Tag: Terror Laws

Data Retention, George Brandis, Malcolm Turnbull, Metadata

Mandatory data retention laws an attack on Australians

Greens Senator Scott Ludlum has called the Government’s mandatory data retention legislation an outrageous attack on Australian’ right to privacy’, which will be fought.

THE GOVERNMENT’S MANDATORY DATA RETENTION LEGISLATION is an outrageous attack on Australians’ fundamental right to privacy and does not represent a proportionate response to the needs of law enforcement authorities.

The bill contains no description of the metadata it is seeking to access and no details about the cost of this unwelcome new surveillance tax.

Since the idea was first floated in 2009, mandatory data retention has been dissected and rejected by almost every major stakeholder group affected by the idea, including the telecommunications industry, civil liberties groups, media organisations, journalists, political parties and thinktanks across the political spectrum.

Data retention will impose a surveillance tax on the entire Australian population, and turn the telecommunications industry into unwilling appendages to enforcement agencies, tracking and storing material on every device held by every man, woman and child in Australia.

Data retention was rolled back by the European Court of Justice because it was found to violate human rights and because it did not affect authorities’ ability to do their job.

Data retention will also make a mockery of the ability of journalists to protect their sources. When the Government has access to a log of every phone call made in Australia and every email sent, the practice of whistleblowing will cease to exist.

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull got it right in 2012 when he said he had “very grave misgivings” about data retention, because it was “heading in precisely the wrong direction” and would create a “chilling effect on free speech” as well as invade privacy.

Turnbull said at the time:

“The German Federal Constitutional Court has recently struck down a similar data retention law noting that “metadata” may be used to draw conclusions about not simply the content of the messages, but the social and political affiliations, personal preferences, inclinations and weaknesses of the individual concerned.”

Turnbull also noted in 2012 that the criminals of greatest concern to Australia would be able to use numerous means to anonymise their communications to evade their data being retained, meaning the scheme would be easy to evade.

The Greens and a wide range of other groups across the political spectrum will step up the fight against data retention to ensure it is blocked in the Senate.

Today, the Greens call on the Labor Party to declare they will vote against Mandatory Data Retention, and not wait until after it has passed to express their regrets and concerns.

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Humour, SWAT

Our boys in ASIO , AFP and Police are in training for no knock raids as we speak. They have tried a few and have managed to arrest and free a number of suspects. It takes a while to memorize the new laws though.

Police Converge Mass

Habersham County Cop Wins Coveted “NAZI Stormtrooper Of The Year” Award

Posted in humor, politics

ATLANTA (CT&P) – Bubba “Catfish” McDim, the Georgia SWAT team member who tossed a stun grenade into a baby’s crib during a drug raid this spring, has been awarded the NAZI Stormtrooper of the Year Award according to Haberham County Sheriff Joey “Heinrich” Terrell.  Although no drugs or weapons were found during the raid, McDim managed to melt the infant’s face and disfigure him for life, an achievement that brought praise from law enforcement agencies from across the country.

hitler

“We shore are proud of our Catfish,” said Sheriff Terrell. “All those hours of practice throwing fragmentation grenades at Messican farm workers and carloads of negra teenagers really paid off. Bubba sets a sterlin’ example of just what can be achieved when using deadly force against unarmed civilians.”

McDim will be honored at a gala banquet in Atlanta over the Christmas holidays. The yearly banquet honors militarized police thugs from all over the country who perpetrate abominations on the American public in the name of the “War On Drugs.”

Below is a synopsis of the Habersham SWAT team’s actions that the awards committee used to determine this year’s winner:

 

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Of all the botched drug raids that have occurred in 2014, the most appalling took place in Cornelia, Georgia on May 28—when narcotics officers carried out a paramilitary no-knock SWAT raid at 3 AM at the home of Alecia Phonesavanh. The person they were looking for, Phonesavanh’s nephew Wanis Thonetheva, was suspected of making a $50 methamphetamine sale. Thonetheva, however, didn’t even live in Phonesavanh’s home and was nowhere to be found during the raid. But Phonesavanh’s 19-month-old toddler, Bounkham “Bou Bou” Phonesavanh, was home. After breaking down the door of the Phonesavanh home, one of the brave cops, Officer Bubba “Catfish” McDim, tossed a flash-bang grenade which landed in the baby’s crib, exploded and caused the toddler extensive injuries (including severe burns, disfigurement and a hole in his chest that exposed his ribs). No drugs were found in the home, and Wanis Thonetheva was subsequently arrested without incident.

stormtrooperoftheyear

Habersham County officials announced in August that the county would not be giving the Phonesavanh family any assistance with the baby’s huge medical expenses. Members of the SWAT team escaped any criminal charges for the botched raid on October 6 when a grand jury, under threat of lifelong police harassment, found no fault with police procedure on the raid.

