Snowden releases information about Australian Intelligence gathering programs

DON'T relax. These feelings of frustration are absolutely NORMAL and they must be channeled into action, not relaxation.

You will initially get depressed as you see the injustice around you.

You can deny what you see and go back to browsing Facebook.

Or, you can embrace the movement. I've been traveling the rabbit hole and I assure you that the thing is manageable if you put your time into it.

Here are some guidelines:

- You already have local communities (hacker/creative spaces) that have members who are on top of the news and working to escape the system. Find them.

- Find the commonality between libertarianism, anarcho-capitalism and anarcho-socialism. None of these ideologies are sufficient, but the conversations and debates are converging.

- Learn history and social/economic sciences. The history of debt money, the collapse of rome, today's corporate power structures, etc.

- Understand how the dollar works and how it's controlled and enforced. Support alternative currencies.

- Support open hardware. The EFF is your friend. Learn more about encryption and understand the vulnerabilities online and offline.

I could go on, share links, etc.

"Tempora is the first 'I save everything' approach ('full take') in the intelligence world. It sucks in all data, no matter what it is, and which rights are violated by it"

The other systems have always been given some degree of plausible deniability by government doing some hand-waving and suggesting that they have controlled methods by which wiretaps are only placed on specific targets, for specific reasons, etc. etc.

When you start saving everything, especially stuff that you know you are not supposed to, you are violating UK law (Human Rights Act of 1988) as well as international law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Protection_Directive)

Trying to pass this off as nothing to be concerned about means that you are not paying attention, or don't care.

http://williambowles.info/spysrus/cia_australia.html

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

We already have the bill of rights. Creating new laws won't help us. It's too late for that. Maybe repealing some laws and executive orders might help... but what we're seeing is the symptom of something bigger than governments.

We need to see the cage and step out of it. Educating ourselves and honing our common sense will help us. Becoming self sufficient will help us.

There's an important step you forgot to include: Getting the new laws enforced. When most of the people in charge of the enforcement are used to (and may well have liked) the old laws, that will not be simple.

Given that, what good would a new law do? They already have everything in place to subvert any law they want, and their chief tool is mere will.

What might change things is public outrage and muscular congressional hearings, a la Watergate. I can't see that ever happening again.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23195283

Telling us how useful GCHQ is in the fight against terror without mentioning Tempora.

If it's stored indefinitely (as they have the ambition to do, and will soon have the ability), it doesn't matter if it is not used today, or in the past. What if at some point in your life you run for parliament, or your business strikes a prominent deal with a foreign power? At that point your records can be taken out and scrutinised by whoever has access to this data at that point in time, and you won't even know, because it's secret. Information has a habit of spreading beyond the intended boundaries, and if it is collected in secret, we have no way of controlling that spread or controlling its use.

I would be a lot more worried if it was a US and not a UK agency.

You should be worried then, because this data is routinely shared with the NSA, seems to be collected under the remit of a joint program, and is probably stored indefinitely by several GCHQ partners where someone is judged to be of interest or enemy of the state/agency, the definition of which will of course vary with the agency.

I would also be a lot more worried if it wasn't GCHQ, but was a police force.

I'd be surprised if access is not given the police on some level, given their participation in counter-terrorism activities, and there's nothing to stop a secret policy change giving more access, you wouldn't even know about it. So you should be worried.

There are other databases in the UK that are a lot more concerning to me.

Given that those databases exist online, and are probably transmitted regularly as backups etc as well as accessed via the internet, you can assume that all that data is also accessible by GCHQ partners and clients. The important difference though is that, as you point out, these databases are public, acknowledged to exist, and controlled by our existing law. If you want to you can challenge the use or collection of the data in a court, sometimes you can stop using these services, or ask to see all information collected on you, but no such options are available for information gathered and shared in the name of security.

What I find troubling here is that the only limit on the indefinite storage of all this material by GCHQ is technical, not legal or moral, and that limit will soon be overcome.

(1) Where do you place collection points so you get a full take of not only international traffic (moving across your borders) and domestic traffic (all traffic within your borders but that doesn't leave your borders) (2) Since the number of collection points is limited, that means there is a lot of data that has to be recorded at select points. How do you record that data to disk in real time? (3) How do you avoid the duplication of packets that travel through multiple collection points. (4) Lastly, the most difficult problem is figuring out how to query all that data and not end up with a haystack. When you have millions and millions of pieces of communication from people with no involvement in the criminal activity, then all that communication becomes noise.

That said I could imagine this is enough for Russia to make their case either way.

There is a supposed distinguishable feature between a user/self publishing website, and a publisher with editorial control. One is considered as free from responsibility regarding the content and get legal protection to said effect (with exceptions like DMCA), and the other is supposed to be responsible for the content being published. News papers has always been responsible when they publish secret information, but are protected under the freedom of the press. Self/users-publishing sites like youtube, wikileaks, facebook, twitter, flickr and so on is not responsible for the content available on their websites (again, with some exceptions). Content on those sites are published by users, and the user is responsible.

One could of course argue that Snowden is ultimate responsible for providing the Guradian the ability in publishing the information, through that would be a slight lie. "Ultimate" would mean that there aren't anyone with even more responsibility, which the term whistleblower tend to disagree with. As such, there is plenty of blame to throw around if one wishes to build a blame tree.

The furore over the NSA data hoovering and the fourth amendment has no parallel in Australia. The general citizenry is completely uninformed, complacent and lazily uninterested in these matters.

http://m.heraldsun.com.au/news/law-order/victorians-private-...

http://powerhouse.theglobalmail.org/the-australian-governmen...

The sad thing is, our government is no better, out intelligence service is just as amoral and unaccountable, and our civil liberty movement is ineffectual to the point of being invisible. Perhaps "ignorant bliss" was preferable…