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.

Tags: Australia, Big Brother, Data Abuse

They had it, they shouldn’t have, now they lost it. Same story all over.

The funniest part of this is that they’re trying to convince their public that it’s a good idea to have a national ID card containing even more data and that they’ll be responsible with that data.

Said someone from an anti-ID card group:

“It’s inevitably good news for our campaign because it proves to people that this government, and indeed any government, cannot be trusted with this amount of information. For 25 million people this is a catastrophe but it is just a small herald of the national ID scheme which would mean a potential catastrophe for 60 million of us.”

Tags: Big Brother, Data Abuse, National ID, UK

But will anything be done this time? That’s the question. Tags: Big Brother

The NSA has been working on their public image and trying to market itself as a cool place to work partially with their "Cryptokids" campaign. Their goal is to teach kids about what the NSA does in a fun, kid-friendly way. But that's not what I'm posting about. I ran across this interesting comic about the unpopular little-know cryptokid, Y.R. Tap, the NSA domestic spying fly. The fly shows the Cryptokids what can happen when civil liberties are violated. Tags: Big Brother, Public Confidence

The Wall Street Journal says that Dunkin’ Donuts is experimenting with video screens that use facial recognition technology to figure out your age and gender. The screens then display ads targeted specifically to you.

The last thing we need is computers trying to figure out who and what we are so they can target ads to us. Tags: Big Brother

The TSA's CLEAR program where people can spend $100 to be "pre-screened" at airports and bypass security had a security hit recently when a laptop (doesn't this get old) with customer data was stolen. Well gosh, how could they ever have seen that coming? Anyway, Schneier covers the story and links to the TSA's response as well as taking a moment to denounce the program again along with most of what the TSA is doing for airport security. Since I've met the privacy officer for the TSA and know he knows what he's doing, the only reason I can come up with for this is that they're not listening to him when he's telling them not to put this kind of data on laptops unencrypted. Tags: Big Brother, lost laptop, TSA, Well Duh!

In Senate debate, Patrick Leahy (D-VT) argued strongly against telecom immunity, because it would make it almost impossible to ever find out what really happened and “the American people ought to know who in the White House said, ‘Go break the law.’” Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) noted that, “We’re considering granting immunity when roughly 70 members of the Senate still have not been briefed on the president’s wiretapping program. The vast majority of this body still does not even know what we’re being asked to grant immunity for.”

These were the protests that smarter senators made before the vote. They were ignored. The “FISA update” including immunity was passed yesterday.

“I sit on the intelligence and Judiciary committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program,” said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), another prominent opponent. “I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen . . . members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation.”

Tags: Big Brother, Bushiness

Breaking news, Congress is full of quarter-witted imbeciles and corrupt sychophants. Wait… we knew that already. What is new is that now we have a roster of the members of the House who either have no clue about what's going on or have gone to the dark side (cue Darth Vader-like breathing). Yesterday the House passed a FISA amendment act which includes a provision shielding telecommunications companies from any liability. In the coverage of the situation by Ars Technica, they were able to quote Nacy Pelosi as being an idiot:

The most extended apologia came from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who urged that the compromise be judged by comparison with the Senate bill, which she characterized as the only realistic alternative (So we can't ask for a good law, only a less bad one? That's a great standard to live to). She outlined several ways in which the current legislation is preferable to the Senate's version. First, the compromise bill reasserts that FISA is the "exclusive means" for conducting electronic surveillance, which would require the president to ignore such language twice in order to launch an extralegal surveillance program, rather than only once, as under traditional FISA rules (So if the President breaks the law, now it would violate two laws instead of just one. The next time someone breaks a law, I wonder if it will result in jail time if it only breaks the law "once"). Second, it preserves prior judicial review of surveillance authorizations, except in "very, very rare" circumstances, such as when the attorney general asserts that waiting for a judge would entail delay (I think that recent history has shown how much we can trust to the "rarity" of the Attorney General approving anything a president might ask. Has she even been awake in the last decade?). Third, it contains specific provisions barring the use of authorizations targeting parties abroad as a pretext for targeting U.S. persons, presumably to be enforced by a board of psychics. Finally, it provides for an internal investigation of the extent of past surveillance, which Congress will act upon with the same legendary zeal for civil liberties it has displayed over the past seven years (Brilliantly summarized. Ars has some great writers.).

So in one day, the House voted to expand powers of the Judicial branch that they didn't need and shield their conspirators from liability against justice. Don't get me wrong, if I got a letter from the Attorney General of the United states that required my company to do something and my lawyers said to do it, I would have and maybe that's what happened to the telcos. But if there is no accountability for the Attorney General, the President, and the involved Agencies, then the whole things tastes like Congress cooked us up some chili made of poo. Tags: Big Brother, Bushiness, Public Confidence, Utter Failure

Any computer with at least one file "coming from 'dubious origins,' e.g. downloaded from P2P". I don't know about you, but everyone I know has downloaded something at one point or another. As I've said before, there are many situations where downloading even copyrighted material is completely ethical(even if it may not be clearly legal or illegal). Info on the bill brought to you via Slashdot. Tags: Big Brother

By putting tons of cameras at different angles on an airplane and carefully inspecting everyone's faces and movements, the EU hopes to identify terrorists before they strike. There's only a few problems to work out: 1) There's no way to know what a terrorist looks like 2) Removing privacy with no gain is a vast waste of money and resources 3) Mass surveillance hurts everyone and doesn't actually work. (H/T to schneier for the link) Tags: Big Brother