very similar to the misguided wanderings of the last 12 months of the Howard government.

I'm getting sick of the words "paedophilia" and "terrorism" being trotted out to justify every invasive new policy.

Especially since it's such a poor excuse - these sorts of people do not use standard http to communicate or distribute this sort of content (the dumb ones do but they would just as easy to catch without filters or logs like this).

Good example, hop on TOR and try to access almost any image site such as 4chan as a test. 99% of endpoints are banned for uploading child-pornography or other material while these sorts of users simply look for another exit point.

The government is either ignorant about how these sorts of people actually operate, and how the internet facilitates them, or it really is a Big Brother style solution to put a full blanket audit-at-will on the general population.

The 'government' is a blanket term. I'm sure there are parts of the government that know perfectly well how these people operate. On the other hand, initiatives like these seem to be instituted by politicians who probably don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.

[Insert nefarious reason that the people that know don't bother to inform the people that don't]

That's true - the policy makers is probably a better term here.

these sorts of people do not use standard http to communicate or distribute this sort of content

Well, actually they do. At least the "end user" types.

Whilst it is reasonable to assume that pedophiles are using secure systems to transfer information the majority don't fit that profile.

The ones who do fit that profile are usually the ones creating the content for sale (that operation is extremely well organised :() and a relative minority.

the dumb ones do but they would just as easy to catch without filters or logs like this

Damn straight. In fact it's arguable whether or not we would have much more success with filtering and logs. It would be easier to secure a prosecution because you could turn around and say "well we have a log of you accessing X at Y time, explain that". But to be honest usually such things aren't needed.

The problem with filtering when pitched as a solution to pedophilia is: how do you filter for it? Oh, you could probably watch for keywords. But typing "Lolita" into Google is not illegal, so how do you figure out which traffic actually represents a pedophile downloading images? It's a dodgy path to go down; and I doubt any one of the proponents of this idea will be much impressed to find their computers seized because, say, their teenage son searched "lolita" for a school project or something :)

In actual fact the vast majority of peadophiles are caught in two ways: being reported by a friend, relative, passer by etc. OR because they tried to groom a child over the internet, and we have great success using the current logging methods to track down such individuals. Catching the gangs behind the commercial stuff; well, filtering certainly won't improve our efforts there...

Getting sick of it? I was already sick of it by 12/11.

If this law ever comes into existence, I predict its number-one use will be pursuing illegal downloaders or something. I bet it won't be explicitly limited to terrorism or whatever its ostensible purpose is.

Hope I'm wrong, on both points.

It doesn't matter what its number one use today is. If such a law exists at all, sooner or later it's going to be abused.

The thing I find so surprising about all of this is that I would never expect a "normal" country like Australia to have censorship issues. China, North Korea, Iran... Australia? Is the Australian government simply too powerful for its people's own good?

We are "blessed" with a two party system where the two major parties are both headed up by religious conservatives.

Someone goes to Rudd and gives him a folder of 'objectionable material.' Also gives Rudd stats on how frequently it's accessed. And it's been on Rudd's mind ever since and he's trying to disinfect Australia and himself from it.

I'd answer "No".

1. A lot of these creepy proposals never get past the proposal stage. Take the Australia Card.

2. Australia's legal institutions have proved reasonably effective in dealing with such creepy laws. E.g. laws banning the Communist Party were struck down in the '50s.

3. This latest proposal is about law enforcement, not censorship. Creepy anti-terrorism laws aren't a peculiarly Australian vice.

4. The government doesn't have a majority in both houses; it needs the complicity of non-government members to make laws.

None of this is to say that this is a good thing. It's creepy and embarrasing and I wish they'd stop.

The Australia Card was very nearly law - the Hawke Government went to the 1987 double dissolution election on it, and won, and the scheme was only defeated because of a small technical error in the pre-dissolution legislation which deferred the commencement date of the legislation to regulations (which can be disallowed by the Senate, where the coalition had a then majority).

Because the legislation couldn't be changed when it was presented to a potential joint sitting, this technicality is what killed it. Not popular opposition.

My mistake. Thank you for the correction. I certainly agree that popular opposition to creepy laws isn't an area where Australia has covered itself in glory over the years. That's not a specifically Australian failing, though.

Not too powerful, just overly conservative. This has its advantages - our financial crisis experience was mild because regulations in the banking sector (plus our small size plus our mining industry, but let's avoid that discussion here) helped us through.

