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Thread: Australia's new spying law & the Five Eyes access to it

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    United States Avalon Member mojo's Avatar
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    Default Australia's new spying law & the Five Eyes access to it

    Hope someone can share more about the ability for law enforcement or Gov agencies to read, stop, and manipulate social media. Because the US is part of FVEY there is a report that this new law and tool will be able to reach other people not just in Australia. This seems like the WH & spying agencies will be able to use it to.

    Quote The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.[1] These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
    Quote The Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 (Identify and Disrupt Bill) provides three new types of warrants that allow the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission to edit and erase data, take over accounts, and spy on Australians who are suspected of being involved in criminal networks.

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    Australia Avalon Member Anchor's Avatar
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    Default Re: Australia's new spying law & the Five Eyes access to it

    Australia has been used as a proxy for the US FBI who could not do what we do here.

    For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/08/w...orse-anom.html

    Quote Anom also had a built-in advantage: Those running it were able to listen — directly — to the target audience and give users what they wanted.
    We were the ones listening. Now, the article is all framed around "criminal" networks and they got hit hard, but how many people doing journalism or how much client attorney privilege or how much privacy outside of that framing was also breached? The mainstream is silent on that one.

    Quote Australian officials said they had revealed the operation on Tuesday because of the need to disrupt dangerous plots currently in motion and because of limited time frames for legal authorities invoked to intercept the communications.
    See - you are told it was us, and the FBI admitted they could not have done this (legally) - but I cant find that quote sorry.

    The laws here are getting very biased and have slim to no checks and balances against abuse and both main parties are lockstep in passing them.

    Even though that Surveillance Legislation Amendment bill was passed, most savvy criminals could easily counter it. Savvy criminals are not the target though,,, IMHO the target is dissenters.

    One could think Australia was being packaged up for sale to China.

    It is darkest before the dawn - hold the line - a storm of light is coming.

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    United States Avalon Member mojo's Avatar
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    Default Re: Australia's new spying law & the Five Eyes access to it


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    United States Avalon Member onawah's Avatar
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    Default Re: Australia's new spying law & the Five Eyes access to it

    Australia Has No Bill Of Rights, And It Shows
    SEPTEMBER 8, 2021
    by CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
    https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/09...-and-it-shows/

    https://soundcloud.com/going_rogue/a...s-and-it-shows

    "The Australian government has been on the receiving end of more and more criticism for its Covid response lately, not just domestically but from overseas.

    There’s a lot to criticize, from soldiers patrolling state borders and policing the streets of Sydney, to people being arrested for merely posting about lockdown protests on social media, to police accessing QR tracing information and firing projectile weapons at lockdown protesters, to news broadcasters naming and shaming Covid patients who violate isolation orders, to the frequently ineffective hotel quarantine system for travellers being replaced with purpose-built quarantine facilities and Orwellian surveillance apps. The states of both Victoria and New South Wales have begun moving toward reopening after the Delta variant proved zero-Covid goals unattainable even amid strict lockdowns, but will do so by adding Australia to the growing list of nations that have implemented the dangerously authoritarian policy of vaccine passports.

    And there are other aspects of this trend which have nothing to do with Covid. One of the most controversial recent developments in Australia’s escalating government overreach (and potentially the most consequential in the long term) has been the hasty passing of a new law greatly expanding government surveillance powers which allows law enforcement to hack into people’s devices and collect, delete, or even add to and alter the data therein, as well as take control of their social media accounts, supposedly “in order to frustrate the commission of serious offences online.”

    Critics tend to lump this sweeping surveillance state escalation in with authoritarian policies related to the pandemic, but the bill makes no mention of Covid; its proponents cite its utility in fighting terrorism and child exploitation. Indeed this bill, which will certainly lead to myriad abuses, is just the latest in a continuing expansion of government surveillance powers in Australia that has been going on for years. This video from The Juice for example was made in 2018 criticizing Canberra’s assault on encryption:



    In reality, while the pandemic has certainly been a major factor in exacerbating civil rights erosion, Australia’s Covid response has simply added to a problem that had already existed and was already getting worse. The 2019 CIVICUS Monitor, a global research group that tracks fundamental freedoms in 196 countries, downgraded Australia from an “open” country to one where civil space has “narrowed”, citing new laws to expand government surveillance, prosecution of whistleblowers, and raids on media organizations.

