Australia's opposition backs warrantless metadata collection Australia's opposition Labor Party has signalled that it intends to link arms with the intelligence community. In a television interview with Sky News, the party's deputy leader Tanya Plibersek said she wants to give “agencies the maximum ability to do their job well, within the bounds that people would expect.” According to …
For us to remind the politicians that they work for us, not the other way around. No more shall they pass laws which leave a bad taste in the mouth of honest aussies.
No more shall they sell off our assets because they dont know how else to fund the pay rise they give themselves.
It's time for us to yell "NO!" at the top of our voices, shatter the windows of parliament with the sound of our indignant rage, and deafen those who have the "born to rule" mentality. They think they can get away with it because aussies typically dont give a shit, but the more they take the piss, the more aussies are going to arc up and rebel against the rule.
Fuck the NSA, fuck the GCHQ, and fuck ASIS. Get real jobs you privacy invading perverts.
"It's time for us to yell "NO!" at the top of our voices, shatter the windows of parliament with the sound of our indignant rage, and deafen those who have the "born to rule" mentality. "
It is now impossible to shout loud enough to even momentarily disturb the pigs feeding at the trough of taxpayer funding. What with Can-do Campbell paying himself just shy of 1 Obama (new wage metric for pollies) and the Mad Monk on well over an Obama there's no stopping their single-minded and blatantly open piggery.
The idea that Australians need to be protected from terrorists is ridiculous, and that we can be protected from terrorists by surrendering our last shreds of privacy even more so. I suspect more australians have been killed in australia by dropbears than terrorists in the last decade, and those critters don't even exist. If they really want to save lives, australian or otherwise they should take all the funding for intelligence agencies and funnel it into eradicating bees. They'd save many more lives per dollar spent.
First – why is there a problem with forcing intelligence agencies to obtain warrants before they conduct surveillance? Warrants ensure that executive actions are appropriately checked.
Second, on the off chance that we do get mass data collection like the US, all this means is that people will adapt. They will start using encryption for their emails, TOR, VPN and seedboxes for their web browsing and downloads and will keep their mobiles away when they need to have private conversations or go out to places they don’t want big brother knowing about. They will start using cash more often rather than credit cards and will be more cautious of what identifying information they leave behind.
Third – if an ordinary citizen like me knows to do the above in the case that we DO become a police state, what do you think the terrorists and kiddy porn peddlers will do? They will actually have something to hide. They will use the above and more to evade data collection.
So tell me, what does all this achieve? We can now be likened to China for our authoritarian policies, we modify people’s behavior by treating everyone like a suspect and we don’t actually reach our goal – catching the terrorists. Sounds like an awful lot of trouble for not alot of payoff.
In answer to the first question, it is because this is to be used as a way to control dissent and you wouldn't want legal oversight on that would you? It never ceases to amaze me how Stazi-like the behaviour of Western *cough* Democracies has now become. I think even the most hardened post-war privacy invading eastern block nutcase would be amazed at what they now get up to in the name of saving us from events rarer than lightning strikes.
And this will, of course, save all Australians from the same number of forestalled terrorist attacks as has happened in the USA - probably a grand total of nil. Governments are elected by the populace at large to serve those who actually took the trouble to vote, NOT to go around conjuring up half-baked laws which either don't work or serve their own interests. All the recent Snowden spying reports show, without a shadow of a doubt, that so-called democratically elected representatives are just working to their own agenda, with absolutely no consultation with the people who put them in power. Depressing, ain't it?
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