Is controlled by, not belongs to. Theoretically in a democracy we have a say about what our government does. We allegedly wanted it to sell of Telstra, Medibank Private, and the dozens of other government business enterprises that ‘could be found in the Yellow Pages’ (I wonder if Peter Costello still gets his Yellow Pages?). We told our states to sell off their electricity infrastructure; we want our government to sell off the NBN (or at least the profitable bits) if it is ever finished.
Should we really be surprised when governments that are elected for three year terms and want to show their ‘fiscal conservative’ credentials go against the wishes of their own electorates? If they don’t balance budgets, international currency and speculative markets will punish them - so voters in this ‘capitalist democracy’ are no longer the only people who get a say in how governments govern.
Of course, the Federal Parliament has now passed the Assistance and Access Bill allowing government agencies to require tech companies to decrypt our data - on top of existing access to all of our metadata from ISPs. This was to ‘protect us over the Christmas break’ - but its more obvious aim was to seek to find a way to split Labor on ‘security’! Its real effect will be to weaken encryption, require back doors, and potentially drive the tech industry out of Australia entirely.
This is an issue we should all be pushing back on - if Australia actually implements this law as written other countries will follow suit, and the Internet will lose its last vestiges of being anything other than Big Brother.
In fact, we should be calling upon the likes of Facebook, Google and Microsoft to walk away from the Australian market rather than submit to this regime. Maybe the government would listen to them, at least.
This is great news. For those who don’t already use it, you can easily get to DuckDuckGo with the address ddg.co.
On the really good news front, Microsoft is calling for regulation of facial recognition tools.
Unfortunately, if governments demand ‘all the datas’ (as they increasingly do), then such regulations will never be meaningful. The world is becoming increasingly scary - not because of ‘terrorism’ or ‘paedophiles’ but because our governments are increasingly refusing to do what their voters want and prefer to be able to know what we really think by spying on us.
I heard in a recent podcast that in 1973 the US had 40,000 bombings, bomb threats or other terrorism-related incidents. (This number apparently came from Richard Nixon’s autobiography.) Wikipedia has a more conservative list of terrorist incidents for that year, globally. The numbers today are nothing like that, but we are being told to be scared and that we need our governments to protect us through increasingly monitoring our every move.
Google and Facebook are not the main threat to privacy any more.
