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

791–800 of 894 posts

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#791

Post by nanis »

jezzzabell wrote: post #550
zarzavat wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In some like the UK, that trust was misplaced, and compliance with isolation rules was under 50%. More like, people in the UK more correctly assessed the risk of COVID. While is a dangerous disease, it's not so dangerous that it is worth giving up all of your civil rights to avoid it. In Australia the cure seems to be worse than the disease.

UK Covid deaths 133,000 vs Australia Covid deaths 1054. That's some cold-blooded calculus to say that Australia would have been better off with another 50,000 people dead rather than having some restrictions in place while they wait for vaccination targets to be reached.

> UK Covid deaths 133,000 vs Australia Covid deaths 1054.

Looking at all cause mortality and just eyeballing, it looks like in most cases Covid19 is reducing some lives by a few times while the fact that no one lives forever stubbornly persists.

Australia: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/provis...

UK: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#792

Post by ben_w »

nonameiguess wrote: post #704
ben_w wrote: post #569

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not being a legal expert, I can’t tell where the boundary is between enabling legitimate police work and giving (accidentally or deliberately) the police the power to plant fake evidence, the latter being what some of this sounds like. But, I’m not a legal expert, and “sounds like” is a way to make very large mistakes when looking outside of one’s own domain of expertise like I’m doing here. (Also doesn’t help that I…

I have no idea how Australia handles this, but in the U.S., the process of discovery is what is supposed to keep the police from just planting evidence. Prosecution needs to present all evidence that will be used against you, including exactly where it came from and chain of custody. If they can't, it gets thrown out. The only exception is they can't be compelled to give away the identity of confidential informants.…

Indeed, I have no issue with the police having the power to read whatever data a warrant grants.

My problem is the linked page says:

> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.

Copy is fine, it’s the other three which are scary. Perhaps they shouldn’t be scary, perhaps they have well-defined meanings in law I’m just not familiar with (like how “Hacker News” has nothing to do with cyber crime), but I can only respond within the limits of my knowledge, and that seems scary.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#793

Post by nanis »

ud_0 wrote: post #577
Nursie wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about taking a nap, taking a bath, cooking, etc.? If you fail to check in, they try again a bit later on, if you fail again it falls back to the non app-enabled method of a police check at your home. The app is voluntary and allows you to be at home rather than in a facility, and to not have random police checks. It's a convenience, not an imposition. > Many other countries trust their citizens enough that suc…

Hang on, the 15 minute interval requires constant human action, it's not enough that the phone itself is reachable? How does that even work? If that's true (which is sincerely hope it's not) being woken up every 15 minutes during the night for two weeks constitutes torture under most definitions.

You have to respond within 15 minutes with a geotagged selfie as I understand it. Given that one cannot know when one's chain is going to be yanked, it still sounds like torture.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#794

Post by satronaut »

twic wrote: post #781
satronaut wrote: post #713

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> be treated like an adult and just stay home for 2 weeks Ah yes, that thing adults routinely do.

People have been getting sick literally since the dawn of man. I knew many co-workers who'd come in with a cold or a fever and get the rest of the office sick. Now, there's a virus that's so dangerous you need a test to know if you're even sick with it but people are demanding everyone stays home so nobody catches it. If you don't want to catch it, stay home, but don't ask myself or others to change their behavior

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#795

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

chitowneats wrote: post #678
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm familiar with the etymology. This makes a lot of sense for the bubonic plague . Frankly the Venetians would scoff at what we've done to our societies over a disease so tame (measured by overall rate of survival, individual circumstances can be tragic). It was also an era when people had few rights, no vaccines, no access to treatment. Surely, we should aspire to be better than 14th-century Venice. To not treat pe…

You said that quarantine was only for sick people. That's simply wrong.

It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone.

Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even people who do not appear to be sick be quarantined.

