Perhaps too political for HN, but anyawy...<p>I can't understand Labor's plan. They seem to be going out of their way to alienate everyone who is attracted to voting for them.<p>They have lost the green vote by dropping the emissions trading scheme.
They have lost the "doctors wives" (see last election) with their refugee policy.
They have lost most political progressives with the internet filter and now this plan.
Even the unions aren't 100% behind them because of the impact of the Super Profit Tax policy.<p>I can understand that they think that they might lose primary votes to the Greens, say, and then regain them via preferences. But it seems to me that many people are getting to the point where they think that <i>even Tony Abbot</i> couldn't be as bad as this.<p>(Disclaimer: I'm Australian)
If this law ever comes into existence, I predict its number-one use will be pursuing illegal downloaders or something. I bet it won't be explicitly limited to terrorism or whatever its ostensible purpose is.<p>Hope I'm wrong, on both points.
The thing I find so surprising about all of this is that I would never expect a "normal" country like Australia to have censorship issues. China, North Korea, Iran... Australia? Is the Australian government simply too powerful for its people's own good?
They're such two-faced shits. On the one hand, they pan Google for collecting the locations of wireless networks and logging some packets off them, criticising them for <i>invading privacy</i>. On the other, they're attempting to legislate a way to record <i>all</i> of what people <i>actually do online</i>.
Moving to the UK in September. Wish I could say this was a motivating factor (experience is the real reason), but I'm scared about what I might return home to at some future point.<p>Maybe I should list every book I own or have read as part of my packing, and send it to Senator Conroy et al, as a preemptive move against those needing to be recorded as well.
In Australia, they also make you provide ID for any sim card for your mobile that you buy.<p>Looks like it might be time to head to the UK, since they decided to scrap the ID card.
I work within an ISP in Australia and have dealt with providing information to the Federal Police for investigations. I was under the impression that we already recorded that information. Looks like I was wrong.
Consider the two recent creepy proposals together. They point to everything being censored and everything being monitored.<p>Consider Wikileaks. Consider how these laws work together against whistleblowers. How convenient for a government to be able to
- block such a site from the majority of citizens; and
- have a red-hot go at tracking down anyone rash enough to upload anything.<p>Throw in a law or two to make it illegal for paedophiles and terrorists to circumvent these arrangement and you have a truly nasty arrangement.
Purely tactics to get their filtering bill passed? In the end we'll all be thanking them for being such nice people that they are only filtering our internet...
There's another story on this from Renai LeMay (ex-ZDNet) who is an IT writer who started his own IT news site, Delimiter. An underdog worth supporting I think:<p><a href="http://delimiter.com.au/2010/06/11/govt-may-record-users-web-history-email-data/" rel="nofollow">http://delimiter.com.au/2010/06/11/govt-may-record-users-web...</a>