Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

digitalrightswatch.org.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 894 posts

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#631

Post by oblio »

kongin wrote: post #620
oblio wrote: post #613

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on what examples?

WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the war on drugs, the war on terror, now the war on covid.

I'm trying super hard to decipher your message.

Post WW1 didn't erode rights, it actually increased them. Post WW2, the same.

Korea and Vietnam didn't leave behind any long term repression that I remember.

War on drugs and terror, ok.

Covid is a disease. We have vaccines, we'll have treatment. Just get vaccinated. We've had pandemics before, they always end and I can't remember any rights still taken away abusively after the Spanish Flu or SARS or HIV.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#632

Post by rainonmoon »

cottsak wrote: post #114
glenngillen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't vote on every bill, we vote on preferred parties every 3 years. It's still a predominantly 2-party dominated system though, and there's basically zero difference between the two on issues like this.

This is an important point. How do we vote for and elect representatives in sufficient quantities that will throw out privacy and security overreaches like this? Very few of the representatives in both houses will understand the technical means, underpinnings, and exploit and overreach potential of these bills because they simply don't understand the technology in the middle. All a party/member needs to do is draft t…

Empower third parties to hold the balance of power. We did it last century with the Democrats and it moved the needle on some vital issues. We can do it this century with the Greens.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#633

Post by krapp »

oblio wrote: post #616
Mordisquitos wrote: post #602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet government agents shooting unsuspecting non-criminals in their own home, after mistaking the address or responding to a malicious fake emergency call, is a line that is only crossed in the country with the Second Amendment.

Yeah, plus they're practically the only country that hasn't had serious government threatening civil unrest for 160 years and they still brag about guns. Heck, the only real recent unrest of that magnitude, the takeover of Capitol, was without guns as far as I remember. As in, no standoff.

>Heck, the only real recent unrest of that magnitude, the takeover of Capitol, was without guns as far as I remember. As in, no standoff.

Condescending to other countries with smug quips by the American founding fathers turns out to be much easier than taking those principles seriously on your own soil when facing the prospect of armed Federal police.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#634

Post by lucideer »

raxxorrax wrote: post #607
Nursie wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say what I said on the other thread - If you want to present an argument against quarantine being needed or warranted, please go ahead. Checking in on the app is the least intrusive of the three options - quarantine under guard (usually in a hotel, like the one I'm in right now), quarantine at home with police visits tio ensure compliance, or quarantine at home checking in to the app once or twice a day. In this…

Not from Australia, but as a citizen the precaution I would take is not to get tested while such a quarantine policy is in effect. Don't know, my country does some checks like calling people on the phone, the rest relies on trust. Seems to work just as well. So I see a lot of room to criticise "the least intrusive" option as well. This is security done wrong. Not slightly wrong, detrimental towards the goal of securi…

> Seems to work just as well.

Curious what country this is where things are working "just as well" as Australia?

The only major places I can think of in the "developed" world faring similarly* to Australia statistically (deaths per capita) are South Korea & Taiwan; both have had similar citizen monitoring.

* leaving out NZ here obvs which is faring significantly better

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#635

Post by [deleted] »

kongin wrote: post #628
Nursie wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quarantine for coronavirus, in a pandemic that’s claimed millions of lives. You quarantine people (and animal) who might be sick, that’s the point of it. It doesn’t look like madness to me when you look at the comparative death rates.

> Quarantine for coronavirus, in a pandemic that’s claimed millions of lives. So are we going to do a quarantine for the flu next? A pandemic that claims up to a 2 million lives a year globally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932018_United_State...

[deleted]

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#636

Post by 0xy »

0xdeadb00f wrote: post #308
roody15 wrote: post #269

I simply cannot wrap my mind around what is happening in Australia. Continuing a lockwdown while the number of positive covid cases remains in the low hundreds and the daily death rate in the lower tens to single digits. Nothing makes sense here. Draconian laws, complete shutdown over something that is and has been statistically under control and managed from months. Am I alone here or do people really think what is…

This talk about "Draconian" lockdown in Australia needs to stop. Our privacy and digital rights laws are awful. But the lockdowns are necessary. NSW had upward of 1000+ cases and that's why they're (still) in a strict lockdown. QLD and i beleive WA as well for example are not in lockdown at all because of their much much lower daily cases. Also, "50 cases in a nation of millions"? I dont know where you're getting you…

UK and Israel have proven the "vaccinate your way out of trouble" strategy doesn't work, therefore Australia's lockdown regime will not work either.