“We are here to support our officers no matter what kind of abomination they may perpetrate,” said a trembling Billy Bob McSneed, the jury foreman.

Mildred Fatback of Clarkesville agreed.

“I just don’t see how anyone could ever criticize our brave police officers,” she said, as she looked around nervously, “why, only last week one saved my life by giving me a ticket for going 3 MPH over the speed limit. He also confiscated 53 bucks from me that I could have used to purchase drugs if I actually used them. I’m very grateful.”

Sheriff Terrell told WSB News that the grand jury “did good” and more heinous and deadly “no-knock” raids were planned in the near future.

“There just ain’t no telling what’s goin’ on out dere,” said Terrell. “We may need raid every home in the county just to make sure no one ain’t doin’ nothin’ wrong. Who knows what we might find? I know some of the boys are needin’ some new appliances and stereos, so this no-knock thing might just be the ticket for ‘em.”

ABC, Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott

Abbott’s thuggish agenda steers country down authoritarian path

Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Abbott’s thuggish agenda steers country down authoritarian path

THE Abbott Government is a regime with a taste for authoritarianism the like of which we have not seen in Australia since World War II.

It is using the pretext of a terrorist group called ISIS, operating thousands of miles from this island continent, to strip freedoms and empower security and police agencies in a way that is frightening, so frightening in fact that the venerable Washington Post last week described Australia as a “national security state”.

The authoritarianism of the Abbott Government also manifests itself in seeking to suborn the ABC and turn it into a tame propagandist for the reactive conservatism of Mr Abbott and thuggish lieutenants like Immigration Minister Scott Morrison and Attorney-General George Brandis. Sounding more like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Russia’s Vladimir Putin than the leader of a democratic country, Mr Abbott once complained that the ABC is too often not on the side of Australia. A troubling comment and symptomatic of the intolerance of dissent and critical commentary that is part and parcel of the modus operandi of the Abbott Government.

Last week, the ABC looked as though it was buying into Mr Abbott’s implicit desire to make the ABC a loyal servant of his regime. The ABC Lateline program carried an interview last Wednesday with Wassim Doureihi, a spokesman for a radical group called Hizb ut-Tahrir. Lateline’s interviewer Emma Alberici blew up because Doureihi, taking a leaf out of Mr Morrison’s book, refused to directly answer questions.

Mr Abbott wants to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir — so much for freedom of speech. So the PM lavished praise on Ms Alberici.

“She’s a feisty interviewer …  good on her for having a go and I think she spoke for our country last night,” Mr Abbott said.

Note the last part of that quote —“she spoke for our country”. It is not the job of any ABC interviewer to speak for anyone’s country. It is not the job of the ABC to attack groups and individuals Mr Abbott wants to ban. And the ABC is not meant to be a propagandist.

Instead of telling the Prime Minister that Ms Alberici is not a propagandist or a tool of the Abbott Government’s dangerously xenophobic, racist and anti-Islamic “Team Australia” concept, the ABC’s managing director Mark Scott simply tweeted the interview and its transcript. But Mr Abbott’s ploy of seeking to turn the ABC into his propaganda tool by praising journalists who agree with his view of the world was not the only example last week of the Federal Government’s sinister authoritarianism.

Mr Morrison, in an act of bullying and such hypocrisy that the term needs to be spelt with a capital H, has referred workers from the Save the Children Fund to the Australian Federal Police for allegedly misusing privileged information, which is an offence under Commonwealth law. Mr Morrison is seeking to censor individuals who work in the gulags on Nauru and Manus Island from speaking out against the serial abuse of men, women and children that occurs courtesy of the minister’s policies.

What makes Mr Morrison’s action so distasteful is not just that he is seeking to stop the truth of human rights abuse emerging, but that he quite obviously leaked to a journalist recently a report that was critical of aid workers in detention centres. As noted above, capital H hypocrisy.

All this — anti terror laws, Abbott’s patting the ABC on the back for being loyal and Mr Morrison’s legal bullying — in only a month. But look at the pattern. This is a government obsessed with secrecy and pumping taxpayers’ dollars into police, spies and the military. It is a government that berates its critics in a way that makes former Liberal prime minister John Howard look positively tolerant.

