Attorney-General Plans Full Assault on Privacy

Attorney-General Robert McClelland has expanded his plans to accede to the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention. He now wants to track every contact we make, whether by phone or by email, and store it all for years.

Many people might be ok with the prospect of having the government able to peer in on who they know and communicate with. They might feel that nothing can really be determined from a bit of meta-data. They should look at Palantir Technologies. Palantir's software makes it easy for agents to draw conclusions from the most unstructured data. From sexual persuasion to political affiliation, software that governments worldwide are currently using can easily unveil many of your lawful secrets.

Here's the tally board for the current government:

• Filter the internet
• Secret negotiations of ACTA that would erode our right to privacy in the name of copyright protection
• Abdicate sovereignty to countries with less freedom than that to which we are used, with no effective protection for Australians
• Track number plates and faces as part of CrimTrac
• Track communications as part of OzLog

Maybe if the government introduced all these policies slowly, it would be more like boiling a frog, and we wouldn't notice. As it stands, every few weeks sees another major incursion in to the privacy of every Australian. At this rate, it will only be another month or two until the government introduces plans for a national id card system, against which all data will be logged, from the above-mentioned, to expenditure data, to TV viewing habits and library borrowings.

In the world of George Orwell's dystopic 1984, the size of a secret microphone was about the size of a fist. Back in the real world, a secret microphone could be invisible to the naked eye. We need to be more vigilant than ever to protect against exploitation by possibly well-intentioned, though definitely power-hungry, moves by politicians to control how we live our lives.


If you read this, and you're fed up with the constant incursions into our rights to privacy and freedom of speech, the Vote Pirate Party at the next election (assuming we are registered in time, which should be the case).

The weather!

I just have to say, the weather at the rally today was beautiful.
Right now, about an hour after it finished, the BOM is showing the heaviest rain possible to represent on the weather radar.
Very fortunate.

Anti-censorship rally follow-up

So, I've just arrived home from the rally, and it went very well.
There were speakers from all the organisations mentioned in the previous post, plus some concerned parents and other citizens who just wanted to voice their concern about the "filter."

Here is the speech that I presented at the rally:

My name is David Crafti. I am president of Pirate Party Australia and a software architect by trade.
I’d like to give you my take on Senator Conroy’s censorship plans. I’m sure that you will have already heard some of what I have to say today, but I hope to bring a new perspective to the issue.
The government states the aim of its Internet censorship program is to protect the nation’s children from mental harm.
I, and Pirate Party Australia, believe that nobody is better placed to protect your children from mental harm than you, their parents.
Personal filtering software, such as NetNanny, has been widely available at little cost for over a decade, allowing you fine-grained control over what can be viewed on your own computers.
For those of you with young children, I would encourage you to use this software. For all the previous government’s faults, they subsidised this type of software for anyone who wanted it.
We also recommend that children be taught about basic Internet safety from an early age.
Pirate Party Australia wants to see international cooperation, following due process of law, to investigate the actual abuses that lead to the creation of material that is considered illegal.
What won’t protect children, or anyone for that matter, is stopping everyone from finding information on subjects deemed unacceptable by the government of the day, such as graffiti or euthanasia.
What won’t protect your children, is bringing them up in a world where they are taught that doing the right thing is not the free choice of a good person, but the only action that can occur, due to boundaries set up by a group of unelected blacklist administrators.
The scope of the filter is currently claimed to restrict Refused Classification material, which is already more than the initially-claimed scope. Who wouldn’t be concerned that this censorship list could be expanded further and further?
Senator Conroy himself has stated that he is in talks with Google to filter YouTube. He claims that he knows that it’s possible because Google already does it for China.
He wants Australia to be censored like China?!
What this will teach children is to find ways to exploit the system wherever loopholes are found.
Their family- and society-taught morality will be replaced by rigid boundaries defined in secret.
Any civil libertarians out there will automatically see the problem with this, but it seems obvious to me that the Australian Christian Lobby, or ACL, who has pushed so hard for this filter, should also see the problem with this:
A person is not good, based solely on their actions. An element of choice must be involved.
If people are not given the choice to do wrong, then they are not given the choice to do right. If they are not given the choice to do right, then they cannot be good people. They’re merely robots.
If the ACL wants to create a society of good people, they should oppose the filter and support education, to teach people why accessing certain material is wrong, so they can make the right decision for themselves.
I’m an IT expert, so I know that the current filter plans are a joke.
I’m personally not that concerned about the immediate effects of the proposed filter, because I know I could get around it easily if I want, and I don’t know of anything that the filter would block that I would really want to access, anyway.
My main concern stems from the fact that it establishes a framework upon which more censorship can be built, which will further erode our rights to privacy and freedom of speech.
Version 1 might be a flimsy joke in practice, but the authority and ability will exist to create a more effective version down the line.
To those who support the current Labor government generally, keep in mind that when a version of the filter exists that is not a joke, you don’t know who will be in government.
Will it be Liberal? Will it be Labor? Will it be some new party that exists in 50 years time? We just don’t know.
While the current government might be implementing this censorship scheme with the best of intentions, who can predict what the intentions of future governments might be?
What happens when the secret filter list starts silently including political websites? You won’t even know, so how can you protest?
Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and modern-day China and Iran all began their strangleholds on their populations by limiting freedom of communication in some way. If we are ever unfortunate enough to have a government like one of those thrust upon us, let’s not hand them the tools to oppress us!
The only way to stop this from creeping in scope is to stop it dead in its tracks.
There is no good censorship!
Thank you

Anyway, it has just started hailing massively here, so I'm going to go and unplug some stuff.

