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Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

digitalrightswatch.org.au

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Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#811

Post by kingkawn »

mc32 wrote: post #687
kingkawn wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can quote whatever you like however you like, but it ain't all men out there. Relying on such worldviews to understand the world leaves you with a truncated world.

As the other poster pointed out the word men has multiple meaning which depend on context. The meaning is clear to me and no need to modify it. Next time you quote it you can make your own changes.

The idea that ‘men’ is a universal stand-in for people is no different than saying White is the universal stand-in for people.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#812

Post by bin_bash »

ocschwar wrote: post #421
bin_bash wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well to be fair the US bans alcohol for native eskimos in the Alaskan bush. EDIT: I guess in the 1980s the government allowed the villages to make their own decisions to be dry or not: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/is-proh...

And any reservation where the tribal council votes to go dry, the Federal government will enforce it. (Well, to the extent that it will, you know, actually spend the money to have BIA police officers assigned to that Rez.)

Is that enforcement a positive thing or not?

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#813

Post by dane-pgp »

nl wrote: post #376
dane-pgp wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> vaccine passports haven't been implemented in Australia yet. The lack of vaccine passports is of little consolation when its citizens have already accepted this: "The state will text them at random times, and thereafter they will have 15 minutes to take a picture of their face in the location where they are supposed to be. Should they fail, the local police department will be sent to follow up in person." https://w…

That is specifically about enforcement of home quarantine as an alternative to hotel quarantine for interstate travel. It's not generally applicable in any way.

Sorry, I should have provided more clarifying context. My point wasn't that this was a general policy, but that Australians have accepted a system of self- and AI-administered biometric constant surveillance for at least some citizens, some of the time. I could easily see this being used to enforce future lockdowns.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#814

Post by javagram »

raxxorrax wrote: post #778
lucideer wrote: post #634

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Japan for example. Also an island, South Korea is too for all practical purposes. Australia isn't even half an Italy, although the population is admittedly mostly concentrated. Still, you have to compare it to countries which can only be reached by ship or plane. There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case, what NZ did relatively successfully. But admitting that it failed is hard to convey political…

> There is merit for harsh policies if you can prevent any case, what NZ did relatively successfully. But admitting that it failed is hard to convey politically.

Note that the South Australia app under discussion is in an Australian state which, like NZ, is relatively successful at preventing “any case”. It seems like the last case necessitating a 7-day lockdown in SA was almost 2 months ago and before then they hadn’t instituted a lockdown since Nov 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_in_South_Aus...

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#815

Post by adamrezich »

brutusborn wrote: post #453
0xdeadb00f wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey mate. Aussie here. I'm sorry to say that it seems to me no one around here gives a flying fuck about politics let alone anyrhing to do with digital rights. This is a war we've already lost. I blame Murdoch but quite frankly most of the people I talk to are too wrapped up in working to pay their bills and care for their families to care about anything else.

There's still a few of us, but I think you hit the nail on the head with regards to being too busy. Political reporting tends to either oversimplify things to the point it is not useful, or be so verbose that only the most committed citizens will read it. I have started working on the idea of using knowledge graphs to fix this problem. The idea is basically representing political values/ beleifs/policies as nodes tha…

this is a really cool idea!!

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#816

Post by javagram »

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.

Quarantines and lockdowns were used against previous pandemics such as the 1918 flu pandemic.

American Samoa, for instance, was entirely unscathed by the Spanish flu because they instituted a strict quarantine at the border, the same policy Australia/NZ did for Covid-19.

See this pre-covid article from 2018, for instance.[0] Sound familiar?

> “These communities basically shut themselves down,” explains Howard Markel, an epidemiological historian at the University of Michigan who was one of the authors of the study. “No one came in and no one came out. Schools were closed and there were no public gatherings. We came up with the term ‘protective sequestration’, where a defined and healthy group of people are shielded from the risk of infection from outsiders.”

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181023-the-places-that-...

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#817

Post by javagram »

AndrewBissell wrote: post #786
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…

I'll present an argument against quarantine being warranted: Covid-19 is an endemic virus for which there are no sterilizing vaccines and hence "zero Covid" policy frameworks are an insane and hopeless attempt to turn back the tides. You will either live under these restrictions for the rest of your lives, or give them up and eventually be exposed to the virus.

Consider, however, that being exposed to the virus after being vaccinated reduces your risk of death and/or hospitalization by a factor of 10-20x. The assumption that there are “no sterilizing vaccines” is a little questionable too - even against Delta, the FDA approved vaccines are showing 40-50% immunity against infection, i.e. sterilizing immunity.

Zero Covid countries like NZ and Australia that re-open to the world once their populations hit 80% vaccination will have prevented many deaths among their population.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#818

Post by samstave »

samstave wrote: post #339
siquick wrote: post #37

I've lived in Australia for 10 years and really considering my familys future in this country. We are sleep-walking towards a very average future. An undiversified export economy, out of control house prices, a job-market primarily focused on two cities, a government intent on selling all public assets, very limited political interest in positive climate policies. The latter is simply addressed with "technology will…

I recall readinga book when I was young, it was all about a nuclear war - and the perspective of the characters was that AU was the last bastion of humanity to survive... and went on to talk about how the people were able to survive there... So dystopian weird idea follows: What if "they" are 'cleansing' Australia to make it clear for the oligarch elites to come in and claim the land! :-)

It would be wonderful if HN had an ear for SCI-FI ideas as opposed to taking every gosh darn thing literally...

I understand the need to keep some "thought-bumpers" to prevent reddit-ization of HN (ironic given that HN is the seed of Reddit) -- but FFS lighten the heck up.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#819

Post by mc32 »

kingkawn wrote: post #811
mc32 wrote: post #687

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the other poster pointed out the word men has multiple meaning which depend on context. The meaning is clear to me and no need to modify it. Next time you quote it you can make your own changes.

The idea that ‘men’ is a universal stand-in for people is no different than saying White is the universal stand-in for people.

Nope. White has never had that meaning at all.

Please look into the etymology of a word before making whimsical arguments.

You’ll have an awful time with Chinese where words have many different meanings depending on context.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#820

Post by kongin »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #796
kongin wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The 2017 flu season killed 200 Americans per million, world wide that amounts to 1,400,000 people.

Should we have locked down in 2017?

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