My immediate thoughts when Snowden's first revelations came to light were "I wonder just how much our local Australian government has rolled over and played lap-dog to every US intelligence request, no matter _how_ illegal or immoral?"
I also have very little faith in the Australian civil rights movement - the US has some powerful, smart, and noisy civil rights activism - here I see very little that appears in any way effectual.
Encrypt all the things…
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Well if your local job centre front desk can access your metadata with the nod of your supervisor upstairs, or if the upcoming referendum on local councils coming under federal auspices succeeds, and would allow as a consequence all levels of government to probe citizens metadata, I'm sure the NSA can.
The furore over the NSA data hoovering and the fourth amendment has no parallel in Australia. The general citizenry is completely uninformed, complacent and lazily uninterested in these matters.
Non-Americans are going to have to come to terms with the likelihood that their governments cooperate with the US not because of blackmail or coercion or fear, but because they agree with the justification for and procedures surrounding this kind of surveillance, and very much appreciate the US's willingness to throw billions of dollars into the pot to help it happen.
I wonder what would cause you to say something so stupid.
When you say "this shit" do you mean the negative image the USA is gaining from this? Why on earth would you prefer to remain in ignorant bliss about these happenings?
I read that not as "stupid", but (perhaps incorrectly) as a fellow Australian finally admitting to themselves that we're fooling ourselves if we think we can point an laugh at USA's treatment of their citizens while hiding behind some expectation that our local government is treating us with any more respect.
The sad thing is, our government is no better, out intelligence service is just as amoral and unaccountable, and our civil liberty movement is ineffectual to the point of being invisible. Perhaps "ignorant bliss" was preferable…
Actually it is likely worse than the US, the US government spying would generally stay US government only. Whereas ours in Australia is likely accessible by US agencies.
Indeed, and given the NSA's unique interpretations of some fairly commonly understood english words (like for example "collect" and "no"), I have no doubt that they're capable of creative legal interpretations where they can look their elected representatives and (in theory) overseers in the eye and say "we're not spying on US citizens" - claiming later if caught that it's "the least untruthful answer" - when what they really meant was "we asked the Australians to spy on US citizens for us, and hand over everything they found. _We_ didn't engage in any spying."
On the plus side, while I have niggling doubts about whether GPG and encfs/OpenSSL/AES are really secure against the NSA - I'm reasonably sure that even if they've got practical attacks against them, they aren't likely to be sharing even the existence of them with ASIO. I'm as close to 100% certain as makes no difference that GPG/encfs are secure against even the most powerful Australian government agencies (which is to say, only as secure as anything that'd break easily with rubber hose cryptography…).
People on HN have been mentioning ECHELON and five eyes. ECHELON is a system from the 90s, and involved Australia, New Zealand, Canada, UK, and the US.