Anti-censorship event on March 6th!

Hi everybody,

The planning for the Melbourne event is going along well. It has been endorsed by EFA, and it will have speakers from:

• EFA
• The Greens
• Australian Sex Party
• Exit International
• A couple of socialist groups, and...
• Pirate Party Australia

Crap! What have I gotten myself in for. I have to write a speech... And deliver it. This will be my first public, real-world speech as president of Pirate Party Australia.
I'm sure I can write something decent, but the delivery makes me somewhat nervous. Nothing for it, but to push on through. I've taken a day off work to ensure I have enough time to put together something decent.

Anyway, come along for a laugh (at me), and to learn about the censorship issue, if you don't know about it already.

Also, some progress is being made on swag, but we have to get the artwork to be perfect for the manufacturer. It feels like it should be easier.

Also, during o-week, I went to Monash Clayton on one of the days on the spur of the moment. Thanks to Steve for letting me take leave with little notice. I was hoping to be able to pick up whatever permits I needed to hand out information an sign up members, but they were sold out, and the permits are apparently expensive. I tried to come up with loopholes that would allow me to hand out information, and eventually settled on trying to find a group who would let me put my information on display at their stall. Most groups said no, but then one group not only said yes, they also let me sit with them and sign up people. I got 17 members, which is not bad for a few hours in meat space. We are now only about 80 memberships away from being able to register.

That'll do for now.

Actually, check out the blog of one of the organisers for a great story.

Regards,

David Crafti

Melbourne Anti-censorship Event on March 6th

<rant>
I accidentally got myself in the middle of a fight between several factions trying to organise some kind of anti-censorship events across Australia on March 6th. I promoted a Melbourne event that was being advertised as a protest, when most factions, including one that has some Pirate Party members, had decided to go for an informal picnic or barbecue approach.

It was my own fault that I didn't know about the change of direction that some of the groups had taken, as I hadn't read the emails (they'd been filtered out of my inbox automatically). Once I'd realised my mistake, and caught up on my reading, and worked through the aggressive abuse that was hurled my way for my mistake (very productive, that was), I started trying to calm things down.

I won't be naming names or organisations in this post, despite my aim for transparency, as things committed via email and facebook tend to escalate well beyond where they would go over phone or in person, and I think that it has pretty much been a case of frustration boiling over for everyone involved in organising these events.

Anyway, so I started getting involved in working on compromises for the Melbourne and Perth events, as the organisers of those had started organising protests due to the lack of any other events being planned, and not having been told about the picnic plans of the organising groups from the other states.

I started with email, but quickly realised that it would be an ineffective means of communication to really make good arguments that would be heard. So I picked up the phone, and pretty soon, the Perth organiser had compromised on some the the plans for the Perth event, to a point where the other states' groups should have been happy. They weren't.

Then I got involved in the Melbourne planning, getting compromises and format changes so that other than not actually having a picnic, the format seemed to be almost the same as the other states. All the people I have spoken to from Melbourne and Perth have seemed to be nice, reasonable people (though I've only spoken to one organiser from Perth). I was pretty proud of myself about getting these compromises, I must say. I felt like a real deal-maker, and all it took was speaking calmly, having logical arguments and being polite: almost the opposite of most online communication conducted between strangers.

But no matter what I have managed to do to get Melbourne and Perth to compromise on their formats, issues kept coming up with the organisers from the other states either not believing me about the format changes, or just not listening. No matter what I promised about the events, old quotes and badly-written zdnet articles kept being used, over and over to imply that Perth and Melbourne were going to have angry street protests, which was not, and is not, at all the case.

It has resulted in the Melbourne event being ignored by the other groups, and without the endorsement of these other groups, the word is not being put out there effectively. I'm really quite mad about how obstructionist these groups have been. There are a lot of details that I just can't go into here, mostly because if I start, I won't be able to stop.

And to top it all off, the groups from the other states, which had the "perfect" plan about how these events should be run now seem to be imploding, with nothing to show for all their fighting and arguments.

Anyway, the details of the Melbourne Anti-censorship event can be seen on Facebook. At this stage, it is still going ahead, with or without the endorsement of these factions. And no matter what, there will not be a street protest.

I'm going to take a step back from the organising, I think (which I've only helped with a bit so far anyway), as it's not a Pirate Party event and I don't want keep stepping on people's toes.

There will probably be people who are angry at me for even writing this piece, despite so many of the details not being mentioned, though if I am to be transparent in my role within Pirate Party Australia, it's not all going to be pretty, and the mistakes aren't all going to be mine.
</rant>

Disclaimer: Some of what I have written about is based on rumour, and the state of things is likely to change frequently, as it has been for the last week, so if I have said anything wrong, it is unintentional, and if you plan on quoting me, you'd better get decent confirmation and make sure that your quotes are accurate at the time of printing them. I'm looking at you, zdnet.