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.
Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
661–670 of 894 posts
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#662Earlier 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…
They could always do that: once they have a warrant, they can search your house and pretend to find physical evidences in it.
Indeed they could. However the linked page says:
> A DATA DISRUPTION WARRANT enables the agencies to “add, copy, delete or alter” data on devices.
With the exception of the word “copy”, this makes it seem like the plan is to make it not merely possible but also legally acceptable for anyone given such a warrant to create/place that evidence (or delete things to make real data look incriminating by lack of context).
Again, I really know I can’t trust my interpretation of any legal text, all I can say is it does sound bad to an outsider like me.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the Australian government rapidly moves toward an authoritarian police state, does part of you wonder if they'd be so cavalier if their citizens had guns? Or if that might be a deterrent to tyranny at some point?
lol you're kidding yourself if you think having armed citizens would make any difference to authoritarian policy anywhere.
I've personally witnessed a single gunman absolutely shutdown and preoccupy the entire Philadelphia police forever for several hours. One guy.
You all seriously overestimate the capabilities of the police.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't a partisan thing, the liberal/authoritarian axis is independent from the collectivist/individualist axis. I'm against authoritarianism full stop , I don't care about the other policies sold alongside authoritarianism. Trying to tar me as right-wing for being anti-authoritarian is ignorant at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Zero covid is a fool's errand unless you want to be a North Korea-style h…
> It is at best a policy that buys time to get people vaccinated This is exactly the strategy in Australia, from all states and territories. We're last in the OECD in population vaccinations and so COVID-zero via lockdowns are our only strategy until jab rates get to 80% (of people above 16).
I cannot accept a policy where people are imprisoned within their borders and not allowed to leave as ethical. Free countries don't have laws to stop people escaping, and there's no threat on earth where a genuine police state is an ethical response.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#665These "data disruption warrants" are the most interesting to me: > Data disruption means adding, copying, deleting or altering data held in a computer. This can only be done in order to frustrate the commission of offences or determine relevance of data. To assist disruption, a warrant can also authorise other facilitative activities, such as entering specified premises, using electronic equipment to obtain access to…
> So they can get a warrant to come into your house while you're not home and put a keylogger in your keyboard USB cable, or put a bug on the UART of your router, etc. Or just hacking your cheap Netgear router with one of the hundreds of vulnerabilities that exist. That's actually not that weird. If you are a suspected criminal and a judge give a warrant targeting you specifically, it's quite natural the police can n…
It's certainly better than simply compromising everyone but it's not like they're going to stop their mass surveillance activities. This is just a step towards legitimization of those activities.
It's time for computer security to include nation states in their threat model. We need tamper-evident hardware.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#666Earlier quoted context omitted.
So I'm Australian but from the part no one ever visits (ie Perth). I say this because for most visitors Australia = Sydney, maybe Melbourne. Anyway, I've gone to live overseas a couple of times now. The most recent time was to the US 11 years ago. I'm still here. As many problems as the US has, the one big selling point it has is career opportunities and earning potential as a software engineer. Like... it doesn't ev…
> It's a shame because Perth and even Melbourne used to have a relatively low cost-of-living and high quality-of-life. I'm British and have just moved to Perth. I am looking at being able to get a house 2-3 times as large here compared to the UK, for similar outlay. Add to that the weather and the sheer space... the QoL here seems so much higher than back home. I have spent time in some parts of the US (about 4 month…
I'm genuinely curious about this. My questions are:
1. What do you do for a living in Perth? What I guess I'm really trying to determine is what income bracket you're in.
2. Where in Perth are you looking at renting or buying? and
3. How much of your ability to buy is because you sold a house in the UK so have a huge deposit to put down?
I've known quite a few British people who have moved to Australia and pretty much all of them had (3).
I would say that QoL is generally much higher than the UK though. Houses and blocks are of course larger. Earning potential in London at least is pretty high though. But if you want a house you're probably commuting for an hour each way when the trains are running, which they generally aren't. Crossrail will be interesting.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#667[flagged]
Could you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? You don't have to change your views but we want thoughtful, substantive comments here, not battlefield stuff.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#668Earlier quoted context omitted.
When it all started in February 2020 that's exactly what Australia was doing, but a minority could not be trusted and broke quarantine and consequently COVID started spreading. At that point the model changed to mandatory quarantine in a government facility. There was broad community support for that change. In an ideal world people would have liked to have stuck with the voluntary approach, but most were realistic e…
This comment is revealing and truthful. It's almost been 2 years and most people have suffered. They blame and identify a minority for their suffering. It's one way that if you look at history minorities have also been identified. Scapegoat behaviour from the crowd is a response to senseless suffering and pain. It actually makes those who scapegoat others feel better and people want to feel better. Why would anyone v…
Your comment conflates two meanings of the word "minority". The first meaning relates to a group with a shared inherent property, such as race, and is irrelevant here. The second meaning, which I used, simply means a small number of people.
It's not an invisible virus. With the right tools we can see and track it. Up until the recent delta outbreak, COVID was being accurately tracked and contained in Australia, with the source of almost all transmissions known. Under these conditions, quarantine is pragmatic, not abstract.
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#669I'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…
> phone check-ins every 15 minutes or they will deploy police to follow up and confirm your location
WHAAAAAAAT??
Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate
#670Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps in the past. The sheer numbers and equipment of modern police and military forces are overwhelming. You need a lot of people, good organization, support from the inside. Not to mention you'll be hit with the media first, discrediting all of your efforts and painting you as a terrorist or traitor in everyone's minds. Then you're easy pickings.
Seems like the Taliban did fine taking their country back from globalists, with a bunch of used weapons from the 70s and Toyota utes.
Their country, yeah.