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posted by martyb on Friday September 04 2015, @04:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the they-should-look-into-getting-some-artificial-intelligence dept.

One of the individuals who first brought the Internet to Australia, Geoff Huston, writes in his blog:

I recall from some years back, when we were debating in Australia some national Internet censorship proposal de jour, that if the Internet represented a new Global Village then Australia was trying very hard to position itself as the Global Village Idiot. And the current situation with Australia's new Data Retention laws may well support a case for reviving that sentiment. Between the various government agencies who pressed for this legislation, the lawyers who drafted the legislation, the politicians who advocated its adoption and the bureaucrats who are overseeing its implementation, then as far as I can tell none of them get it. They just don't understand the Internet and how it works, and they are acting on a somewhat misguided assumption that the Internet is nothing more than the telephone network for computers. And nothing could be further from the truth.

The intended aim of this legislation was to assist various law enforcement agencies to undertake forensic analysis of network transactions. As the government claims: "telecommunications companies are retaining less data and keeping it for a shorter time. This is degrading the investigative capabilities of law enforcement and security agencies and, in some cases, has prevented serious criminals from being brought to justice." ( https://www.ag.gov.au/dataretention ). So what the agencies wanted was a regulation to compel ISPs to hold a record of their address assignment details so that the question "who was using this IP address at this time" had a definitive answer based on the retention of so-called meta-data records of who had what IP address when.

[Also Covered By]: Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Friday September 04 2015, @07:02AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Friday September 04 2015, @07:02AM (#232153) Journal

    I have some acquaintance with actual Austrailians, and find them to be about average as humans go, maybe a bit more hospitable. But my perception is distorted by Monty Python. That, and Crocodile Dundee. And Steve Irwin, Crocodile something. But more to the point are Werner Herzog's movie "Where the Green Ants Dream", and the one with Peter Weller, "The Last Wave", and of course, "Pricilla, the Queen of the Desert". All those, and "Rabbitproof Fence." So we have a bunch of Brits, administerating over a bunch of Wollygongs and Criminals from the Old Country: what could possibly go wrong? I find that the Idiots in British Villages usually are world class, for some reason.

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  • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @08:08AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @08:08AM (#232168)

    I find that the Idiots in British Villages usually are world class, for some reason.

    In addition, we find that those Poms whinge a lot.