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Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#91

Post by Fnoord »

pjc50 wrote: post #30
lettergram wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, working at a medical billing company standard practice was zero out drive, then drill. It was far less secret than that too

The point was not the method of destruction but that they were forced to do it at all, on a questionable legal basis, on computers they were still using (not disposing of).

> but that they were forced to do it at all

I'd like to underline this. The Guardian co-workers were forced to perform the entire deletion _themselves_ (!!!)

It is almost like a combination of some kind of forced, unpaid employment (akin to "slavery"), shifting the blame ("you did it yourself"), or retribution ("you abused it, you take care of it"). Very twisted.

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#92

Post by thrwaway5642 »

Australia has recently had an election that was won (quite unexpectedly due to bad polling) by the incumbent political party (actually a semi-permanent coalition but that’s irrelevant in this case).

Before the election, which the opposition was widely expected to win, there talk of “land mines” being set for the expected new government, intended to destabilise them early on.

In the past week:

* asylum seeker boats from Sri Lanka were intercepted. Boat arrivals are a big issue in Australian politics, and the timing would have placed a new government in a bind

* a flotilla of Chinese warships sailed into Sydney Harbour on a friendly visit catching the public and media by surprise. The visit was approved post-election by the Prime Minister, but was said to be in the works for a while. Again, this would have been a very difficult issue for a new government to deal with.

* These raids on journalists. The first raid, before the ABC was raided was actually on a journalist for News Corp Australia, which had been hostile to the opposition during the election. The optics would have looked terrible if they had won the election, and then their foes raided...it would have been portrayed as payback.

If these raids are really “just” post-electoral land mines firing, they’ll stop soon enough, and won’t represent a fundamental shift in Australia’s freedom of the press. If not, then there is real trouble ahead

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#93

Post by noir_lord »

sansnomme wrote: post #86
noir_lord wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a company that makes stone products. We still drill through drives and then bash them till the platters are dust. It doesn't take long and where our main site is people dumpster dive.

Stone as in rock? The hard stuff on the ground?

Yep.

I was hired to re-write the internal ERP as well as adding new features plus bring everything up to date as well as run the servers and all the other stuff, I'm an army of one basically, varied job, nice people and 9-5 - can't fault it.

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#94

Post by trhway »

Datenstrom wrote: post #49
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They look different to me. Australia is flexing its anti-speech authority, asserting the power to control what its subjects are allowed to talk about. My hometown cops are engaged in a much more quotidian abuse of power. Which is not to say ransacking Carmody's place wasn't egregious - it was. Watching the circular firing squad composed of the Mayor, the police chief and the cop-union attack dog just leaves me rootin…

> Our cops are criminals I spent a year working as a cop and I can assure you that cops are in fact normal people. Like any organization or group there is a tribal aspect to it and they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own; however, that is organizational not individual. There is a larger cultural issue involved that drives such misguided organizational behavior.

>that is organizational not individual.

man, that is just such a pathetic excuse to say the least.

>Like any organization or group there is a tribal aspect to it

"any organization or group" doesn't have the right to shoot me on sight and get off just by claiming a split second subjective perception of danger.

If one can't handle the "tribal aspect", then the one is just not qualified to be a cop.

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#95

Post by logfromblammo »

Datenstrom wrote: post #49
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They look different to me. Australia is flexing its anti-speech authority, asserting the power to control what its subjects are allowed to talk about. My hometown cops are engaged in a much more quotidian abuse of power. Which is not to say ransacking Carmody's place wasn't egregious - it was. Watching the circular firing squad composed of the Mayor, the police chief and the cop-union attack dog just leaves me rootin…

> Our cops are criminals I spent a year working as a cop and I can assure you that cops are in fact normal people. Like any organization or group there is a tribal aspect to it and they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own; however, that is organizational not individual. There is a larger cultural issue involved that drives such misguided organizational behavior.

> they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own

AKA obstruction of justice. By cops. At an institutional level.

In every other industry, if you are caught breaking the law by a co-worker, you will be thrown under the bus (unless you are an executive or a top-quartile salesperson, because sometimes the money is more important than the justice).

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#96

Post by willsr »

ben_jones wrote: post #59
shusson wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this stood out to me too. I don't really understand why a warrant would enable alteration. Copying I can wrap my head around, but alteration without oversight seems awful. Hopefully the warrant has more fine print than the journalist implied.

Probably legal completeness. Think about it, log in to a windows computer there is probably an event log that gets updated. While checking browser history the history may be altered. Installing surveillance applications would modify the machine. Etc.

This. Also covers deleted files being overwritten when new files are created.

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#97

Post by theandrewbailey »

mwill wrote: post #48

The raid was being live tweeted by an ABC editor, the tweet that stood out the most to me was this:[0] AFP: I’m still staggered by the power of this warrant. It allows the AFP to “add, copy, delete or alter” material in the ABC’s computers. All Australians, please think about that: as of this moment, the AFP has the power to delete material in the ABC’s computers. Australia 2019. [0] https://twitter.com/TheLyonsDen/s…

Another reason for offsite, offline backups.

(offsite = not here, offline = not powered on)

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#98

Post by hprotagonist »

Datenstrom wrote: post #49
_jal wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They look different to me. Australia is flexing its anti-speech authority, asserting the power to control what its subjects are allowed to talk about. My hometown cops are engaged in a much more quotidian abuse of power. Which is not to say ransacking Carmody's place wasn't egregious - it was. Watching the circular firing squad composed of the Mayor, the police chief and the cop-union attack dog just leaves me rootin…

> Our cops are criminals I spent a year working as a cop and I can assure you that cops are in fact normal people. Like any organization or group there is a tribal aspect to it and they will certainly close ranks and attempt to protect their own; however, that is organizational not individual. There is a larger cultural issue involved that drives such misguided organizational behavior.

As it turns out, “normal people in a group with a tribal aspect that closes ranks to defend itself” is ... often very easy to make act in illegal ways.

“Civvies are The Out Group” is a terrible worldview for law enforcement, though a very common one.

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#99

Post by heraclius »

Fnoord wrote: post #91
pjc50 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point was not the method of destruction but that they were forced to do it at all, on a questionable legal basis, on computers they were still using (not disposing of).

> but that they were forced to do it at all I'd like to underline this. The Guardian co-workers were forced to perform the entire deletion _themselves_ (!!!) It is almost like a combination of some kind of forced, unpaid employment (akin to "slavery"), shifting the blame ("you did it yourself"), or retribution ("you abused it, you take care of it"). Very twisted.

> The book, published next week, describes how the Guardian took the decision to destroy its own Macbooks after the government explicitly threatened the paper with an injunction.

They were “forced” but not in that sense. The Graun offered to do this instead, and so GCHQ came along to watch. There is a problem but not with forced labour.

Re: Outcry as Australian police search public broadcaster

#100

Post by lukevdp »

thrwaway5642 wrote: post #92

Australia has recently had an election that was won (quite unexpectedly due to bad polling) by the incumbent political party (actually a semi-permanent coalition but that’s irrelevant in this case). Before the election, which the opposition was widely expected to win, there talk of “land mines” being set for the expected new government, intended to destabilise them early on. In the past week: * asylum seeker boats fr…

Is there any evidence that these were “land mines”?
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