Big Brother is flexing his muscles down under.
The Australian government is currently looking to force Internet service providers to surveil their own customers and snitch to authorities when things look suspicious. The pretext for Orwell.gov’s prospective partnership with Orwell.net is concern that law enforcement cannot keep up with the increase in cybercrime.
Troubled that the next high-level domain extension might become dot-fink, civil liberties organization Electronic Frontiers Australia is fighting the government’s recommendation.
“They’re very cautious with words,” said EFA’s Greg Taylor, quoted in the Aug. 29 ZDNet Australia News, “but they’re basically saying they want ISPs to be forced to keep records of the activities of their customers.”
Taylor said the government’s report on the ISPy plan wasn’t “very specific” about the scope of the surveillance, “but reading between the lines they’re looking for as much information as they can get.”
Similar to the U.S. Fourth Amendment, Australian police are bound by law to surveil phone conversations only if there is evidence of a crime and a warrant to do so. EFA’s concern is that the recommendation skirts this legal protection and intercepts communications regardless of criminal suspicion, storing the data just in case it might be useful in criminal investigations at some later date.
Spying on millions to possibly catch an illusive crook here and there is not a guarantor of liberty. Quite the reverse.
The equivalent would be if the government ordered the phone company to eavesdrop on every conversation in hopes of possibly catching your neighbor telling his tax accountant to cheat on a deduction or two.
Aside from the U.S. government’s possible expansion of Carnivore to tap wireless communications, the snitch culture in American is going private, as well.
With Napster gone the dodo route, peer-to-peer file sharing has stepped in to take its place.
P2P is hard to control and monitor because it utilizes no central servers to either sort or store files. Networks like Gnutella allow Mike in Minnesota to search for a file on Oliver’s computer in Oregon, and client software packages like LimeWire allow Mike to download directly from Oliver’s computer without the transaction registering on a central server someplace. So if Mike and Oliver are illegally transferring copyrighted files – say, movies or music – it’s more than hard to find out.
Unless dot-finks are at work.
Both Mike and Oliver are most likely using ISPs, which are increasingly willing to rat on their customers, according to a recent report at LockerGnome.com.
Explains LockerGnome’s Jon Wright, “When you download a movie in any format, you tend to use a lot of bandwidth. The ISP’s are monitoring this usage, flagging it and looking at what you download.” From there, it’s a call to the authorities and one more notch in the belt of the snitch culture rapidly infesting this nation.
“I’m no big fan of stealing copyrighted material,” says Wright, but “If the ISP is allowed to do this, what’s next? Does this mean that Voice over IP isn’t protected by the same laws that protect the privacy of a regular phone call.”
It’s more than a phantom fear. In order to nab a few lawbreakers, authorities and even fellow citizens seem increasingly willing to pitch privacy out the window and spy on the rest of us.
There are two telltale marks of a police state: 1) an overarching central government snooping into the private lives of its citizens looking for any hint of wrongdoing, regardless of probable cause and suspicion; and 2) stool pigeons willing to fink on their fellow citizens.
Hello, Big Brother.
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