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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
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday September 04 2015, @01:53PM
Will they tire? I doubt it. Law enforcers always want more surveillance. Too often they see their jobs as catching the "bad" guys no matter what. If they could, they would put cameras on every street corner and door, and feed the video to facial recognition algorithms. We'd all have to walk around with Guy Fawkes masks, until the next advance renders that insufficient. They'd do the same with logs, have algorithms do the searching. Some laws should not be enforced. I particularly resent the use of our police and courts, paid for by us, to enforce laws that are actually thinly disguised agendas of monopolistic businesses, things like having the border guards seizing prescription drugs from seniors and outlawing underserved communities from creating their own ISPs.
I think the better play is to nip this in the bud, make it clear that such logging constitutes Australia's equivalent to an unreasonable search. Kill such proposals in the legislative sessions, and any that make it past that can be shot down in the courts.
(Score: 2) by Anal Pumpernickel on Friday September 04 2015, @03:46PM
If they could, they would put cameras on every street corner and door, and feed the video to facial recognition algorithms.
Facial recognition algorithms are being developed right now. Whenever someone complains about surveillance in public places, people reply that you have no expectation of privacy in public places; this is despite the fact that mass surveillance is different from merely being seen by another human (with imperfect memory, no video feed being sent to a central organization, hiring humans to conduct surveillance would be prohibitively expensive, and normal humans are not nearly omnipresent), so it would be perfectly legitimate to have privacy from mass surveillance. Your fears are already coming to pass, and the situation will continue to get worse if it isn't stopped.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Friday September 04 2015, @07:20PM
Facial recognition algorithms are being developed right now.
That work has already been done. Your drivers license photo is stored with the pre-calculated reco numbers.
The point about no expectation of privacy is a good one.
We have a reasonable expectation of privacy as we go about our daily business in public, even if we might
fall into the sight line of John Q Public, John is unlikely to know who we are, where we live, where we work, and
have instant access to our banking records.
It is reasonable to be seen in public, by friends, foes, and even (occasionally) police officers. What is unreasonable
is for any of those people to have access to a full dossier, or to report that information to police, or to enter
that information into a computer for future use.
I suspect, in time, the GPS Tracking ruling [networkworld.com] will be expanded to require warrants for other means of tracking, via facial recognition, license plate readers, etc/ (Or at least it should).
Requiring a warrant to track a specific face, or license plate, would require the hardware/software to instantly discard any "non-hits" with no matching warrants. That's just about what every cop on the street does when they are looking for the Red Chevy Impala with Florida plates. Blue cars are pretty much ignored, unless they are doing something egregious. The Face Reco systems should do the same.
The argument is about the word "reasonable". Creating police databases of every person walking by a camera is not reasonable.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.