Oz stats bureau deploys a bot to harvest Twitter IDs

Having managed to creep-out an awful lot of Australia with its high-handed, arrogant, tone-deaf handling of the 2016 Census, there wasn't much left for the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) left to foul up, right? Wrong. Now the ABS has created a Twitter bot that sucks up IDs of those who mention its @ABSCensus handle and …

[Number6]

I seem to remember filling in my last UK census with a Sharpie. Shame about the cheap absorbent paper. Had fun colouring in all the barcodes, too.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think if I look hard enough, in the filing at home, I still have the original of the last Census form. I wasn't at home when they came to collect it so was instructed to leave it at the front door to be collected on a particular day. I left the form as instructed and when I came home it was still there so I took it back inside. It still hasn't been collected.

AC for obvious reasons...

[John Tserkezis]

"I left the form as instructed and when I came home it was still there so I took it back inside. It still hasn't been collected."

Same here, and what we've heard from the neighbours, same for them too.

[Oengus]

This is egregious stupidity.

Coupled with a story about the ABS, this is a tautology.

[Myvekk]

ABS, "We're from the Government, and we're here to help you!"

[Magani]

PR 101

Given all the available evidence, one would have to think that this has been one of the best PR debacles in history. Not only did the ABS not explain what they were doing with the name + address data and the non-anonymising of it, but then they just trumped it with a 'we know best' attitude and (in the best Joh Bjelke-Petersen manner) followed it with a 'Don't you worry about that' response.

Fail all round.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope they come to their 'census'

It's not too late guys!

[Anonymous Coward]

What should be expected

Many years ago I worked for the ABS for a number of reasons. I found that they very certain of their value to society, although none could explain it.

The entire place had a toxic culture - intruding on the privacy of people seemed to be erotic for them. Speaking of which, their personal lives were horribly entangled with each other: you could smell the hormones when entering the office. This is the place where I saw more workplace stalking than other places - including the military.

ABS staff were very much more aggressively anti-privacy than any spook or cop I have worked with. Even back in the early 1990s they wanted to collect and keep all names, and cross-check against other government departments.

When dealing with non-respondents there was a script which was very hostile and threatened people with court orders to disclose information - all bollocks of course, but it was part of the script.

So this creepiness is not just apparent - it is very very real.

[harmjschoonhoven]

At the other side of the globe ...

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) has said that if the world would come to an end, he would go to the Netherlands, because there everything happened 50 years later.

However 46 years ago there was widespread protest against the general Dutch census to be held in 1971 fueled by privacy concerns, computer angst and memories of the Nazi occupation.

[Kratoklastes]

"Your data is secure" should be the subject of a class action

One thing that you can sticky-tape to your fridge, is that the team responsible for datasec at ABS is comprised of 3rd quintile talent except at the very top (where it will be 4th quintile for datasec, but 1st quintile for brown-nosing and empire-building).

They will all be ASO5 or 6, getting $78k a year, tops - basically exactly in line with average weekly earnings for all-comers, and 25% below the average for full-time male employees in Information, Media and Telecommunications. So expect average intelligence (economy-wide) and average technical expertise (economy-wide), and average (economy-wide) understanding of how to properly implement decent data security.

And then consider how low a bar that is, when sector-specific attributes of all three of those things is low.

Consider that within the tech sector there are a shítload of people whose understanding of data security is woeful - including relatively well-paid, relatively highly-skilled people working at security firms or responsible for data layers at large firms (e.g., notice all the vulns found in high-exposure apps like DropBox, LastPass, etc).

Government does not pay enough too recruit talent, and its workplaces are actively toxic for talent (they are not remunerated well, and they are not recognised adequately, they are not resourced properly, and their feedback is not sought - because it's brown-nosers and triangulators all the way up to the Minister*).

If I am ever prosecuted for refusing to fill out this Orwell's-wet-dream snooping document, I will show the court in real time how easy it is to expose personal data from a government data repository. It won't get me off, but it might help the "failed barrister on the bench"** think a bit harder.

*: disclosure - my youngest sister was a Senior Adviser to the Prime Minister (Gillard). She plays no role in, and doesn't endorse, my view of bureaucrats (as Upton Sinclair quipped, 'It is difficult to get [your sister] to understand something, when [her] salary depends on his not understanding it.').

**: there are some judges who are very smart people and were very good advocates. My old mucker Michael Croucher (now Croucher J of the Vic Supremes) is a good example - we studied economics together and he and I both won RBA cadetships (and we both turned them down). While he has a very sharp mind, and would not be prone to Dunning-Kruger on matters of technical complexity, it remains that he is part of a machine that relies on mediaeval garb and faux-solemn set-piece theatrics to give the process undeserved gravitas, when the average person in the 'big chair' is a bit of a dullard, relative to the average practitioner. Maxim 237 applies*** even if not specifically in Croucher's case.

Smart judges who were good advocates are the exception: the run-of-the-mill judge makes Vosper, Graves and Oliphant JJ (from 'Rumpole') look like Denning by comparison.

**: Maxim 237 from "Réflections ou Sentences et Maximes Morales" (1664) by François, Duc de la Rouchefoucauld, which goes -

"La gravité est un mystère du corps inventé pour cacher les défauts de l'esprit." (Gravitas is a physical charade designed to conceal mental shortcomings).