    And this ongoing trend can be largely traced back to the fact that Australia is the only so-called democracy in the world which has no national charter or bill of rights of any kind. A tremendous amount of faith has been placed in state and federal legislators to simply do the right thing, which has proved foolish and ineffective. Professor George Williams wrote for the Melbourne University Law Review in 2006:

    Australia is now the only democratic nation in the world without a national bill of rights. Some comprehensive form of legal protection for basic rights is otherwise seen as an essential check and balance in democratic governance around the world. Indeed, I can find no example of a democratic nation that has gained a new Constitution or legal system in recent decades that has not included some form of a bill of rights, nor am I aware of any such nation that has done away with a bill of rights once it has been put in place.

    Why then is Australia the exception? The answer lies in our history. Although many think of Australia as a young country, constitutionally speaking, it is one of the oldest in the world. The Australian Constitution remains almost completely as it was when enacted in 1901, while the Constitutions of the Australian states can go back as far as the 1850s. The legal systems and Constitutions of the nation and the Australian colonies (and then states) were conceived at a time when human rights, with the prominent exception of the 1791 United States Bill of Rights, tended not to be protected through a single legal instrument. Certainly, there was then no such law in the United Kingdom, upon whose legal system ours is substantially based. This has changed, especially after World War II and the passage of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but by then Australia’s system of government had been operating for decades.

    The state of Victoria has a Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities, which supposedly includes rights like freedom of movement and peaceful assembly, but such protections have been unceremoniously dismissed as state premiers harnessed sweeping powers hardly anyone was even aware they possessed and began imposing strict laws to get the virus under control.

    Officials have been rewarded for these drastic actions with thunderous public support, and until a few months ago the Australian government enjoyed soaring levels of approval from a very collectivist-minded population who overwhelmingly desired the elimination of the virus even if it meant trading some freedoms. Approval of those strict measures has dipped significantly since the Delta outbreak, but a majority of Australians still believe lockdowns and other restrictions are at appropriate levels for the time being. The absence of any federal restrictions on state governments’ ability to limit personal freedoms has allowed premiers to chase this public support regardless of potential long-term consequences.

    Australia is not a free country. Westerners are trained to believe that that’s what you call any wealthy English-speaking nation with liberal cultural values, but really it’s just a continent-sized US military base with kangaroos. Human rights are only allowed where they are convenient, which is why they are continually disintegrating.

    The first mistake in believing that Australia is a free country is believing that it is free. The second is believing that it’s an actual country. As Julian Assange put it shortly before the Australian government allowed him to be silenced and then imprisoned for journalism exposing US war crimes:



    Anyway, it’s a mess.

    So what to do about all this? If you listen to social media comments from people in the northern hemisphere the answer is that Australians should wage a civil war against their government, which from where I’m standing is hilarious partly because they’re talking about a populace whose entire cultural values system is built around being laid back and unbothered, and partly because most of those commenters are Americans living directly under the single most tyrannical regime on earth who have yet to put their much-touted Second Amendment toward practicing what they preach.

    There’s a lot that’s going to have to shift before Australians gain stable protections for their civil liberties, which will necessarily have to include not just some kind of bill of rights but becoming an actual republic and finally getting that ugly old woman off our coins and ending the illegitimate US military occupation here once and for all. This will not happen until there’s an expansion in public consciousness of the need to do this, which may or may not be born out of conditions getting a lot worse before they get better. It may also be born out of a critical mass of Australians deciding they’re fed up and beginning a real push toward becoming a free country.

    Bottom line the answer to the question of what needs to happen for Australia to move toward health is the same as the answer everywhere else: we’re just going to have to wake up. Human consciousness wants to awaken, and it will shake us in whatever ways we need to be shaken in order to make that happen. This is a hell of a time to be alive."
    Each breath a gift...
    _____________

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