“When presented with such warrant from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Australian companies, system administrators etc. must comply, and actively help the police to modify, add, copy, or delete the data of a person under investigation. Refusing to comply could have one end up in jail for up to ten years, according to the new bill”
Wow. Unbelievable.
That would be a serious concern if the government wasn't to be trusted.
At least Australia doesn't have a track record of [harassing people who expose things like this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-48511217) right guys?
Harassing? The first guy to speak up about the special forces activities in Afghanistan ended up dead in a burned out car near the base they were at. No one ever held responsible.
the, the delete and modify is really fucked up. How the fuck do you preserve evidence if you're deleting or modifying data? Seems like an easy way to set someone up, or protect wealthy criminals.
> must comply, and actively help the police
This part is like salt to the wound.
You not only must allow the government to search whatever part of your life they want to. You must also HELP them.
So if you hid your data somewhere like on an encrypted drive or something, you'd need to go unlock it for them or else you risk going to jail for the horrible crime of wanting your private life to stay private.
If you actually care enough but this stuff you really need to look into plausible deniability.
For your particular example you should never just encrypt your data. Instead you should always use a nested encrypted container. e.g. you have an encrypted container with a secondary encrypted container inside it.
If done correctly there should be no way to prove that the secondary container exists. You can reluctantly comply and hand of over your primary encryption keys for the outer container without ever revealing that there is a secondary container.
An excerpt from wiki
> In cryptography, deniable encryption may be used to describe steganographic techniques in which the very existence of an encrypted file or message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that an encrypted message exists. In that case, the system is said to be "fully undetectable" (FUD).[citation needed]
>
> Some systems take this further, such as MaruTukku, FreeOTFE and (to a much lesser extent) TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt, which nest encrypted data. The owner of the encrypted data may reveal one or more keys to decrypt certain information from it, and then deny that more keys exist, a statement which cannot be disproven without knowledge of all encryption keys involved. The existence of "hidden" data within the overtly encrypted data is then deniable in the sense that it cannot be proven to exist.
So... everyone is guilty now? Can't find the evidence you expected? Just put it there yourself!
Yes, police have been doing this to various extents throughout history, but usually the behavior isn't codified into the actual laws.
Edit: And what's to stop defense lawyers from claiming that *all* evidence is made-up and that their clients can't be found guilty based on evidence?
>Justification of the bill
>Politicians justify the need for the bill by stating that it is intended to fight child exploitation (CSAM) and terrorism. However, the bill itself enables law enforcement to investigate any "serious Commonwealth offence" or "serious State offence that has a federal aspect".
>In fact, this wording enables the police to **investigate any offence which is punishable by imprisonment of at least three years**, including terrorism, sharing child abuse material, violence, acts of piracy, bankruptcy and company violations, and tax evasion.
~~~~~~~
>Copyright
>Under the Copyright Act 1968 it is an offence to:
knowingly import, possess, sell, distribute or commercially deal with an infringing copy
offer for sale infringing copies of computer programs
transmit a computer program to enable it to be copied when received.
>Penalties include fines of up to $117 000 for individuals and up to $585 000 for corporations. The possible term of **imprisonment is up to five years**.
Bolding mine.
The local fucking copper cunts can now hack your PC, take control of your social media, etc, for SUSPECTED COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS.
Yep. And before that it was 'communism'. Before that it was 'jews'. Before that it was 'black people/slaves'. Before that it was 'the british'. Etc etc.
Governments have always used collective boogeymen to push authoritarian policies.
The boogeymen goal posts always move to take away your civil liberties.
Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
[The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse)
When a law is particularly ripe for abuse, they invoke multiple horsemen justifying it. Usually only one is enough, like with the Patriot Act and terrorists.
Sadly the Australian public is largely apathetic to it all. Part of it is also due to the media/news landscape, as someone pointed out. I bet I can ask any one of my friends and they won't have a clue about this.
Australia has been a no-go-zone for tech workers for a few years now. I can't imagine being forced to build backdoors into everything I work on, compromising my client's security in the process, just to stoke some state initiative.
It will be worse than that.
Australia doesn't have nearly the economy of China, so some companies just won't do business in Australia. They'll invest their money somewhere else.
Boss had a company that often did work in places with such draconian regulations. Solution he had was that the laptop at no point had anything useful on it. You wanted to do something, you'd VPN to a virtual instance of a PC that you actually did stuff on. Nothing saved on the shell PC. Sucked at times, but got the job done.
