I am really happy the Anglo-Saxon World is shooting itself in the foot with technology.
I worked for a tech company in the UK who had german clients that produced economical policies that were used by Merkel's Cabinet.
It was the same time that the snowden scandals were all over the news and the client flat out told us no amazon, microsoft or american cloud computing platform.
It was a pain to find good European cloud providers but as a young 20 year old I was cynically happy - It meant that just like in the cold war - physicist never ran of jobs In my lifetime there wont be a shortage of jobs for programmers. Essentially the world had twice as many physicist ( Soviet and America ).
Snowden has been the best thing to happen to the tech world.
Finally I can stop making shitty apps to connect to amazon and make my own amazon !
My wish is not that the Snowden scandals cause European companies to make shallow clones of American cloud platforms but that libre / free software software and open hardware emerge. I feel this is the path to real privacy and freedom.
We need to figure out a way of making a more united front in this war. Its crazy how hard it is to reach people regarding the danger of all this surveillance, I feel completely drowned out.
There were three really shocking things about this. Firstly, how little any of the politicians who voted for it understood what it was. Virtually none of them could even define what "meta data" meant, yet were casting judgement on the privacy implications of retaining it.
Secondly, how poorly drafted the actual legislation ended up being. Since nobody involved understood it, the law itself is a series of self contradictory statements that make very little sense. At some point they decided to exclude "web browsing history" but nobody obviously knew how on earth to write that in, so it became its own section that overrode the other sections to say that "nothing else in this bill requires retention of anything that could be interpreted to be web browsing history" - despite the fact that the rest of the bill very explicitly details retention of web browsing history. As it stands, the law is unimplementable, and thus what is now happening is that ISPs are going through a process of getting "guidance" which is a euphemism for "since we can't legally operate any more given this law is unimplementable, just tell us what you want and we will do it".
Finally, the fact that there was a sudden and inexplicable spike in terrorism raids in the weeks when the bills were debated. There have been almost no raids since, and there were almost no raids before. Yet in those critical weeks, law enforcement just happened to decide that it was timely to execute a bunch of "raids", which have had no material outcome. In other words, law enforcement appears to be transparently corrupt and willing to abuse its powers for political ends. Which means we are very much well on the way to being a police state.
Politicians "not understanding" something is an age-old excuse. They don't even give a fuck about anything besides themselves, because they're psychopaths.
They're smart too, because otherwise they wouldn't have managed to climb up the hierarchy of political power to their current positions, what with all the other smart psychopaths jockeying for position along with them.
So if it's in a politician's personal interest to vote X on whatever, then he will do so. If it's not, then he won't. It's as simple as that.
Understanding has nothing to do with it. It's not like they couldn't get someone to help them understand, if they wanted to.
Also, the Australian government (along with any others that can) has been doing the things listed in the article already. They don't need permission from themselves.
As a voter in Australia I actually wrote and called my representative. The response I received was borderline insulting. At this point I have no choice but civil disobedience or to leave the country. Both of the main parties pushed this through and both are unlikely to ever repeal this law.
I'm angry. I feel betrayed by representative democracy. The system is absolutely insane.
As an Australian, I'm doing what I can to legally shift my tax burdens to other jurisdictions. I'm hiring more overseas and looking to shift the registration and tax obligations of the corporations I'm involved with to Switzerland.
Yep. OP here. I left the country 15 years ago but care deeply about its downward spiral in to US-style totalitarian anti-democratic corporate hegemony. New Zealand seems to be doing a lot better, though still on the same path.
The sad fact is, I feel more free here in China than the US/UK, and it seems to me that Australia's only a little behind those jurisdictions in its rapid descent.
It seems a bit hyperbolic to write something like this right when the Chinese economy has been in a tail spin, and the Chinese government has been censoring the press coverage of declining value of public companies (many of which have significant government ownership stakes).
>it seems telling that you conflate economy and freedoms.
What? I didn't conflate the two, and I don't know what that is telling of exactly. The freedom to report (i.e. press freedom) on the economy and the economy itself are 2 separate things, and the Chinese government was censoring the press.
Me: "I feel more free here in China than the US/UK" [doesn't include economy]
You: "It seems a bit hyperbolic to write something like this right when the Chinese economy has been in a tail spin, and the Chinese government has been censoring the press coverage of declining value of public companies (many of which have significant government ownership stakes)." [includes economy]
That's called conflating two issues.
While you are correct that China censors the press, the western press is also deeply controlled and manipulated for political purpose. For example, the UK has more concurrent gag orders in operation than anywhere else on earth. US and Australian media ownership is ridiculously centralized, worse if you include viewership.
