Australia pushes for spyware on phones
brisbanetimes.com.au
brisbanetimes.com.au
If we as a society (quite reasonably) conclude that our government should have access to criminals' communications, allowing savvy criminals to make use of "non-electronic backdoors" is obviously out of the question.
Anyone want to propose an enforcement mechanism? Maybe listening devices implanted in everyone, or just everywhere in our homes?
Domestic surveillance seems to be an example of where democracy is completely circumvented.
If it means a loss for the major parties by having, say, an independent taking over, then both sides will start to listen.
However, that kind of activism is very hard work and you have to be prepared for the rest of your electorate to be blaise about the subject matter.
This is definitely the root problem of democracy of today. Lives are comfortable enough for most that they don't really need to care for these issues (until it's too late).
It also has the added benefit of moving the Overton window towards authoritarianism. This puts anyone who uses sophisticated encryption to hide their communications squarely in the radical camp, making them easier to marginalize.
Using this mechanism to achieve a chilling effect on activism has a huge detrimental impact on democracy.
We must be careful whenever a politician attempts to trade liberty for security - for fools who agree will soon have neither.
But I think such a feature would better implemented at the OS level! :)
https://web.archive.org/web/20020802214412/http://www.oreill...
;)
Urbanus vertelt dat zijn buurman boer is en dat hij rond rijdt met zijn tractor en een vieselijk geel poeder spuit op zijn akker. Kwaad interpelleert hij hem. Urbanus: “Maar voor wat is dat nu allemaal weer nodig ?” Boerke: “Dat is poeder tegen de olifanten.” Urbanus: “Maar hier zitten toch geen olifanten in ’t Pajottenland ?” Boerke: “Goe poeier hé jongen!”
Translated:
Urbanus says that his neighbor is a farmer and that he drives around with his tractor and sprays an awful yellow powder in his field. He interrogates him badly. Urbanus: "But for what is all that necessary now?" Farmer: "That is powder against the elephants." Urbanus: "But there are no elephants here in the Pajottenland?" Farmer: "Yes boy, good powder!"
Just this weekend it was announced that people with welfare debts would be blocked from flying overseas. That might be fair, but blocking people from travelling seems to be at the whim of civil servants and politicians. There wasn’t much of an uproar, since the ends justify the means, and no one likes cheats, despite this amounting to extrajudicial punishment.
The minister proposing this encryption crackdown has used his vast discretionary powers to do immigration favours for the politically connected, with impunity, while ignoring arguably more deserving cases.
The land of roos, barbies and golden beaches has a rather well-developed authoritarian streak behind its carefully constructed facade.
Rent is generally calculated as 25% of a person's income - regardless of what their income is. For someone on $550/fn New-Start, rent is calculated at approx $68.75 per week.
There are often instances where families in public housing properties are regularly taking overseas holidays despite having quite extreme unpaid rent debts. Sometimes from low thousands to 10-15 thousand of unpaid rent/debt.
They simply stop paying rent. And to rack up that amount of debt when you're paying so little in rent, it's often for quite some time that it remains unpaid.
Often the only real option is to start eviction proceedings through the xCAT tribunals, where the tribunal member will usually give families many multiples of chances and time to pay.
When they finally realise they are finally going to actually be evicted, they will often show up to the housing offices with the entire amount of unpaid rent.
So I agree with this policy and think it will often work to recover debt. There are quite a few people who play the system and I think this will help combat that. But I only think it should be implemented for cases with high amounts of debt and as long as some safeguards are added (exemption for victims of family violence for example).
I’m pointing out that in most western democracies there would be legal challenges and a massive outcry if such a ban was instituted (there were/are no-fly lists in the US but those are ostensibly aimed at preventing terrorism, they aren’t meant as administrative punishment for unrelated offences). The few complaints I’ve seen about the policy are that tax cheats and multinationals aren’t subject to the same ban, not anything from a civil liberties perspective about the wrongness of such a policy per se.
On the flip side, it’s possible that locking them up would be politically unpalatable, so this a better alternative..but again that would give the concept of “rule of law” short shrift.
Australians are more accepting of government authority than people in other western especially “Anglosphere” democracies.
In a few years, you could be saying the same exact thing but removing the word "welfare". That's why the ends can't justify the means. It's a massive slippery slope.
One of the main issues with this is it's being tried to push through as quickly and quietly as possible.
The original draft bill was open for public submissions for less than a month (Aug 15 - Sept 10).
* http://web.archive.org/web/20180814010356/https://www.homeaf...
The draft was 176 pages of legislation and quite complex in it's language so required a lot of time to comprehend - which is quite difficult to do effectively in a 3 week time period.
Quite a few large organisations put forward submissions (a couple of them are linked here):
* https://internet.org.au/news/209-submission-internet-austral...
Submissions included a few internet bodies, EFF and privacy organisations, major ISPs and Telcos, the Law Council, Human Rights Commission, device makers (Apple/Sumsung/Google) as well as others.
The bill was then submitted into parliament 10 days later.
There is no way possible that they have reviewed and considered all public submissions in 10 days. The government also stated that they had "widely consulted industry" to which the major IPSs denied.
It's basically a shambles.
What the cynic in me thinks is this is basically being made in collaboration with the five-eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and the United States).
As agencies in those 5 countries share information, the spyware/encryption keys/backdoors gained will be openly shared amongst all.
I think they all believe Australia is the easiest place to try and get the legislation through.
And they're correct. Australia is used for all sorts of unsavoury things, from spec-ops operations that other countries don't want to take the risk on, to taking over PlayPen(?) and operating it for months -- we don't have strongly enumerated rights, and our authoritarian past has never actually been dealt with. The same people, or those they trained are still in power.
This is the most likely reason, however.
