What happened in the last few years to allow our civil rights in the most forward thinking countries to unravel so easily? And why do citizens not care? How is it possible that all countries have elected such a group of corrupt, nearsighted politicians to the point where freedom is an inconvenience over them consolidating practically dictatorial power? And again, why does no one care?
<i>the Australian government made the usual argument that metadata needs to be retained for long periods in order to fight terrorism and serious crime—even though the German experience is that, in practice, data retention does not help</i><p>Which only goes to show that it's not about fighting crime, but supporting it on the highest levels. Civil rights and the rule of law are obstacles to the coming rule of institutionalised crime, so they have to be abolished.
Cool. So, if I was to publicly announce "I have never been given a warrant demanding I hand over data by the Australian government", then I will have committed a crime attracting a two year prison sentence, and I should never visit the country?
The warrant canary is not a solution to the problem of secret legal actions. It's merely a protest.<p>As we see the warrant canary idea institutionalized - with companies like Apple and Twitter adopting them to a certain degree, and cataloguing them on sites like canary watch[1] we are falling down a rabbit hole of speech about speech (and speech about speech about speech, etc.).<p>The real issue is NSLs and other secret warrants. These are older than you might think. Look up PRTT (pen register trap and trace, for telephones, which can be served with a gag order) or the All Writs Act. This is what we need to be working against, and this is what falls to the background as we find new and better ways to run our warrant canaries.<p>I am guilty of this.[2]<p>[1] <a href="https://canarywatch.org/" rel="nofollow">https://canarywatch.org/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt" rel="nofollow">http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt</a>
The article linked in the article about how to dodge these new laws has some particularly asinine advice:<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-government-minister-dodge-new-data-retention-law-like-this/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/03/australian-govern...</a><p>The guy says "just use skype" because then the telco doesn't know who you're calling, just that you called skype.<p>Sure, because there's NO POSSIBLE WAY for Skype to get a subpoena, right?
Someone should make a website where you can check off a list of countries you want to be barred from, and then it sends out an illegal tweet for each country.
Australia is officially the only place in the world where the laws and technological restrictions make me never want to go there. Bandwidth is capped, porn is filtered, videogames cost a ridiculous amount. I know the country was founded by criminals, but I didn't realize they still ran the place.
I'm honestly surprised they had to make a law against it. It has always seemed to me that warrant canaries would not survive their first contact with the judicial system; it's a clear attempt to circumvent the intent of the law through a technical loophole. Judges aren't stupid and they tend to not look very kindly on such legal "hacks".<p>(Related: <a href="http://xkcd.com/1494/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/1494/</a>)
Url changed from <a href="http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-cana.html" rel="nofollow">http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/australia-outlaws-warrant-c...</a>, which points to this.