But sometimes that conservative need to protect is combined with ignorance of reality, technical reality in these instances. That's a bad thing.

(Some side notes on conservatism - we're a country who didn't have it's own national flag in practice for 50 years post Federation; one of our first national Acts of Parliament was the 'White Australia' policy which lasted until 1975; the Prime Minister we had when Hitler invaded Poland was the same guy we had when Kennedy was shot 25 years later; and we call Football 'Soccer'.)

our financial crisis experience was mild because reglations in the banking sector

Those were liberal financial regulations. Seriously.

Um.. what do you mean by liberal? It is true that the Liberal government supported them (as did Labor).

But they were conservative in that they restricted financial institutions in a number of ways (high capital requirements, strong(er) regulation of loans, etc etc)

I used the terminology in the same way you did.

It's disappointing that you feel the need to pretend this is confusing to you.

I doubt our banks are as safe as everyone says. Our housing market, by many measures is in a much bigger bubble than where the US got to and I'm convinced this is not due to supply demand fundamentals (as most people have been brainwashed into) - plenty of research out there as to why. We haven't seen bad times for 20 years. When we finally do (and there are people like Jim Chanos out there right now shorting China Property, i.e. Australian resources), that is when the swhtf. Our banks have massive exposure to mortgages. Not that many need to go bad before our banks are in trouble.

No I would say the Australian government is inventing policy without consultation to what it's citizens actually want.

Nobody is really sure where all this (plus the internet censorship) is coming from.

It's rather embarrassing. Add this to the mineral-tax grab announced without consultation by the government like some African dictatorship and it looks like the country is being run by a bunch of amateurs with no real experience and heads in the policy clouds.

Probably a bit partisan for HN but I have had it with their ineptitude.

Nobody is really sure where all this (plus the internet censorship) is coming from.

In a word, it comes from fear. Fear that the badies are going to blow us up while we sleep. Fear that the sexual deviants will molest us, or more likely just that they will have more fun than we can allow ourselves to have (being good religious folk). Fear that if someone holds an opposing viewpoint, this may make me feel like my own ridged, black and white outlook is not adequate to address the complexities of reality.

A lot of people know where it's coming from. That doesn't really make anything any better though.

Are you sure it's coming from there and not just leveraging it? Seems more likely to me that it's a power grab. The world took notice about what happened in Iran. I didn't hear any governments being thankful for internet anonymity when that broke out. In fact I've mostly been hearing about plans for "filtering" since then.

I do think that it originates from there, yes. Although I'm sure there are also those who may not believe in the cause and are only using these issues for their own political purposes. I suspect for example that one of the main reason's that the "clean feed" idea just won't die despite massive opposition is that the government is courting the favour of Xenophon and Fielding in the Senate.

The only problem I have with the Fielding/Xenophon theory is that the government never talks about it, and both Fielding and Xenophon have a pretty bad track record when it comes to voting with the Government. Fielding effectively blocked the ETS, so I don't see the Government doing them any favours.

The other thing that worries me is you don't see the opposition hammering them on this. It's clearly unpopular with younger voters, and it could be a good chance, to pick them up. But maybe it backlashes against others who don't understand the issues and just hear 'OMG child porn!'.

Bottom line : I seriously don't know where the push for internet censorship is coming from, and I have creeping dread that it is actually bipartisan.

I get what you mean. Maybe I was inaccurate when I talked about the Xenophon/Fielding thing in the present tense. I think that if there was any idea of courting Fielding/Xenophon, it was attempted much earlier than the ETS business. I remember some months ago now, hearing that there was talk of adding gambling sites to Conroy's blacklist, without looking up where that talk may have come from, I could pretty confidently guess that it came from Xenophon. But not much came of it as far as I could tell, Conroy was too focussed on trying to demonstrate that his blacklist wouldn't suffer from any scope creep, and I'm sure this outcome must not have pleased Xenophon. As I alluded to previously, my feeling is that by now, the push for the "clean feed" is more ideology than political manoeuvring and I think you're right that by now the government would have given up on getting Fielding/Xenophon on side. I still think it's likely that they would have given it a go though.

I also think you're right that there is likely some bipartisanship on this issue and yeah that's pretty scary. But it's not really surprising is it? Considering the somewhat perfect storm of social conservatism that we seem to have all over the place right now. Conroy, Fielding, Xenophon, Abbott, Rudd, they all have that streak in varying degrees and must be only the tip of the ice berg. I'm just hoping that some of these guys maintain a bit of practicality and reason.