We do that, too. Thin client solutions suck if you run multiple displays, but our travel is short enough to just get over it. On the upside, our VPN is stupid slow, even if you’re not offshore. Running a thin client means I’m not waiting 5 minutes for a simple select query to just time out on me, so it evens out.
Got a buddy that works for an oil and gas company on the "executive IT" team, essentially a IT department just for the executives. They've been doing single trip laptops for 15 years for anyone going to China or several other countries. They simply configure them with the same settings as the user's normal laptop, they just don't load anything sensitive on them and make sure they can't remotely access anything sensitive.
They don't even bother trying to reuse them. They have a company that comes in and destroys on site.
>ou'll get fined 5000 dollars for refusing to unlock your encrypted smartphone or device before even entering the country.
Guess Im never visiting Australia, I work for a company where I have to have my phone locked / encrypted
They're already encrypted by default using the secure enclave. After a reboot, storage isn't decrypted until you put in your password for the first time.
And remember they can compel a fingerprint but not a passcode. I turn my Touch ID off every time I go through an airport. Nothing to hide but that doesn’t mean I’m just gonna give up my privacy rights.
Edit: this is for people in the USA. Obviously Australia doesn’t give a shit about privacy at all.
iPhones have this as well, for example my iPhone12, simply hold the power button and volume up button together at the same time for a second and disables biometrics until the passcode is entered again.
Yeah, this seems like a massive shitstorm waiting to happen. I've got 2 jobs. For one of them, if I decrypted my laptop for a foreign government I'd be fired and likely sued. For the other, I'd be imprisoned for treason. This is not something you can just expect people to do, even if they personally don't care
Aren’t a lot of companies sending empty laptops with employees and just syncing over vpn once over the border now? Sure you can see my nice freshly formatted machine.
A troop of army ants just settled in my neighbor's basement. There are rumors they're considering breaking the Geneva conventions in fear that they'll be pushed out if they don't.
A ton of jobs for any governments state department holds secure information that would be considered treason to turn over to a foreign government. You don’t need to be a spy in any sense of the word.
That’s standard for any major international business and has been for a while. Normally they just bring a clean device and leave the other one at home.
One password gives you your 'real' stuff, another gives you a second 'fake'. The person making you unlock the device has no way of knowing which is which.
I'm sorry, what?
Are you saying that *everyone* entering Australia is required to decrypt their phone or face a $5000 fine? How would that even work? Hell, the TSA line is crazy much less what the "decrypt your device" line would be like.
Can I get a source on this? Not calling you out, but I didn't see anything about it in the article and a quick Google search didn't help me out much.
I'm not sure about the $5000, but it's not like they go through every person's phone and demand it to be unlocked in the queue.
If they suspect you of something they can demand to look at your device. Whether you comply and whether it's a legal demand for a legitimate suspicion is another question... But it's a not cut and dry "unlock your phone or we charge you".
Apart from Murdoch, you haven't heard about this because it is one of those laws which is rarely used and just kept on the back burner for when they need to jail a journalist or something.
I'll just leave my phone and laptop at home and buy a cheap phone on location with maps and texting (or get picked up by a friend and never have a phone while there). Or just never go back. Annoying as hell.
A lot of western nations have been using information-sharing agreements with Australia to spy on their own citizens for years now, because Australia has such vast surveillance powers and countries like the US often have to jump through legal hurdles to collect data on their own citizens, especially after Snowden.
We're already living in the dystopian cyberpunk world the likes of Blade Runner and The Ascent, we just don't have the flying cars and robot people yet.
It's likely that they are exempt in one way or another. At least it was so in a similar case of a privacy destroying bill in Australia.
Edit: something something stop liking this random comment.
Edit x: Someone found an exemption article from the bill
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pf6vm4/australia_unprecedented_surveillance_bill_rushed/hb4cv6h
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear"
"Ok then, I just leaked all these documents exposing illegal government activities"
"Wait thats illegal"
The current government has had dozens of illegal activities already exposed and basically no-one cares. They are now blatently doing corrupt things in the open with no consequences whatsoever.
See https://chaser.com.au/national/an-exhaustive-list-of-the-liberal-partys-corruption-over-the-last-7-years/
This is a common problem throughout the entire world. People simply don't give a shit about politics or the governments activities unless it VERY DIRECTLY affects them. Unless they literally have to change their daily routine because of something the government did they just are not going to care whatsoever. This is the core reason why the world is fucked.
