101–110 of 116 posts
For those who don't know, the ABC is funded by the government.
Funded in the same way the US government has grants for PBS and NPR or funded in the sense it's partially or fully owned by the Australian government?
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Australia does not have any constitutional protections of press freedom (or freedom of speech for that matter). So draconian laws limiting press freedom can be passed without any recourse for the public. Being able to forcefully disclose a journalists sources would not be permitted anywhere else in the world. We need reforms, not cow-towing to these disgusting authoritarian tactics. Not to mention that this is clearl…
"Being able to forcefully disclose a journalists sources would not be permitted anywhere else in the world." -- China would like to have a word with you, prehaps..
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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I'm unsure what your point is? You can make the same claims about criminals and indeed many people people do. Criminals are in fact normal people.
> Criminals are in fact normal people. Could you elaborate more on this claim? In an ideal world, criminal behavior is supposed to be defined as abnormal and unwanted behavior. * Is my definition of “criminal” for an ideal world way off target? * Or, are you mostly critiquing how non-ideal our current world is, and the injustice of many laws currently on the books? * Something else?
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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.
If I were to look the other way while my coworkers abused or stole from people, I would at the very least expect to be fired and not trusted with similar responsibility again. That is what a normal citizen looks like, and I don't think a normal citizen attitude could survive in a cop shop.
There is the additional problem that your criminal cops (and we both know there are plenty of them) don't exactly wear identifying tags, so I have no way of knowing which are which. That means my only strategy is to minimize contact with and distrust all of them.
This is simple: if you want people to respect and work with the police, stop protecting the bad ones.
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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.
Perhaps they had a ruling in the past that during accessing a computer, things got changed, like the logs. And so now they have to have that in the warrant so that they don't lose their case. It sounds stupid, but I could see it happening.
The ABC staff literally copied all the stuff that might be interesting (found using keyword searches) into a folder, which the ABC legal and AFP investigators went through one by one to determine what was of interest to AFP. The items of interest was then copied to a “sealed” package which the AFP pinky swears nobody will look at for two weeks while the ABC seeks an injunction.
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Perhaps they had a ruling in the past that during accessing a computer, things got changed, like the logs. And so now they have to have that in the warrant so that they don't lose their case. It sounds stupid, but I could see it happening.
But this isn't a way to do a forensic analysis. You just clone the hard drive. Anything else should not be able to stand up in court. Afaik it is practice in rule-of-law countries to hand a clone to each party in the case.
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)
The news director's thinking was "they can't subpoena what we don't have."
This was in a city where the local police would subpoena at the drop of a hat, and used it as a harassment tool. The goal was to keep the subpoena storms from getting in the way of people actually reporting news.
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Australia does not have any constitutional protections of press freedom (or freedom of speech for that matter). So draconian laws limiting press freedom can be passed without any recourse for the public. Being able to forcefully disclose a journalists sources would not be permitted anywhere else in the world. We need reforms, not cow-towing to these disgusting authoritarian tactics. Not to mention that this is clearl…
I don't necessarily disagree with your larger point, but there are at least two important factual errors here: * Australia does have an implied constitutional right to freedom of political communication: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_constitutional_law#... * The federal election was on May 18, this search was on June 4th, well after the election. If anything, the AFP may have waited long enough to ensure t…
> The federal election was on May 18, this search was on June 4th, well after the election. If anything, the AFP may have waited long enough to ensure this did not affect the election.
I didn't say that their actions affect the election, I said it was political. If they really thought this was purely about justice they would've conducted the raids last year, but they conducted them ~2 weeks after the election now that the Liberal government is back in power again with a majority. Dutton and Morrison claim that they have nothing to do with it, but that's complete bullshit -- the AFP are now being run by Home Affairs (Dutton's turf). Police generally don't start prosecuting whistleblowers without government pressure.