It's always the religious social conservatives who fret and worry that society is going to hell in a hand basket and it's their self appointed task to save the misguided and punish the wicked. That's the root of the push IMO and yep, it seems to be pushing up though both sides of politics pretty well right now.

Australians are very apathetic about their rights. Many people think it goes back to our roots. Most countries have some kind of founding story that involves revolution, violence, some kind of struggle for freedom (even if it is more myth than reality). Australia doesn't. We were handed a cosy democracy by the British and it's been all rosy ever since. So while most people easily conceive of the government as incompetent, misguided or even corrupt, almost nobody ever even conceives of government as potentially evil.

They're such two-faced shits. On the one hand, they pan Google for collecting the locations of wireless networks and logging some packets off them, criticising them for invading privacy. On the other, they're attempting to legislate a way to record all of what people actually do online.

>On the other, they're attempting to legislate a way to record all of what people actually do online.

It's unfair to say they're attempting to introduce any sort of legislation. At this stage they're exploring whether or not EU regulations would be appropriate for Australia.

And Senator Conroy calls Google creepy.

To be fair, this creepiness is coming from the Attorney-General's department, so Conroy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it.

> Conroy doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it

That is being a little bit too fair. They are members of the same party, the same government. Conroy is the Minister responsible for broadband and the internet. It would be insane to think he is not intimately involved in this.

Perhaps they've decided the best way to take some heat off Conroy is to suggest something even more horrific from another department.

I think perhaps you're underestimating just how much autonomy Australian political ministers are given in managing their portfolios, particularly in areas that the public don't give a shit about.

I believe that's why the Internet filter is still being proposed. Stephen Conroy is the leader of the right-wing faction within the ALP, and therefore Rudd can't tell him to shut up and do something else. He's been given the autonomy to do whatever he wants (except on "important" issues like the NBN). The same situation existed with Michael Atkinson in SA. He pretty much determined himself without any outside consultation that he wouldn't support R18+ video games, and it appears the new AG has been given the same level of freedom and autonomy to determine his own policies.

Moving to the UK in September. Wish I could say this was a motivating factor (experience is the real reason), but I'm scared about what I might return home to at some future point.

Maybe I should list every book I own or have read as part of my packing, and send it to Senator Conroy et al, as a preemptive move against those needing to be recorded as well.

Perhaps, someone should start a "technology" party.

I can't believe how crazy the Australian federal government has gotten. I could never vote for this ass-backwards internet and technology policy.

> Perhaps, someone should start a "technology" party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirate_Party_Australia

I don't think the name 'Pirate Party' will work in Australia. They won't get any support (financial or otherwise) from any credible organisations. From what I've seen people are turning to the Greens as anti-filtering party.

We're still waiting to see what the Liberals are going to do. At the moment they're maintaining strategic ambiguity on the issue, which means somebody needs to get out there and start convincing them there's more votes in opposing it than supporting it.

Not the same thing. I support and make technology. I think piracy is disgusting.

In Australia, they also make you provide ID for any sim card for your mobile that you buy.

Looks like it might be time to head to the UK, since they decided to scrap the ID card.

Don't worry, you can still use the pay-phones to organise your drug deals. What a terrible thing to take issue with.

That's right — registration prevents drug dealers from getting disposable phone numbers because they are incapable of circumventing the law.

Hmm - I just bought a sim card on Monday - over the internet. It came yesterday, works great.

http://www.tpg.com.au/mobile/plans.html

Now - they do have a fix on me - my credit card and the fact that the sim card was sent to my home address. I don't know if they would have baulked if my CC address was different to the address where the sim went. However at no point did they ask for or see any actual identification of me.

They have your name, address and credit card number. That's more than enough identification.

Sure, but I could easily have lied about all those things except the CC number, which is why I wonder if it would have gone to 'manual verification' if my address didn't match. From all appearances I could enter any name, address and get a phone tied to that identity, with the billing going somewhere else.

You can also provide false ID when you buy them in person. That's not the point.

BS. Arab-American here, bought a SIM with no questions asked at an Optus booth.

Did you pay cash? Did you have to register by phoning Optus before using the SIM?

I paid cash and didn't have to do anything.

