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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: 4, Informative) by zeigerpuppy on Saturday September 05 2015, @12:48AM
The people don't "choose" a government in modern democracies.
As you rightly mention, the populace obliges people like Rupert.
Why? Well, in Australia, we have the most controlled media in the first world;
The people would like to vote in their interest but the real issues are never aired on the media (only convenient smoke screens that the two parties can take faux positions on).
Therefore, the government doesn't care what the people think, they care what the media can tell them. The media shares interests with big business and powerful individuals, hence we end up with absurdities like the continuation of big coal (coal power companies have received more "green" grants in Australia than renewable energy companies).
We also had one of our prime ministers replaced by pressure over the mining tax. It's not even covert any more, the mining companies openly said that had a $400M fighting fund to sink the government in negative advertising. Goodbye Kevin Rudd, hello Julia Gillard (and her first announcement the next morning was: "we're reconsidering the mining tax").
It's time that the populace saw the farce for what it is,
There have been some moves to reclaim representation (Senators online) but the system at the moment is far from functional.
Democracy is dead, long live Democracy!
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday September 05 2015, @11:01AM
It sounds like this is something that needs to happen on a global scale, then, because you could have written that about America and it would have been equally true.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by zeigerpuppy on Tuesday September 08 2015, @12:34PM
right on, it's a bit of a con really,
notice how they try out the really weird and nasty laws in the UK, AUS or US first and then ship them to the other counties