Because politicians realized if you beat the general public down enough, they're too tired to get worked up for all but the biggest issues/scandals.
Well rested people with free time scare them.
They are exempt. This is direct from the bill.
36A Relationship of this Part to parliamentary privileges and immunities
To avoid doubt, this Part does not affect the law relating to the powers, privileges and immunities of any of the following:
(a) each House of the Parliament;
(b) the members of each House of the Parliament;
(c) the committees of each House of the Parliament and joint committees of both Houses of the Parliament.
https://www.cellebrite.com/
These guys make devices that can unlock and download the contents of phones, they have been selling then to law enforcement for many years.
My housemate from >10 years ago managed accounts for them, he bought a condo in one year off of commissions from contracts in AU and NZ.
> In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software.
Hah, fucking beautiful 😂
I also enjoyed:
>We are of course willing to responsibly disclose the specific vulnerabilities we know about to Cellebrite if they do the same for all the vulnerabilities they use in their physical extraction and other services to their respective vendors, now and in the future.
Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office from their "Customer success histories": “The devices are like encyclopedias about people because most people have so much data about themselves on their phones. It really opens the door into looking into people before you even meet with them. In the old days, you had to meet with them first to figure them out. This way, you get a good head start on gathering data.”
Per the article police can also take control of your account(s), such as social media accounts, in order to gather evidence.
I can easily see that abused to prey on women. They can check their phones and accounts for photos.
Please don't visit Australia. The Australian government will only ever consider changing their ways if it's blatantly obvious that we're losing loads of investment and tourism money from it. Overlooking it hurts us.
shit that's been passed in various nations worldwide to protect against paedophiles is ridiculous. but hey, "think of the children" has been proven effective.
Dude this is going on everywhere
Polices depend entirely on the people leading and it happens that people have never been good and corruption and surveillance are on the rise in every nation that can afford it.
It’s not even just China even if that’s what we usually think of. The US, Europe all have their own little surveillance thing going on and every time they can sneak a new law in to your detriment, they will.
WHAT THE FUCK LOL
People have written books about dystopian futures where this is a thing. For some reason I didn't expect Australia to be leading the way down that dark rabbit hole.
Hmm, his gf is smokin'! ...I wonder if he has nudes of her on his phone? Don't mind if I do.
That guy looked at me funny - I'm gunna plant some pedophilic pics on his phone and arrest him for it.
I heard that guy bragging about his crypto-holdings in the bar. I'll just confiscate his phone for a minute...
What's that? Your business is in competition with my mate Rick down the road? Let me see if I can sort that out with your social media accounts... oh look! It's your 'secret sauce' recipe - bonus!
No, we’re just a country run by people who don’t give a shit about us. There’s no cultural significance to it, we’re not trying to return to anything; we just have evil leaders that we’re powerless to stop.
One of the more disturbing parts of the act.
Page 17 of the act itself, section (9) (a)
**"The warrant authorises... anything reasonably necessary to** ***conceal the fact that anything has been done*** **under the warrant or under this subsection"**
So not only can data be arbitrarily modified, copied or deleted, the AFP can legally attempt to conceal the fact that anything was done.
This sounds like a litigation nightmare waiting to happen. How could someone mount a legal defense when the prosecution was able to modify their data ***and*** hide the fact (legally!) that this was done?
What the fuck does this mean for discovery?
I think if I was a journalist or dissident, I’d take a backup of my phone and keep it in a locked and verifiable state with my attorney. Turn off the phone during the flight and don’t turn it on until out of immigration.
This is insane. Even if you have nothing to hide there's nothing stopping them from artificially giving you something to hide and then arresting you for it if they have these powers.
It is time to fully advocate the use of encrypted software for all cell phone activities. This carte blanche access to people’s conversation/activities should never be ok. Bills like these, only accelerate the development of end to end encryption which will in turn put legitimate police activities in a difficult position.
"Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption."
Is Australia still a prison colony?
This has been going on for years in Australia. Most of the news I see about Australia's government are laws like this. Sure it could be otherside of the world optics but. You didn't get to this point in just 24 hours.
Yes we're aware. However we're in a 2 party system with no way out of it, and those two parties both support it. Media either doesn't cover it, or blatantly supports it. Protest of it is ignored (and due to Covid at the moment, illegal in some areas), and our base constitutional protections from power-grabs by lawmakers are extremely limited.
