Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston One of the individuals who first brought the Internet to Australia, Geoff Huston, has unloaded on the federal government's chaotic attempt to introduce its data retention regime. Now chief scientist at APNIC, Huston has written in his Potaroo blog that one of the key assumptions behind the data retention regime, a stable …
The reason, he suspects, is simple cluelessness: nobody in parliament nor among the various departmental heads that demanded data retention understands how the networks operate: "They just don’t get it", he states
Yep you could also safely say that turnball, Brandis and the other asshats of the Australian federal government make a bus load of idiots look like a physicist’s convention
"Brandis and the other asshats of the Australian federal government make a bus load of idiots look like a physicist’s convention"
Yeah (and I despair), but whose fault is that? I'm old enough to remember Vietnam and Civil Rights demonstrations–a time when governments were actually frightened of the citizenry. When citizens rioted in the streets governments then changed the laws.
Today, insufficient people care about the issues to effectively count. But why so? Seems Chomsky was right when he wrote [the Establishment/government] manufactured consent through necessary illusions and we didn't notice.
nobody in parliament nor among the various departmental heads that demanded data retention understands how the networks operate: "They just don’t get it", he states.
I think it's slightly different... they just don't care. Oh I'm sure some of them can't even use email, but they can't all be this ignorant. This lets them have their cake and eat it too. Like Ashley Madison claiming they didn't store credit card entries - technically true because they were offsite, but easily accessible. They can claim they're not storing your browsing history while making it trivially reconstructable.
And when the data store gets hacked - highly likely we will find out where our politicians mistresses can be found amongst other interesting things. Then it may be found to be unnecessary to keep all such personal information on everyone.
The only comfort is that they will have so much data that they will be unlikely to be able to analyse it sensibly.
Ah Scoular, Scoular
you trust too much young jedi
Too much data ? Don't you see Larry and the TLAs IT companies et al lining up to sell < trumpet peal> <drum roll> Big Data </noise> to eager snoops and dumber PHBs who like big shiny-shiny. I note the CIA blessed data miner is doing well here too lately. Cant remember name. Remember Oz is open for business. Funny business mostly. No doubt a few more incriminating connections in dodgy political funding will turn up too but crime by pollies is always a minor misdemeanour now.
All the head scratching comes from misunderstanding the purpose of a meta-data retention scheme. Its not about terrorists or organised crime, its about being able to find and punish whistle blowers and leakers*. The whole farce only makes sense if you bear that in mind.
* You could, I guess, make the case that there are few things that politicians and senior bureaucrats are more terrorised by than having their misdeeds revealed thus those revealing them are terrorists...
@ Cincinnataroo
pondered this and suggest, most humbly, that a return to the practice of middle ages city states in Adriatic has merit. It would also match the Oz love a flutter and lottery. All adults (ie people who have held down a job in real work, not academia or union office) and born here are in lottery. Parliament consists of two houses as of now. The lower house like the House of Reps has a membership based on two people selected randomly from each electorate for 4 years. Every two years 50% change. Call up is electronic and non-contestable unless clear medical case established by a military doctor can be made for release.
Cant get more unclued corporate/party drones than we get now, abolishes the old political families influence, removes the power of a political class, removes costs of ever more idiot stoking election campaigns and can be tested as "fair". Dunno about house of review. Perhaps mandatory callup of all engineers might be in order.
Yep, I've been advocating this for years. It's a good solution to the problem of politicians. Only difference is that I'd prefer a three year term with our reps only active in Parliament for two. Spend the first six months getting trained in parliamentary and committee procedure and the last six to hand over any longer term work to a newbie. Pay rate? Double average weekly earnings so that they have an incentive to increase AWE for all Australians instead of driving it down as present pollies seem hell bent on.
How do we get them to understand? You won't really, but if you want to start
- Give them the data they're asking for. On paper. Bring in the first wheelbarrow load and let them know how many seconds it's for, and ask where they want the next 32767 batches delivered.
- Give them the data they're looking for, for a narrow slice of IP addresses that includes theirs, in a nice spreadsheet that tracks what they're doing, or mixes up what they're doing with what their neighbors are doing.
- Many years ago, when a right-wing US judge was being nominated for the Supreme Court, somebody looked up his video rental records, and provided it to Congress. It was boring and entirely non-scandalous, and Congress quickly passed a law providing privacy protections for video rental records. You need to let them know you can do the same for them.
yeah, given we take in the highest number of refugees per capita in the world, we must be terrible people. I note the Europeans are no longer lecturing us about treatment of illegal arrivals now. NOTE: I also pity the poor sods. Leaving home and country is no light matter. And no, like everyone else, I don't have answers either.
except we don't - that claim about Australia taking in the highest number of refugees per capita is just false.
http://www.factsfightback.org.au/does-australia-take-the-most-refugees-check-the-facts/
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/fact-and-fiction-with-prime-minister-tony-abbotts-refugee-intake-numbers-20150906-gjgc7q.html
I read yesterday that Germany is set to massively increase its intake of refugees:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/07/germany-to-spend-an-extra-6bn-to-fund-record-influx-of-800000-refugees
... so we're even further down the list. :-(
It's not like the idots at ISPs even know how to look up their own logs. About a decade ago a friend of mine in New Zealand was accused of hacking a major corporation, they claiming to proof the IP address of the attacker was assigned to her at the time. Turns they ISP muppet converted the time they were given to GMT-11 instead of GMT+11 and pulled the wrong address, causing months of hassle and legal threats.
This RFC describes a method where CGNAT would not need to be logged
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7422
Subsection 187A(4)(b) puts beyond doubt that service providers are not required to keep information about subscribers’ web browsing history.
So definitely a lot of data to retain, although most service providers will have different governance and compliance policies where they are already storing a lot of this data for other business reasons for longer than 2 years.
http://www.ag.gov.au/NationalSecurity/DataRetention/Documents/DataRetentionGuidelinesForServiceProviders.pdf
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