So the first problem is that Australia is in a head-to-head race with the UK to see which country can lose their freedoms first. The newest chapter in this sad saga of Australia's descent into becoming a China clone is a high school that requires fingerprint identification for students to check in.

Though the privacy violating principal foolishly thought that by tracking fingerprints he could defeat students who used other students to "swipe in" for them previously. However, research which is available online shows how to defeat these with only gummi bears.

So if you're an Australian student at Gosford's Henry Kendall High School who thinks this privacy invasion is crap, check out this article that shows the research you can use to defeat the fingerprint scanners.

Australia has so much Big Brother nastiness going on, sometimes they make even the UK look tame!

The newest development comes where the government is demanding service providers to store all e-mail and possibly web browsing history for all its subjects citizens.

According to the directive, where internet access is concerned, this means the ISPs must retain the user ID of users, email addresses of senders and recipients of email, the date and time that users logged on and off from a service, and their IP address — whether dynamic or static applied to their user ID.

Like most ideas of this nature, it's sold with a plausible premise of catching criminals, but if innocent people are to accept such an invasion, it must first be shown that:

1. The data actually DOES help catch bad guys.
2. The data won't be abused and misused by the government.

In the US, we fail most consistently on the second. I don't know, but I'm going to guess that Australia's track record isn't a lot better.