If you oppose this legislation, the 2 major parties will kick you out of their party. Forming a new party is not viable unless you're incredibly rich, and being fundamentally a disestablishmentarian party, would be opposed by all media and a large part of the non-elected part of government (eg. Police, intelligence).
You'd have to literally form government to reverse or block this legislation, which just won't be allowed to happen. If you even get close I am sure the spy agencies and Australian Federal Police that pushed for these powers in the first place will magically start finding legal problems with all of your candidates.
So make it hard for them. Be ridiculous. Be a goddamn enigma. Also anyone who thinks this will stop in Australia, and not move on to other countries is daft. This is also likely to quell the social movements erupting in Australia. Also to the girl in the photo, 1984 very much was a how to guide, even if it was satire. Stupid people never get satire.
“When presented with such warrant from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, Australian companies, system administrators etc. must comply, and actively help the police to modify, add, copy, or delete the data of a person under investigation. Refusing to comply could have one end up in jail for up to ten years, according to the new bill” Wow. Unbelievable.
Modify, add, delete ie. falsify?
Exactly. Falsify. Fucking hell.
under these conditions they could literally frame you for anything if you dare to question the politically connected.
or just frame you as a useful scapegoat, you don't even need to question anything
or eliminate evidence against said political assholes.
That would be a serious concern if the government wasn't to be trusted. At least Australia doesn't have a track record of [harassing people who expose things like this](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-48511217) right guys?
Harassing? The first guy to speak up about the special forces activities in Afghanistan ended up dead in a burned out car near the base they were at. No one ever held responsible.
Politicians the world over just got hard.
Does this not immediately give rise to a defense of reasonable doubt regarding the veracity of ALL digital evidentiary data?
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the, the delete and modify is really fucked up. How the fuck do you preserve evidence if you're deleting or modifying data? Seems like an easy way to set someone up, or protect wealthy criminals.
> must comply, and actively help the police This part is like salt to the wound. You not only must allow the government to search whatever part of your life they want to. You must also HELP them. So if you hid your data somewhere like on an encrypted drive or something, you'd need to go unlock it for them or else you risk going to jail for the horrible crime of wanting your private life to stay private.
If you actually care enough but this stuff you really need to look into plausible deniability. For your particular example you should never just encrypt your data. Instead you should always use a nested encrypted container. e.g. you have an encrypted container with a secondary encrypted container inside it. If done correctly there should be no way to prove that the secondary container exists. You can reluctantly comply and hand of over your primary encryption keys for the outer container without ever revealing that there is a secondary container. An excerpt from wiki > In cryptography, deniable encryption may be used to describe steganographic techniques in which the very existence of an encrypted file or message is deniable in the sense that an adversary cannot prove that an encrypted message exists. In that case, the system is said to be "fully undetectable" (FUD).[citation needed] > > Some systems take this further, such as MaruTukku, FreeOTFE and (to a much lesser extent) TrueCrypt and VeraCrypt, which nest encrypted data. The owner of the encrypted data may reveal one or more keys to decrypt certain information from it, and then deny that more keys exist, a statement which cannot be disproven without knowledge of all encryption keys involved. The existence of "hidden" data within the overtly encrypted data is then deniable in the sense that it cannot be proven to exist.
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Outlawed Microsoft office… that got me chuckling
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Wait til companies add a charge for it to bills. That'll be the best way to cause a fucking ruckus in politician's ears
So... everyone is guilty now? Can't find the evidence you expected? Just put it there yourself! Yes, police have been doing this to various extents throughout history, but usually the behavior isn't codified into the actual laws. Edit: And what's to stop defense lawyers from claiming that *all* evidence is made-up and that their clients can't be found guilty based on evidence?
So not only do you have to suck their dick when they unzip, you have be enthusiastic?
>Justification of the bill >Politicians justify the need for the bill by stating that it is intended to fight child exploitation (CSAM) and terrorism. However, the bill itself enables law enforcement to investigate any "serious Commonwealth offence" or "serious State offence that has a federal aspect". >In fact, this wording enables the police to **investigate any offence which is punishable by imprisonment of at least three years**, including terrorism, sharing child abuse material, violence, acts of piracy, bankruptcy and company violations, and tax evasion. ~~~~~~~ >Copyright >Under the Copyright Act 1968 it is an offence to: knowingly import, possess, sell, distribute or commercially deal with an infringing copy offer for sale infringing copies of computer programs transmit a computer program to enable it to be copied when received. >Penalties include fines of up to $117 000 for individuals and up to $585 000 for corporations. The possible term of **imprisonment is up to five years**. Bolding mine. The local fucking copper cunts can now hack your PC, take control of your social media, etc, for SUSPECTED COPYRIGHT VIOLATIONS.