> The response I received was borderline insulting
i know identifying your representitive might identify you too much, but if you could make that name public (which could potentially cost you personally, so i suggest you think hard before you do) and publish your letter and responses, it might make others who sees this and feel the same way you do to vote differently.
Phillip Ruddock. So probably the worst possible person to have as a representative on anything modern.
I burnt the letter response out of pure spite unfortunately. I doubt it would make any difference though. His seat is very safe and unlikely to change even if he retires.
I contacted my MP in the UK a while ago .The reply was "our party view is X, thats what we will be representing in parliment". I wrote back expaining that I didn't believe that was how representative democracy was suposed to work. Doubt it made any dfference.
The threat posed by non-confidence votes is often used to justify extremely well-disciplined legislative parties in Westminster systems. In order to ensure the government always has the confidence of the majority of the house, the political culture of Westminster nations often makes it highly unusual for a legislator to vote against their party. Critics argue this in turn undermines the freedom and importance of Members of Parliament (MPs) in day-to-day legislating, making the cabinet the only organ of government where individual legislators can aspire to influence the decisions of the government.
Yes it is. For the duration of the party or collation's control, said ruling majority has complete legislative and executive power, unless it screws up so much that it loses a vote of confidence.
If the system doesn't have a strong constitution, like the U.K. ... well, in US terms, imagine the current majority completely changing the way Senators are selected, and replacing the Supreme Court with a different institution.
Tony Blair's New Labour did the former with the House of Lords, don't remember who changed them from being the U.K.'s highest court. It is indeed an elected dictatorship, and something we in the US very explicitly rejected.
And for some inexplicable reason, in both the U.K. and Australia, the governments (this is generally any of them as far as I know) have all but completely disarmed the people, eliminating as much as they can that ultimate form of feedback; strange, that. (It's not true of Canada, and to a lessor extent New Zealand.)
At least your representatives even responded. Mine not only ignored a host of physical letters and emails but then refused even a ten minute meeting to explain their point of view on the issue. Whats the point of an elected official if they don't intend to deal with their electorate? Add to that the current government's behaviour on other social issues and its starting to look like they really miss the 1950s or the cold war when their security apparatus actually had a purpose.
Sadly, I guess Fastmail will now have to change their privacy policy: https://www.fastmail.com/about/privacy.html. They were pretty openly appealing to people worried about surveillance but that will be more difficult for them now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139442 is very worrying though and I'm sure that sooner or later the gaps in the law will be plugged since the intention is clearly to catch the likes of Fastmail. The direction that the law in Australia in general is taking is clearly towards more surveillance - Fastmail was top of my list of alternative mail providers, but this will definitely make me think twice even if they're exempt right now.
Unless Fastmail is really dumb, and they've not been dumb in the 6 1/2 years I've been using them, they've got contingency plans to move their business (as opposed to their servers, which can't realistically be in Australia with its very expensive connections to the rest of the world) to a better jurisdiction if/when Australia continues to have the 1st World's worst Internet regime.
Mines: Switzerland, Czech Republic, maybe some caribbean island or south american country such as paraguay/panama. If PiratePartyIS win the election, they I'll be adding Iceland to the list.
I'm suprised that you listed New Zealand considering all the political dirty which came out of the Kim Dotcom scandal.
Australia also has one of the slowest internet in the world, which is a consequence of the Telstra monopoly there. It is just sad data retention happens now, it will only hinder even more future development in the IT sector.
I lived there for one and a half years then moved back to Europe, enjoying my 500mbps fiber connection.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 39.6 ms ] threadI worked for a tech company in the UK who had german clients that produced economical policies that were used by Merkel's Cabinet.
It was the same time that the snowden scandals were all over the news and the client flat out told us no amazon, microsoft or american cloud computing platform.
It was a pain to find good European cloud providers but as a young 20 year old I was cynically happy - It meant that just like in the cold war - physicist never ran of jobs In my lifetime there wont be a shortage of jobs for programmers. Essentially the world had twice as many physicist ( Soviet and America ).
Snowden has been the best thing to happen to the tech world.
Finally I can stop making shitty apps to connect to amazon and make my own amazon !
We need to figure out a way of making a more united front in this war. Its crazy how hard it is to reach people regarding the danger of all this surveillance, I feel completely drowned out.