You may argue that China, New Zealand et al. should not have pursued a zero-CoVID policy (and in that case, you should be prepared to argue that the 4 million deaths that would likely have resulted in China would have been acceptable), but given that they've pursued this policy, they need to quarantine international travelers, even if they appear to be healthy.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#796

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

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...

For pandemic flu, yes, quarantine would be reasonable. The 1918 pandemic claimed tens of millions of lives.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#797

Post by adamjb »

antattack wrote: post #630
adamjb wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The phone check in thing is for enforcing the two weeks home quarantine for returned travelers and close contacts of confirmed cases. While there are certainly slippery slope arguments to be made, let's not act like we've already slid down it.

Can the quarantine be shortened with negative PCR test?

Unless the exposure site is identified as a low-risk one where contacts are directed to isolate until they get a negative test, no. You have to do a test when going into iso and you have to get a negative test on day 13 to leave it. There have been plenty of cases where the day 13 test is positive, even when the test at the start was negative.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#798

Post by throwanem »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #782
ls612 wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah that was just taken from the history books. It was our totalitarian response that was from the dystopian novel.

The historical ignorance around Covid and other pandemics, and the way people act as though it was some unprecedented event that justifies the unprecedented reaction, is really stunning.

One might perhaps imagine that those concerned with the lessons of history would not overlook the lack of precedent for a pandemic taking place in a time of ubiquitous and nigh instantaneous global travel. Such a one would be disappointed in this case, certainly, but the expectation could be considered reasonable nonetheless.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#799

Post by chitowneats »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #795
chitowneats wrote: post #678

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm familiar with the etymology. This makes a lot of sense for the bubonic plague . Frankly the Venetians would scoff at what we've done to our societies over a disease so tame (measured by overall rate of survival, individual circumstances can be tragic). It was also an era when people had few rights, no vaccines, no access to treatment. Surely, we should aspire to be better than 14th-century Venice. To not treat pe…

You said that quarantine was only for sick people. That's simply wrong. It's not the plague, but it has killed around 10 million people worldwide, and 700 thousand people in the US alone. Countries that have a zero-CoVID policy, such as New Zealand, China and Australia (or at least some states in Australia), must use quarantine to prevent reimportation of the virus. For such a policy to work, it is critical that even…

People die. My loved ones and I have made peace with that. Life is not about avoiding death.

10 million is frankly a drop in the bucket. We don't shut down society and hand over control of our lives over car accidents, heart failure, or anything else that kills hundreds of millions.

The behaviors that lead to those deaths are absolutely a form of social contagion and in no world are they less important or relevant because they're not caused by a communicable disease. People could choose to stop the world for those, too. It would probably work. That we choose not to, or rather, that we understand there are tradeoffs involved, does not make us callous murderers.

I feel truly sorry for people who believe that "zero Covid" is a possibility. We have documented evidence of animal reservoirs for the disease. You can vaccinate every single person on the planet and it will not eradicate this virus.

Particularly now that we are aware that 1) our vaccines are not sterilizing and 2) we have evidence of a vaccine resistant mutation on the horizon.

If you want to play whack a mole with restrictions and injections your entire life please do so of your own accord and stop trying to force the rest of us to live in this dystopia with you. I have a short life to live.

Humanity has lost its tragic sense. That there are things outside of our control. This reality does however tend to catch up with each and every one of us.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#800

Post by grishka »

flyinghamster wrote: post #751
grishka wrote: post #725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cit…

Good to know, that's more in line with the normal world. I would think that only applies to Russian citizens, though. Getting a visa into Russia is a different story under normal conditions, let alone a pandemic, and exit visas do apply to foreign visitors (at least from the US). https://ru.usembassy.gov/u-s-citizen-services/russian-visas/

Okay, I googled it for a bit. Apparently foreign citizens do need an exit visa but only in two cases:

- If they have (maybe only some type of?) a residence/work permit and would like to avoid problems when returning to Russia

- If they have a tourist visa but overstayed the duration of stay it's valid for

Post reply on HN