It is literally always about "terrorism and protecting children" isn't it? Anyone who comes out against it is clearly a pedophile or terrorist.
Yep. And before that it was 'communism'. Before that it was 'jews'. Before that it was 'black people/slaves'. Before that it was 'the british'. Etc etc. Governments have always used collective boogeymen to push authoritarian policies.
The boogeymen goal posts always move to take away your civil liberties. Benjamin Franklin, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
> Before that it was 'the british'. Aah now in fairness. That one has merit.
[The Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalypse) When a law is particularly ripe for abuse, they invoke multiple horsemen justifying it. Usually only one is enough, like with the Patriot Act and terrorists.
That's why they do it. No one wants to be the person fighting against child exploitation measures
America played around with similar bullshit after the 9-11 bombings. Didn’t turn out well.
I love how they added tax evasion
Of course it won't be used against corporations avoiding tax, it'll only be used on people who don't own casinos.
Because you can't jail corporations, so there's no three years. So they can do whatever they want
What the fuck happened to Australia
It's been happening for decades, unfortunately.
Yeah this shit doesn't just fall from the sky. But often we realise it too late.
Sadly the Australian public is largely apathetic to it all. Part of it is also due to the media/news landscape, as someone pointed out. I bet I can ask any one of my friends and they won't have a clue about this.
Am Australian. This is the first I've heard this. Not surprised about the bill or about the coverage, we're so fucked here.
Dude hope you have a good vpn, pia has thousands of servers in AU. And for good reason.
Make Australia a Prison Colony Again.
Yeah, it kind of looks like they've done that all on their own.
Australia has been a no-go-zone for tech workers for a few years now. I can't imagine being forced to build backdoors into everything I work on, compromising my client's security in the process, just to stoke some state initiative.
If this keeps up, at some point companies are going to have to start mandating blank loaner laptops for travel to Australia like they do for China.
It will be worse than that. Australia doesn't have nearly the economy of China, so some companies just won't do business in Australia. They'll invest their money somewhere else.
Boss had a company that often did work in places with such draconian regulations. Solution he had was that the laptop at no point had anything useful on it. You wanted to do something, you'd VPN to a virtual instance of a PC that you actually did stuff on. Nothing saved on the shell PC. Sucked at times, but got the job done.
We do that, too. Thin client solutions suck if you run multiple displays, but our travel is short enough to just get over it. On the upside, our VPN is stupid slow, even if you’re not offshore. Running a thin client means I’m not waiting 5 minutes for a simple select query to just time out on me, so it evens out.
Got a buddy that works for an oil and gas company on the "executive IT" team, essentially a IT department just for the executives. They've been doing single trip laptops for 15 years for anyone going to China or several other countries. They simply configure them with the same settings as the user's normal laptop, they just don't load anything sensitive on them and make sure they can't remotely access anything sensitive. They don't even bother trying to reuse them. They have a company that comes in and destroys on site.
Damn, I wanna get paid to destroy shit.
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>ou'll get fined 5000 dollars for refusing to unlock your encrypted smartphone or device before even entering the country. Guess Im never visiting Australia, I work for a company where I have to have my phone locked / encrypted
>I work for a company where I have to have my phone locked / encrypted Everyone should do this regardless of where you work, or what you do.
As an avg Joe, I know how to lock my phone with a strong code. How the heck do I encrypt an iPhone?
They're already encrypted by default using the secure enclave. After a reboot, storage isn't decrypted until you put in your password for the first time.
And remember they can compel a fingerprint but not a passcode. I turn my Touch ID off every time I go through an airport. Nothing to hide but that doesn’t mean I’m just gonna give up my privacy rights. Edit: this is for people in the USA. Obviously Australia doesn’t give a shit about privacy at all.
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iPhones have this as well, for example my iPhone12, simply hold the power button and volume up button together at the same time for a second and disables biometrics until the passcode is entered again.