Australia is, at a massive social and economic cost, delaying death and cases. They are not preventing them.

At extremely high levels of vaccination, Australia could see 10-50 daily deaths presuming lockdown is eased. There's already prior evidence, other countries have been through this.

Vaccination is not a silver bullet, and lockdown advocates need to stop implying as such.

80% vaccination will mean thousands of daily cases.

Not to mention lockdown advocates routinely ignore the massive costs associated with the ideology, such as additional deaths (suicides, delayed medical treatment, poverty etc) and mental health (1 in 10 Victorians "seriously considered" suicide in 2020(!!!)).

Also, poverty, which will absolutely be the result of this economic destruction, has a directly link to excess mortality (mortality is >100% more likely when you're in poverty).

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#637

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

chitowneats wrote: post #585
Nursie wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Become like what? Do you have an argument against quarantine? Would tens of thousands of deaths been better than asking travellers to check in for a couple of weeks on arrival, during a pandemic? I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make. I'm British by the way. The UK also has guarded quarantine centres in hotels for people coming in from what it considers “red zones”

Quarantine for what? That's what you do with sick people. Whatever is going on in Australia has long ago left the realm of sane quarantine procedure. It will be 2022 soon, and the Australians are trying to prevent interstate spread of COVID-19. It's madness. Responding to your edit: still madness

Quarantine has never been strictly for sick people. It is for people who might possibly be infected. You can see this in the etymolgy of the word "quarantine": it refers to the forty days (quarantena in Venetian) that people arriving by ship were required to wait on board before disembarking in Venice during the time of the plague. The whole idea is to wait for the full incubation period of a pathogen, to make sure someone is not infected, before letting them out in the general society.

In contrast, when someone is separated from society because they are known to be infected, that is called "isolation."

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#638

Post by rainonmoon »

stackedinserter wrote: post #158

Are there any Australians here on HN? Who in your country is pushing this BS? What's the selling point? What do media say?

Both major parties have promoted these policies. The party in charge has been very effective over the past decade creating an immense atmosphere of fear and envy; the Opposition party believe there are too many votes to lose by not addressing this and have sacrificed a lot of their previously progressive stances to match the tempo of the right-wing. Besides both sides of government, the people pushing it are morning TV show hosts and, naturally, the Murdoch media. There are PLENTY of dissenting voices, typically on the grassroots level or among arts/media industries, but few of them are empowered to match the ferocity with which these other entities will go after them. Police raid journalists' offices and homes at worst, relentlessly harass them in the news or cover them in defamation lawsuits at best. There are a lot of Australians who do not want this current situation, a lot more who are afraid and misguided, and a small but influential fraction protecting their self-interests at the expense of the rest of us. If that summarises things.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#639

Post by raven108 »

rwbt wrote: post #67

I'm curious if this affects FastMail users in US since they're based out of Australia.

Long time FastMail user. Never got a straight answer on privacy so moved to Tutanota for now. Much better, end to end encryption- nice clients too.

FastMail seems to have automated default address collection, backup of drafts & deleted email, ability to archive email. With no at rest encryption this could be possibly used for data mining too.

This new law is the last straw. So far they have not bothered to address the issue. Till few years back FM used to be awesome but feel they have not moved with time.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#640

Post by marvin »

probably_wrong wrote: post #618
hwers wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a ton of countries that just trusts its people to quarantine without the government checking on them.

That's true. But it is also true that, in some of those countries, people fail to follow those rules. For a worst-case example, the Delta variant in Argentina was traced down to a man [1] who ignored the self-isolation rules and visited shopping malls and a restaurant. I can be probably persuaded that some specific regions can do well with voluntary quarantine. But I'd rather trust the local authorities to know what…

Even Norway had lots of cases tracked to people breaking quarantine, after which police started checking up on them. I’d say an argument for not enforcing the quarantine in the hottest phase of a pandemic is in effect allowing such events to compromize things. Maybe you can argue for that, but we need to at least be clear on this detail.
Post reply on HN