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Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

digitalrightswatch.org.au

721–730 of 894 posts

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're possibly confused about what we're talking about here - those weren't restrictions on personal freedoms. A better analogy is blackout laws, which people railed against in the exactly the same way as lockdown laws. But obviously those powers went as soon as possible - literally the day Hitler died in fact.

a blackout law keeps an enemy bomber from dropping a bomb on my house. IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea." While in modern times, if you say "shut down the economy, increase alcoholism, suicides, mental health issues, homelessness, poverty, and inflation to defeat a virus with over a 99% recovery…

> IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea."

Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#722

I've lived to see this kind of thing enacted in a good portion of the Anglosphere and my visceral reaction is to engage in a combination of civil disobedience and a determination to undermine every overstep made. With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of hav…

You seem to be referring to the South Australia Home Quarantine app [1]. There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about this app recently. I'd just like to clear up some things: The app only applies to people that need to quarantine, not the general population. The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being f…

> The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being forced to use the app

Weird. In Canada we're allowed to isolate at home without a wildly intrusive app, or police visits or anything like that.

We get a fine if we are caught out when we are required to isolate, that's all.

Personally if my government was proposing this kind of quarantine tracking, I'd be looking to move somewhere sane.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#723
post #611
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.

Like the UK, where compliance has been estimated at around 40%?

Honestly, that was mostly our government being incompetent. If our PM wasn't bumbling from one disaster to another, he probably would have tried to implement something similar to what Australia has proposed.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#724

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're possibly confused about what we're talking about here - those weren't restrictions on personal freedoms. A better analogy is blackout laws, which people railed against in the exactly the same way as lockdown laws. But obviously those powers went as soon as possible - literally the day Hitler died in fact.

a blackout law keeps an enemy bomber from dropping a bomb on my house. IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea." While in modern times, if you say "shut down the economy, increase alcoholism, suicides, mental health issues, homelessness, poverty, and inflation to defeat a virus with over a 99% recovery…

This is a tangential interesting point, not a disagreement with your comment. But despite the mental health costs of the pandemic and associated policy, there's a growing body of evidence indicating that suicides do not appear to have risen, across many countries. Eg https://www.bmj.com/content/372/bmj.n834

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#725

Australia seems on a steep decline and a testing ground for western authoritarianism. Look at the requirements to leave the country, you need to jump through hoops and prove that your presence is required outside to be granted permission to leave. This should be unacceptable for anyone, whether you are Australian or not.

I just did a quick look, searching (without quotes) "Australia permission to leave" on DDG. It looks to me like you're conflating emergency restrictions for COVID [0] with something like the exit visas that the former USSR used and Russia still uses. There are a great many people dying in the US at this very moment who were making this same sort of argument, right up until they caught COVID and ended up on ventilator…

> Russia still uses

No it does not. I'm Russian, and the only thing you need to leave the country is an international passport. You can apply for one online, then come to the immigration service to have your picture taken, then a month later you come again and collect it. The passport is valid for 10 years. I believe it's fairly similar to the process most other countries use.

Many other countries require Russian citizens to have visas, and some visas are hard to obtain (like Australian one, lol) but that's another story entirely.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a blackout law keeps an enemy bomber from dropping a bomb on my house. IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea." While in modern times, if you say "shut down the economy, increase alcoholism, suicides, mental health issues, homelessness, poverty, and inflation to defeat a virus with over a 99% recovery…

> IMO, if you say to a rational person "keep your blinds down or else the nazi's will drop a bomb on your house" they'll say "gee that sounds like a good idea." Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.

> Your opinion is not factually supported. A million people were prosecuted for breaking lockdown laws in the UK.

That's his point. He's drawing a contrast to blackout laws,by claiming that an individual sees direct benefit from compliance (not getting bombed) while breaking lockdown doesn't create a lot of risk for the vast majority of offenders.

Ie, if a hypothetical person was 100% optimizing for self-interest, they would not break blackout laws but would break lockdown laws. This is a dramatic difference in dynamics when seeking to understand differences in compliance.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#727
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…

you forgot number 4, be treated like an adult and just stay home for 2 weeks and not have the government check to see if you're at home like you're on house arrest while not having committed a crime

"Government treating its citizens like adults" and "Australia" really do seem to be mutually exclusive at this point.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1200+ cases in NSW out of a population of over 8 million. So we should extend a strict lockdown … to do what exactly? Is the plan to manage this virus with a series of alternating lockdowns and get the number of cases to zero? Is this realistic, is this the type of world you want to live in? The virus appears to be as contagious as chicken pox, vaccines help with serious cases but are doing little unfortunately to st…

Please put some effort in getting information instead of creating straw man. NSW and Victoria are in a lockdown to have time to get 70-80% of eligible population double-vaccinated. Modelling by couple of institutes show that if lockdown ends today, hospitals would be overwhelmed and lots of preventable deaths occur. By all estimates we would reach that 70-80% number in 1-3 months time, so that's the plan. Google for…

So the "plan" is to do what other countries have already done and didn't stop the spread? That's a bold strategy Cotton.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#729
post #689
post #617

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a third of Australia that's gone insane. The rest have checked out and completely ignored it. It's like a long holiday where you get paid to pretend you work. But you can't say that in polite company so you just have ~40 percent compliance with whatever insanity is going on now. Hilariously enough the compliance from police is lower than from the general population so basically we have politicians and the termin…

>latter days of the USSR Is it better to prolong the perverse, decadent rule of the senators and consuls or to embrace Clovis? Hit ‘em with your Coriolanus swag.

I'm familiar with Clovis (the Frankish king) and Coriolanus (the Shakespearean Roman), but I don't follow the connection you're trying to draw

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#730

I've lived to see this kind of thing enacted in a good portion of the Anglosphere and my visceral reaction is to engage in a combination of civil disobedience and a determination to undermine every overstep made. With regards to things like the Aussie requirement for phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location, turn off the phone and make them eat the cost of hav…

You seem to be referring to the South Australia Home Quarantine app [1]. There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about this app recently. I'd just like to clear up some things: The app only applies to people that need to quarantine, not the general population. The app allows people who are required to isolate to opt to do their isolation at home, rather than stay at a quarantine facility. Nobody is being f…

> managed quarantine

What's that?

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