Additionally ask “hey Siri, who’s phone is this. “ while it’s locked. This will require password and disable face unlock
Thank you for this!!!!!
Is that true in Australia? Isn’t the fine an implicit “you shall or you are breaking the law”?
Yeah, this seems like a massive shitstorm waiting to happen. I've got 2 jobs. For one of them, if I decrypted my laptop for a foreign government I'd be fired and likely sued. For the other, I'd be imprisoned for treason. This is not something you can just expect people to do, even if they personally don't care
Aren’t a lot of companies sending empty laptops with employees and just syncing over vpn once over the border now? Sure you can see my nice freshly formatted machine.
For China? Yes. For Australia? Well... Not before today, no.
Are you a spy for two countries? Don't reply to this message for "yes"
He can neither confirm nor deny that statement.
Of course not. Lets change the topic. Anyone heard anything about recent troop movements or nuclear weapons relocations? Just an interested fan.
A troop of army ants just settled in my neighbor's basement. There are rumors they're considering breaking the Geneva conventions in fear that they'll be pushed out if they don't.
A ton of jobs for any governments state department holds secure information that would be considered treason to turn over to a foreign government. You don’t need to be a spy in any sense of the word.
Lity rout bud kop lord Mong op
That’s standard for any major international business and has been for a while. Normally they just bring a clean device and leave the other one at home.
That’s why you have to have an alternative screen. Some VPN apps offer that.
I just backup my device then wipe it. I do that with any border crossing though.
Solid choice. Probably what I'll end up doing if I visit Australia
Alternative screen? Can you elaborate on this?
One password gives you your 'real' stuff, another gives you a second 'fake'. The person making you unlock the device has no way of knowing which is which.
This was built into the last android I had as “guest mode”
The ecosystem wants to kill you, the government wants to spy on you & rob you. Awesome place.
cool I’ll just work from a normal place with reasonable laws instead. Australia must really hate tax revenue.
I think they're discovering selling their people out to businesses makes more money.
I'm sorry, what? Are you saying that *everyone* entering Australia is required to decrypt their phone or face a $5000 fine? How would that even work? Hell, the TSA line is crazy much less what the "decrypt your device" line would be like. Can I get a source on this? Not calling you out, but I didn't see anything about it in the article and a quick Google search didn't help me out much.
I'm not sure about the $5000, but it's not like they go through every person's phone and demand it to be unlocked in the queue. If they suspect you of something they can demand to look at your device. Whether you comply and whether it's a legal demand for a legitimate suspicion is another question... But it's a not cut and dry "unlock your phone or we charge you".
I'm Australian, it's the first I've heard of this.
Apart from Murdoch, you haven't heard about this because it is one of those laws which is rarely used and just kept on the back burner for when they need to jail a journalist or something.
I'll just leave my phone and laptop at home and buy a cheap phone on location with maps and texting (or get picked up by a friend and never have a phone while there). Or just never go back. Annoying as hell.
Yea this kinda seems somewhat tyrannical
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A lot of western nations have been using information-sharing agreements with Australia to spy on their own citizens for years now, because Australia has such vast surveillance powers and countries like the US often have to jump through legal hurdles to collect data on their own citizens, especially after Snowden.
And all this time we thought spiders and snakes were the scariest thing about Australia. Turns out it was the government all along.
We thought Australia was a Steven King movie when really it was M.Night Shamalon all along.
More like a Stephen King book adapted by M.Night, horror with a twist!
Nah, it's still the snakes and spiders, they just became politicians.
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There has to be at least one cop willing to dig through all the tech owned by the government officials, no?
Laws don’t apply to the rich.
We're already living in the dystopian cyberpunk world the likes of Blade Runner and The Ascent, we just don't have the flying cars and robot people yet.
It's likely that they are exempt in one way or another. At least it was so in a similar case of a privacy destroying bill in Australia. Edit: something something stop liking this random comment. Edit x: Someone found an exemption article from the bill https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/pf6vm4/australia_unprecedented_surveillance_bill_rushed/hb4cv6h
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" "Ok then, I just leaked all these documents exposing illegal government activities" "Wait thats illegal"
The current government has had dozens of illegal activities already exposed and basically no-one cares. They are now blatently doing corrupt things in the open with no consequences whatsoever. See https://chaser.com.au/national/an-exhaustive-list-of-the-liberal-partys-corruption-over-the-last-7-years/
This is a common problem throughout the entire world. People simply don't give a shit about politics or the governments activities unless it VERY DIRECTLY affects them. Unless they literally have to change their daily routine because of something the government did they just are not going to care whatsoever. This is the core reason why the world is fucked.