Best of luck waking others up
Secondly, how poorly drafted the actual legislation ended up being. Since nobody involved understood it, the law itself is a series of self contradictory statements that make very little sense. At some point they decided to exclude "web browsing history" but nobody obviously knew how on earth to write that in, so it became its own section that overrode the other sections to say that "nothing else in this bill requires retention of anything that could be interpreted to be web browsing history" - despite the fact that the rest of the bill very explicitly details retention of web browsing history. As it stands, the law is unimplementable, and thus what is now happening is that ISPs are going through a process of getting "guidance" which is a euphemism for "since we can't legally operate any more given this law is unimplementable, just tell us what you want and we will do it".
Finally, the fact that there was a sudden and inexplicable spike in terrorism raids in the weeks when the bills were debated. There have been almost no raids since, and there were almost no raids before. Yet in those critical weeks, law enforcement just happened to decide that it was timely to execute a bunch of "raids", which have had no material outcome. In other words, law enforcement appears to be transparently corrupt and willing to abuse its powers for political ends. Which means we are very much well on the way to being a police state.
They're smart too, because otherwise they wouldn't have managed to climb up the hierarchy of political power to their current positions, what with all the other smart psychopaths jockeying for position along with them.
So if it's in a politician's personal interest to vote X on whatever, then he will do so. If it's not, then he won't. It's as simple as that.
Understanding has nothing to do with it. It's not like they couldn't get someone to help them understand, if they wanted to.
Also, the Australian government (along with any others that can) has been doing the things listed in the article already. They don't need permission from themselves.
I'm angry. I feel betrayed by representative democracy. The system is absolutely insane.
The sad fact is, I feel more free here in China than the US/UK, and it seems to me that Australia's only a little behind those jurisdictions in its rapid descent.
It seems a bit hyperbolic to write something like this right when the Chinese economy has been in a tail spin, and the Chinese government has been censoring the press coverage of declining value of public companies (many of which have significant government ownership stakes).
What? I didn't conflate the two, and I don't know what that is telling of exactly. The freedom to report (i.e. press freedom) on the economy and the economy itself are 2 separate things, and the Chinese government was censoring the press.
Me: "I feel more free here in China than the US/UK" [doesn't include economy]
You: "It seems a bit hyperbolic to write something like this right when the Chinese economy has been in a tail spin, and the Chinese government has been censoring the press coverage of declining value of public companies (many of which have significant government ownership stakes)." [includes economy]
That's called conflating two issues.
While you are correct that China censors the press, the western press is also deeply controlled and manipulated for political purpose. For example, the UK has more concurrent gag orders in operation than anywhere else on earth. US and Australian media ownership is ridiculously centralized, worse if you include viewership.
i know identifying your representitive might identify you too much, but if you could make that name public (which could potentially cost you personally, so i suggest you think hard before you do) and publish your letter and responses, it might make others who sees this and feel the same way you do to vote differently.
I burnt the letter response out of pure spite unfortunately. I doubt it would make any difference though. His seat is very safe and unlikely to change even if he retires.
The threat posed by non-confidence votes is often used to justify extremely well-disciplined legislative parties in Westminster systems. In order to ensure the government always has the confidence of the majority of the house, the political culture of Westminster nations often makes it highly unusual for a legislator to vote against their party. Critics argue this in turn undermines the freedom and importance of Members of Parliament (MPs) in day-to-day legislating, making the cabinet the only organ of government where individual legislators can aspire to influence the decisions of the government.
If the system doesn't have a strong constitution, like the U.K. ... well, in US terms, imagine the current majority completely changing the way Senators are selected, and replacing the Supreme Court with a different institution.
Tony Blair's New Labour did the former with the House of Lords, don't remember who changed them from being the U.K.'s highest court. It is indeed an elected dictatorship, and something we in the US very explicitly rejected.
And for some inexplicable reason, in both the U.K. and Australia, the governments (this is generally any of them as far as I know) have all but completely disarmed the people, eliminating as much as they can that ultimate form of feedback; strange, that. (It's not true of Canada, and to a lessor extent New Zealand.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10139442 is very worrying though and I'm sure that sooner or later the gaps in the law will be plugged since the intention is clearly to catch the likes of Fastmail. The direction that the law in Australia in general is taking is clearly towards more surveillance - Fastmail was top of my list of alternative mail providers, but this will definitely make me think twice even if they're exempt right now.
They've already experienced this sort of thing in the 2010-2013 period when Opera in Norway owned the company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FastMail).
Looks like it might be time to make friends with some Kiwi's
I'm suprised that you listed New Zealand considering all the political dirty which came out of the Kim Dotcom scandal.
The Czech Republic seems pretty cool too. The only reason I left it off my list as a place to reside is its strategic location.
I lived there for one and a half years then moved back to Europe, enjoying my 500mbps fiber connection.