Remaining Free
Australian Attorney General’s office has quietly proposed law changes to force ISP’s to retain VoIP data records. I wouldn’t go so far to say it’s a secret plan, but alleged “wide” consultation didn’t include most of Australia or even the the Australian parliament. Maybe “wide” meant the four people they talked to were fat? Oops, I meant size challenged. The few industry groups that were consulted were promptly bound by non disclosure to stop debate on the issue. Details in this mornings IT News.
This is another step in the plans of western governments for wholesale monitoring of civilian populations. All in the name of security of course. There is record use of closed circuit camera monitoring of public and private areas. This in the name of crime prevention, even though the research shows it doesn’t actually prevent crime at all. There is wholesale snooping of mobile phone networks, and as predicted Blackberry have settled the claims of middle eastern governments by allowing access to all the so called ‘encrypted’ data. This is just two samples. There are many more.
Governments seem to live in a place where they assume everyone is evil and no one can be trusted. If someone wants to attack western society all they have to do is put a bomb in the mail. Almost immediately regulations are changed to snoop the entire nations mail in greater ways. Never mind the bomber were so stupid they were tracked by the home phone number they left the courier company. Never mind no bombs went off and no one was injured in any way. Just the hint of danger and they’re rushing in to destroy another part of life as we know it. Governments are acting from a place of extreme fear, just look at their desperate need to choke debate of any kind.
In America it’s got so bizarre tax payers dollars are being spent to find disgruntled and marginalized groups of people, to ‘infiltrate’ them, egg them on and even arrange the resources for them to feed whatever bag of rage they are carrying. All with the purpose of proving how evil they are and how real the danger is out there are. What the government have done borders on entrapment. How far would things have gone if the government hadn’t sponsored them?
As the list of things your government needs to know about you increases year on year there is one simple technology in existence that can provide some protection. Governments are scared by it. It’s called encryption. It’s simple. It’s easy to implement. It’s makes it harder for fear driven governments to snoop your every move. You can encrypt traffic over the internet, your email, your phone system or your wireless networks.
Of course, if you outsource your data to the cloud be assured your trusted partner will hand it over without protest. Without telling you.
I assume once governments have snooped every data that isn’t encrypted they will launch some kind of war against encryption. Algorithms like AES and Blowfish were developed in the full light of day, with the code under the scrutiny of many eyes. It is nigh impossible to build secret back doors for governments with this method. The full light of day method is the only proven way to create security. But that won’t stop these idiots from trying to hide future development under a blanket and breaking that security with a backdoor. Years later it will probably be discovered the enemy found their silly backdoor and used it to exploit all their secrets. You can be sure at that point no one in government will be to blame.
In any case they won’t be able to re-engineer existing algorithms so they’ll have to make a new one. So be very suspicious when they release the latest and greatest encryption system that can never be broken.
In the meantime use encryption and enjoy your limited right to privacy while you still can.
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