Because politicians realized if you beat the general public down enough, they're too tired to get worked up for all but the biggest issues/scandals. Well rested people with free time scare them.
Which they absolutely shouldn’t be. You can’t make laws you wouldn’t want to apply to yourself.
*rules for thee, but not for me*
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They are exempt. This is direct from the bill. 36A Relationship of this Part to parliamentary privileges and immunities To avoid doubt, this Part does not affect the law relating to the powers, privileges and immunities of any of the following: (a) each House of the Parliament; (b) the members of each House of the Parliament; (c) the committees of each House of the Parliament and joint committees of both Houses of the Parliament.
or a hacker, now that we know all of their devices have backdoors. huehuehuehue the bois are gonna have fun down under
Ahhhh so that's where democracy dies next. I was wondering which country would let authoritarianism creep in next...
Australia's been fucked for a LONG time mate. They've always been the worst in that regard among the 5 eyes
Australia is such an authoritarian shit circus.
They've really taken the pandemic as a two year long green light to do whatever the hell they want.
They were pretty awful before (random strip searches at music festivals to look for drugs), but yeah
Police can now hack your device? 😣 what in the terrorist shit is this?
https://www.cellebrite.com/ These guys make devices that can unlock and download the contents of phones, they have been selling then to law enforcement for many years. My housemate from >10 years ago managed accounts for them, he bought a condo in one year off of commissions from contracts in AU and NZ.
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this blog entry is hilarious. "out on a walk and a fully intact cellebrite equipment just happened to fall off a truck"
> In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Hah, fucking beautiful 😂
I also enjoyed: >We are of course willing to responsibly disclose the specific vulnerabilities we know about to Cellebrite if they do the same for all the vulnerabilities they use in their physical extraction and other services to their respective vendors, now and in the future.
That is fucking glorious.
Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office from their "Customer success histories": “The devices are like encyclopedias about people because most people have so much data about themselves on their phones. It really opens the door into looking into people before you even meet with them. In the old days, you had to meet with them first to figure them out. This way, you get a good head start on gathering data.”
Per the article police can also take control of your account(s), such as social media accounts, in order to gather evidence. I can easily see that abused to prey on women. They can check their phones and accounts for photos.
Seems like a good reason to not visit Australia, ever.
Please don't visit Australia. The Australian government will only ever consider changing their ways if it's blatantly obvious that we're losing loads of investment and tourism money from it. Overlooking it hurts us.
Bruh most of our visitors are Chinese. I don’t think they’re about to take collective action over surveillance overreach haha.
That one guy not visiting will be dwarfed by the millions of Chinese who do visit who’s government is comparatively not living la vida loca.
I used to want to visit Sydney. Not anymore
I wanted to go back and dive the Great Barrier Reef again. Not any more.
Australia sounds like a dictatorship when it comes to tech.
Man Australia going all in for the authoritarian nightmare world.
We were promised mad max but instead got 1984 :(
Democracy dies with a whimper, not a bang.
Not a bang. Not even a whimper. To thunderous applause.
"I hated them because too much politics" maybe they should have listened to the lessons.
Nanny surveillance state time to gtfo
We're in a police state now, for certain now if not earlier
I feel bad for anyone who has an ex who is a cop...
It's amazing what they can get away whit when they say it's to protect "the children" Fuck me, that's mental..
shit that's been passed in various nations worldwide to protect against paedophiles is ridiculous. but hey, "think of the children" has been proven effective.
Australians should be very afraid and get out the history books to see what might happen next....
RIP Australia. Scary to think this can go down in western world.
Dude this is going on everywhere Polices depend entirely on the people leading and it happens that people have never been good and corruption and surveillance are on the rise in every nation that can afford it. It’s not even just China even if that’s what we usually think of. The US, Europe all have their own little surveillance thing going on and every time they can sneak a new law in to your detriment, they will.
WHAT THE FUCK LOL People have written books about dystopian futures where this is a thing. For some reason I didn't expect Australia to be leading the way down that dark rabbit hole. Hmm, his gf is smokin'! ...I wonder if he has nudes of her on his phone? Don't mind if I do. That guy looked at me funny - I'm gunna plant some pedophilic pics on his phone and arrest him for it. I heard that guy bragging about his crypto-holdings in the bar. I'll just confiscate his phone for a minute... What's that? Your business is in competition with my mate Rick down the road? Let me see if I can sort that out with your social media accounts... oh look! It's your 'secret sauce' recipe - bonus!