The problem seems to be that one side there's the Government(s) pushing this legislation through, and on the other side we have the above organisations along with increasingly outraged Netizens. In the middle there's a gaping abyss, and no matter what we try (so far) we can't seem to bridge the abyss to get ourselves properly represented. I don't know of a way that would enable us to effectively protest and actually get some results. Goodness knows, my "elected reprsentative" does eff-all to represent me!
Normally both side of politics are happy for ideas to be discussed in civil society for months if not years. The internet filter, or NEG, the "meta data" discussion - so many examples. There is no practical reason this should not go the same route.
But there might be a political one. The strong response means it's probably going to be opposed by just about everybody. My guess is the Libs are hoping it will create a long and loud debate on of their favoured topics - law and order. They desperately need something, anything, to get their own internal turmoil off the front pages, and this must seem like what the doctor ordered. One way of stoking the debate it to get it before the parliament, and quickly.
I'm sure they see it as no different to the meta data debate. The arguments against that were subtle - explaining how big data can be used to knit together a fairly complete picture of a persons life from just the addresses on envelopes is hard. But explaining what is do bad about this won't be so hard: they are demanding the be allowed to legally hack all devices we own so they can install spyware. The concept has been explored in the popular media through movies like Minority Report and TV shows like Person of Interest. If the government makes it easy for themselves to do this, the idea that criminals and rogue states will use it too has already been implanted.
I suspect the debate may go a bit differently this time.
Police raids dude's house, finds torrent client installed and says he'll be arrested for piracy. Since he has tools for piracy. Dude says they should arrest him for rape as well. Why? Well, he has tools for that as well..
Some of these politicians may look like clowns at times, but don't underestimate the level of intelligence (and agendas) of those working for them behind the scenes.
Technical laws are advised by people from technical backgrounds. And in the case of laws like this it is coming directly from technical experts at ASIO/ASIS.
Likewise it is irrelevant whether the Attorney General knows the technical definition of metadata since he isn't personally writing the law.
Much as they shouldn't ban a chemical additive to our foods without first understanding the nature and effects of that chemical (based on scientific research and evidence), then they shouldn't enact laws around privacy and data without understanding what that data itself contains. (He doesn't have to make the chemicals in a lab, he just needs to understand what it is/does).
The fact that the AG has no clear definition of what 'meta data' is, or cannot explain that to a reporter or the public really shakes my confidence that his limited understanding of 'meta data' includes elements that can personally identify someone (e.g. Does he think a phone number is 'meta data' or straight up 'personal data'? Because a phone number can be owned by more than one person, or is transferrable, does he think that is 'meta'?).
The AG should at least be able to give a broad definition of the scope of the laws that he is going to be responsible for upholding.
AG and Ministers set the strategic direction for the public sector. They operate at a sufficiently high level such that they will never be the experts and will never be across the subtleties of the policies. That's the job of the public servants.
Also the distinction between data and metadata is quite subtle and as someone who deals with this daily I make mistakes with it. So I don't expert the AG or really anyone to have the right answer every time.
Everyone generally agrees about how it is. The discussion is about how it should be.
We're talking about the kind of people who seriously say that the laws of mathematics don't hold weight in their jurisdiction. You can't defend that level of ignorance by just claiming it's not workable to have competent lawmakers.
How poignant, and yet startling. Australia is seemingly following in the footsteps of China, a country famed for their strict censorship laws, oppressive and authoritarian nature and far-reaching surveillance powers.
As far as the major political parties are concerned, their obvious differences are really minor and their hidden similarities are major. In the last few years, we have had our federal politicians vote bipartisanly for various legislation that was ostensibly aimed at preventing terrorism and yet, this country already had extensive legislation that covered those particular matters (all of it under criminal offences).
One idea that has been discussed at various time in private is for each piece of legislation to be explained to each electorate and have a response return to parliament. So, instead of each representative voting on party lines, he/she would have to submit from their electorate the number of yes's, the number of no's and the number of abstentions.
For any legislation to actually pass, the total number of yes votes from all electorates would have to be more than the total of no votes added to the total of abstentions. This would mean that for any legislation to be passed, the representative would have to work very hard to convince his/her electorate that they would need to vote yes for the proposal. The benefits of each legislation would have to be carefully articulated before getting traction.
In addition, we could require that all legislation contain a sunset clause of say five years, after which the legislation would be null and void. For any extension, it would need to go back to the electorates again.
One benefit of such a scheme, is the slow-down of new legislation and another would be that old legislation that no longer held the attention would fade away.
I know, I know, this is a pipe dream and will never happen. But such a scheme would have the benefit that political parties would in all likelihood diminish.
* https://mashable.com/2017/07/21/china-spyware-xinjiang/?euro...
* https://www.reddit.com/r/security/comments/8ofiiw/chinese_bo...
Would Stephen Conroy have walked into this mess? I rather suspect he would, after all he wanted to have a giant rubber 'NEKKID WUMMAN' stamp to apply to any URL he didn't like.
Software developers, both within Australia and overseas, can be compelled under threat of 10 years imprisonment, to build and/or insert into their software any mechanism required by the government agencies to enable access to communications.
So, the developers of any secure software would now be under threat of extradition to Australia and jail time unless they compromise their own app.
Unfortunately, in the absence of massive pressure, Labor will do nothing but add a few useless amendments, and pass it.
Then remind them that they should also be obliged to have these backdoors on their own phones, and if they are concerned about doing so perhaps this is not a thing to push on everyone else...
Yeah, but in this case politicians are worse than the criminals.
> and if they are concerned about doing so perhaps this is not a thing to push on everyone else...
They don't think of themselves to be like everyone else, so their intent is that it stays that way.
The next Federal election can't come soon enough...
Where they'll be replaced by the Labor party who also support this.
https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/amp.economist.com/the-economi...