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Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

digitalrightswatch.org.au

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Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#831

Post by gorwell »

Nursie wrote: post #437
gorwell wrote: post #429

Earlier 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?

I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country, and I wouldn't want to live in a country where citizens had easy access to guns, and suffered the violence and mass shootings that seem to come from that, like in the US. Hope that helps.

"I don't think it is moving towards being an authoritarian police state any more than any other western country"

The example on which this thread is based, and otherwise discussed within this thread (checking in every 15 minutes with the state or be visited by the police), is well beyond other western countries and especially the USA at this point. We'll see if that holds.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#832

Post by 908B64B197 »

javier123454321 wrote: post #661

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.

Wait, they have exit checks?

I know Cuba, North Korea and the USSR have/had these. But It's the first time I hear about it for a "western" country.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#833

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

kongin wrote: post #823
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means that CoVID-19 has had about 10 times the impact as seasonal flu. That's extremely serious.

Which means that a bad flu season has had about 10% the impact of covid. That's extremely serious. Should we have locked down in 2017? What number of deaths is the magic one where we decide that it's too much and we need to close everything for years on end?

There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.

> we need to close everything for years on end?

Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#834

Post by tacocataco »

whoknowswhat11 wrote: post #342

Here's the reality - I'd take google and apple's privacy protections related to my data over many govts out there? Is that a bad thing to say? Back to the regular anti google / google news / apple programming.

False choice fallacy.

Google and apple can be regulated or even trust busted.

The government can be forced to serve the people instead of the other way around.

Humanity as a whole may have lost many battles, but we have won some. Plus the war isn't over.

Thing can get better, even if they've consistently gotten worse since before I was born.

I'm prone to despair myself, I always have to give myself self affirmations like this throughout my day. Helps me, hope this comment helped someone else out there.

Perhaps this is why people pray to their god/gods if they have them, to give infinite morale in a seemingly hopeless situation. The majority of casualties occur during a route in war.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#835

Post by 908B64B197 »

numair wrote: post #151

I’ve spent a bit of time in Australia. When I compared the caliber of people who worked in tech and venture to those in mining and law enforcement, it was night and day. There’s a TON of smart people at companies like Woodside, and lots of smart people at the Australian Federal Police (to the extent where the US and other countries rely on them for help in tricky technical situations). The tech and VC crowd seemed to…

> And now that you’ve got the climate activists antagonizing the mining companies, who are responsible for a very significant percentage of the economy, you’ve got two extremely savvy and powerful groups working together.

I wonder which country is the number one customer of these companies.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#836

Post by 908B64B197 »

numair wrote: post #624
melbourne_mat wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Australian. Your argument seems to be "If only the tech sector in Australia had some smart people". That's nice but I don't think that's what is going on. Most of the general public is apathetic to this kind of thing. They just don't get worked up like Americans do about freedom. Especially in the middle of an epidemic (covid19 is now out of control in the two biggest cities). We have a conservative government at…

I think you greatly overestimate how “worked up” Americans get. In reality, there is an enormous amount of lobbying and horse-trading that goes on behind the scenes whenever Washington wants to do anything that touches the tech and telecom sectors. Tech and telecom are seen as areas that drive tremendous economic value and national power, so they have the ability to bend things to go their way. Australia is quite the…

It's interesting to see how, in America, tech is seen as a gateway to prosperity and something worth investing in, while in Australia it's described as a pit for subsidies.

I guess the number one customer for Australian natural resource has incentives to make sure the country stays dependent on said natural resource exports for it's prosperity. Keeps them docile...

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#837

Post by oblio »

modo_mario wrote: post #790
oblio wrote: post #616

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. There was that miners strike which got bombed.

Do you mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

Or something else? I guess that's the closest thing that would qualify.

But compared to the anti-government protests that have probably happened in half the countries in the world during the same time period, it's peanuts.

Example from Romania: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017%E2%80%932019_Romanian_pro...

Half a million people protesting out of ~18 million or so. For reference, that would mean 10 million people protesting at the same time in the US. I wonder if even the civil rights movement during the 60's ever got that many people out on the streets at the exact same time.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#838

Post by kongin »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #833
kongin wrote: post #823

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which means that a bad flu season has had about 10% the impact of covid. That's extremely serious. Should we have locked down in 2017? What number of deaths is the magic one where we decide that it's too much and we need to close everything for years on end?

There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century. > we need to close everything for years on end? Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.

> There's no magic number, but CoVID-19 is the most serious public health emergency in probably a century.

Do you know what AIDS is?

Unlike Covid which kills something under 1 in 100 people it infects AIDS until the mid 90s was a death sentence for anyone who got it.

I remember being in an emergency room and the nurse asking for people to give blood because their blood banks were tainted and the doctors could either let patients die from from blood loss or in 10 years from AIDS.

I have no idea why that whole pandemic has been pushed down the memory hole. It's like everyone born after 1985 doesn't even know what it is, let alone what it was like to see people you know just wilt and die.

>Countries that properly managed the pandemic locked down hard for a few weeks, eliminated the virus, and then reopened. They've been back to normal (or something close to it) for most of the time since.

Countries that don't have it keep having to lock down for two weeks every three months. NZ is the most successful and they are currently in their 5th national lockdown.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#839

Post by kevingadd »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #537
kevingadd wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intent is an increasingly imaginary concept when decisionmaking is partially or completely performed by neural nets and checklists. As such, outcomes end up being the important thing to examine.

Agreed, but this cuts both ways. Intent has a lot of moral judgement attached to it - if we're redefining a word to be primarily about outcomes instead of intent, we should also drop the implied moral assertions around it.

Mmm, I'm not so sure. Certainly the things it means about the person responsible for the decision are a little different - lots of people accidentally put policies into place that harm minority groups, etc. But if the outcome is the same and a person in power chooses not to fix it, it really doesn't matter what their intent is, it's a moral failure not to help the people who need your help if you're able to do so. I don't really care whether they say slurs in their spare time with friends, I just want my elected (and un-elected) representatives to do what they can to prevent people from dying of starvation or preventable diseases.

Re: Australia’s new mass surveillance mandate

#840

Post by indemnity »

logicchains wrote: post #732
iamthemonster wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, there are countries that have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people with their policies. But I can't think of a country off the top of my head that has applied laissez-faire Covid controls but also recorded very low numbers of deaths.

Japan, with a population of around 126 million, only had 16,471 deaths so far from covid, a death rate of 0.013%. As a point of reference, there are around 20k suicide deaths annually in Japan. Japan didn't use harsh/legally enforced lockdowns; almost all their measures have been voluntary: https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/covid-19-cases-su... .

High social cohesion will do that.
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