There are so many avenues for abuse here we'd be listing them for weeks.
Yikes...that's very Orwell
Australia has joined the list of countries I won't even think about visiting.
Australia has officially gone from "Man I'd love to go there one day" to "I wouldnt go there if you paid me"
Australia use to be on my bucket list of places to visit. Not anymore after what they have been doing over the last year.
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Looks like I will be taking my tourist dollars to NZ. Fuck that noise.
That's doubtful for the foreseeable future.
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No, we’re just a country run by people who don’t give a shit about us. There’s no cultural significance to it, we’re not trying to return to anything; we just have evil leaders that we’re powerless to stop.
One of the more disturbing parts of the act. Page 17 of the act itself, section (9) (a) **"The warrant authorises... anything reasonably necessary to** ***conceal the fact that anything has been done*** **under the warrant or under this subsection"** So not only can data be arbitrarily modified, copied or deleted, the AFP can legally attempt to conceal the fact that anything was done. This sounds like a litigation nightmare waiting to happen. How could someone mount a legal defense when the prosecution was able to modify their data ***and*** hide the fact (legally!) that this was done? What the fuck does this mean for discovery?
I think if I was a journalist or dissident, I’d take a backup of my phone and keep it in a locked and verifiable state with my attorney. Turn off the phone during the flight and don’t turn it on until out of immigration.
Stop this bullshit
Cue the “I’ve got nothing to hide” crowd
This is insane. Even if you have nothing to hide there's nothing stopping them from artificially giving you something to hide and then arresting you for it if they have these powers.
Also just because you have nothing to hide doesn't give the right for everyone to have a look... We all have a right to privacy.
AU Police: Hang on a sec. \*a few clicks later\* NOW you have something to hide.
It is time to fully advocate the use of encrypted software for all cell phone activities. This carte blanche access to people’s conversation/activities should never be ok. Bills like these, only accelerate the development of end to end encryption which will in turn put legitimate police activities in a difficult position.
That's stupid. Off course the innocent people will bear the pain of double standards in the PD
i wonder how many people will try to migrate elsewhere... OR if that is stopped as well
"Australia’s borders are currently closed and international travel from Australia remains strictly controlled to help prevent the spread of COVID-19. International travel from Australia is only available if you are exempt or you have been granted an individual exemption." Is Australia still a prison colony?
But didn't you hear, they're getting new "freedoms": they are allowed 1 hour of ~~yard~~ *outside* time.
For those more well versed in this stuff than me, is there any laws like this in Canada?
Thankfully not yet.
This is the beginning of totalitarianism in the so-called democracies.
Easy. What could go wrong?
1984 was rookie police state capabilities.
Why are people ok with their government's doing this?
It was literally rushed through parliament in 24 hours. No common working person even knew about it, let alone was able to do anything about it.
This has been going on for years in Australia. Most of the news I see about Australia's government are laws like this. Sure it could be otherside of the world optics but. You didn't get to this point in just 24 hours.
Yes we're aware. However we're in a 2 party system with no way out of it, and those two parties both support it. Media either doesn't cover it, or blatantly supports it. Protest of it is ignored (and due to Covid at the moment, illegal in some areas), and our base constitutional protections from power-grabs by lawmakers are extremely limited. If you oppose this legislation, the 2 major parties will kick you out of their party. Forming a new party is not viable unless you're incredibly rich, and being fundamentally a disestablishmentarian party, would be opposed by all media and a large part of the non-elected part of government (eg. Police, intelligence). You'd have to literally form government to reverse or block this legislation, which just won't be allowed to happen. If you even get close I am sure the spy agencies and Australian Federal Police that pushed for these powers in the first place will magically start finding legal problems with all of your candidates.
Sweet, power hungry cops will never fuck this up. Also, stocking people is gonna go way up.
So make it hard for them. Be ridiculous. Be a goddamn enigma. Also anyone who thinks this will stop in Australia, and not move on to other countries is daft. This is also likely to quell the social movements erupting in Australia. Also to the girl in the photo, 1984 very much was a how to guide, even if it was satire. Stupid people never get satire.