By law they are meant to (I used to sell them) - depends on the guy behind the checkout though.

That's quite extraordinary — I've registered prepaid SIMs with Telstra, Vodafone and Virgin which have all required registration in order to receive calls and be topped up; a process which Google tell's me via http://www.comlaw.gov.au/ComLaw/Legislation/LegislativeInstr... is the norm.

I work within an ISP in Australia and have dealt with providing information to the Federal Police for investigations. I was under the impression that we already recorded that information. Looks like I was wrong.

Some ISPs do record that information but they are currently not required by law to do so.

Oh, maybe we do record the information then. As i'm pretty sure that I've sent that sort of information to the Fed Police before.

Anyway, I do support that that information is stored. And is used to investigate the right sort of crimes that do need to be investigated. And through the proper channels that the right people are requesting to look for that information.

Do your customers know they are being recorded like this?

We cannot view that information, only by an intersection order is that information is available.

In our TOS and Privacy Statements on our website, it does state that we keep connection logs.

Connection logs are not the same as logging every URL your customers request, am I correct?

Consider the two recent creepy proposals together. They point to everything being censored and everything being monitored.

Consider Wikileaks. Consider how these laws work together against whistleblowers. How convenient for a government to be able to - block such a site from the majority of citizens; and - have a red-hot go at tracking down anyone rash enough to upload anything.

Throw in a law or two to make it illegal for paedophiles and terrorists to circumvent these arrangement and you have a truly nasty arrangement.

Purely tactics to get their filtering bill passed? In the end we'll all be thanking them for being such nice people that they are only filtering our internet...

There's another story on this from Renai LeMay (ex-ZDNet) who is an IT writer who started his own IT news site, Delimiter. An underdog worth supporting I think:

http://delimiter.com.au/2010/06/11/govt-may-record-users-web...

Boo. Glad I moved to Canada.

Can you confirm or deny that Canada is the sanest English-speaking country in the world?

As a Canadian I will admit we are generally sane (aka "dull"), but there are enough crazies around to keep things interesting, especially in BC (e.g., Bill Vander Zalm, Svend Robinson). So, although it is generally overlooked, my vote is for New Zealand.

Does this really help? If I just browsed everything sensitive through SSL sure they will have the domain viewed but nothing to prosecute on?

Except that we have good reason to believe that governments are getting backdoors into SSL certificates. If they can also control DNS, they can set up man-in-the-middle spying. Of course, if they did that, there'd be no reason for ISPs to be doing the recording.

It's a form of populace control by the government; otherwise how would they rule over you?

Time to encrypt everything!

Until encryption is outlawed, or key escrowed. Then we are doomed!

Yes, but for now I bet a startup that finds a way to do to anonymous access what dropbox has done to backups/synchronization will earn a lot of money. Now that the cost per GB is so low, you can route the traffic trough 3 or 4 countries, and any scheme to tap connections will be prohibitively expensive.

Opportunity for an off-shore VPN service?

It will not work. Today's average internet user is technically incompetent to set up something complicated as non-standard VPN connection, leave alone third-party one, like OpenVPN.

The second problem - is monetization. Most people wouldn't pay.

And the last one - you cannot alter an iPhone/iPad and other closed systems. Seems like it is possible to port (recompile) openvpn to android. (IPsec and GRE probably would be discarded on ISPs)

btw, openssh's built in socks proxy is a great deal, for linux laptops or netbooks, but you still need a DNS server.

iOS can already use a VPN

Proprietary protocols only, which could be easily banned on ISP.

Not true. See the chart at the bottom of http://www.witopia.net/index.php/products/ for example

There's about a million of those already!

China is lagging a lot. =)

Dear Aussies and Limies,

Regarding your internet and privacy policies:

Get it together.

Most Sincerely, the Yanks.

Dear Yanks,

    Remember this? http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

Regards,

Excellent point.

Perhaps it should have been obvious that I was joking.

By referencing the somewhat deragatory nicknames used by soldiers in WWII, I was calling to mind our nations' shared heritage of the British Common Law.

When I see Common Law countries misbehave in this fashion, it is always especially irksome. It is the ultimate "could it happen here" test.

I expect more from the Common Law nations, and I wholly agree that us Yanks have had some embarassing episodes in this regard as well. We should all resolve to hold ourselves to the high standards of human and civil rights guaranteed under our shared legal tradition. And we should hold each other to it.

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