Australia suffers from having no real check on an authoritarian leader like Mr Abbott. In Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper shares many of the unfortunate undemocratic traits of Mr Abbott, but he is fortunately constrained by a cultural and legal commitment in that country to citizens having enforceable protections via a human rights charter. Even in the US, citizens have more protection against authoritarian actions than is the case in Australia.

Maybe Australians don’t care. After all, this country started its European days by wiping out indigenous Australians and as a jail for the UK. It is a country that has never had to struggle to maintain democracy. It is a lazy democracy as a result and easily scared by mythical invaders from elsewhere.

It would be a pity if the Abbott Government were allowed to continue along the authoritarian path it is taking this country down. But it will only stop if Australians realise that the democracy they think exists is being dismantled by a bunch of thugs running Canberra, and a weak opposition in the form of an unprincipled ALP.

Media

Five reasons terror laws wreck media freedom and democracy
Having used security as a pretext to impose an information blackout on operations involving asylum seekers, the government is broadening its denial of the public’s right to know. AAP/Quinten Jones

The Abbott government’s latest tranches of national security and counter-terrorism laws represent the greatest attack on the Fourth Estate function of journalism in the modern era. They are worse than the Gillard government’s failed attempts to regulate the press.

Unlike most other Western democracies, Australia has no constitutional instrument protecting free expression as a human right. Few politicians can resist the temptation to control the flow of information if the law permits.

Here are five reasons that this latest move is damaging the democratic cornerstone of press freedom.

It is legislative over-reach

Australians have been given remarkably little explanation of why most of the new laws are needed. Even those that seem well founded could be amended to include a clear public interest, free expression or journalism exemption.

Existing laws worked well enough to enable the arrests and convictions of at least 15 people on terrorism charges in Australia since 2003. Federal Police powers were strong enough to obtain warrants to raid Channel Seven headquarters in Sydney in February. Officers seized computers over an unsubstantiated allegation that Seven had paid for an interview with convicted drug smuggler Schapelle Corby. The AFP later apologised.

It gags reportage of a key public issue

National security and counter-terrorism activity is a major Commonwealth budget item. The 2014-15 budget estimates allocate more than $4 billion a year to public order and safety. Since the budget, counter-terrorism has received an extra $630 million over four years, including almost $200 million for ASIO.

Such a sizable area of government merits maximum media scrutiny and transparency. It criminalises any disclosure, whether deliberate or not, of information about a “Special Intelligence Operation” (SIO).That is basically what journalists do – disclose information. Just to do so in this case carries a five-year jail term, or ten years if they jeopardise the operation.The Attorney-General’s assurances that journalists are not targeted might well be sincere, but the legislation now sits there for any future government to apply against anyone who dares to mention such an operation.

It compromises the separation of powers

Journalists’ exposure of cover-ups by politicians of all colours at all levels of government have dominated the Walkley Awards for decades. Their revelations have triggered inquiries like Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry and New South Wales’ recent ICAC hearings.

These new gags give current and future governments the opportunity to avoid such scrutiny by claiming national security is involved.

It spells the end for the confidential source

The effects of s35P on disclosures, surveillance powers, including access to all of Australia’s IT networks with a single warrant, and metadata storage and access obligations effectively sound the death knell for the whistleblower as a confidential source in this country.

The Counter-Terrorism Legislation Amendment (Foreign Fighters) Bill 2014 now before parliament does offer a journalism exemption to the 10-year jail penalty for entering a declared terrorism area in a foreign country, which is indeed what war correspondents sometimes do. However, that exemption requires the journalist to prove what they were doing. And that may betray the identity of their sources.

Exemptions effectively license old media over new media

The exemption applies strictly to a “person working in a professional capacity as a journalist” (or assisting). This raises the recurring question of what defines a “journalist” in this new era.

The issue arises time and again as more people practise what we know as journalism. Bloggers, students, academics and “citizen journalists” are now valuable sources of information for the public. Yet many of them are not necessarily working in a professional capacity as a journalist.

Thus the new law would privilege the 20th-century definition of “journalist” and is a form of licensing.

ASIO, Australia, Australian Shame, Injustice, Media, Security, Tony Abbott

Australia State of Terror. Lies and Misconceptions

ious

Previous

Like many things our prime minister says, it is simply a convenient lie.These are not good laws. They are not even laws to make Australia safer.These are cynical, opportunistic laws. Laws barrelled through under the spurious guise of protecting us against a fanatical foreign Islamic beheading cult with apparent links to Muslims in this country.

They are appalling laws, built on a lie.

There has never been an act of domestic terror in Australia. And no, a lone teenager committing a seemingly unplanned act of violence is neither a terror attack nor a retrospective justification for foreign military intervention and ramped up “counter-terrorism” powers.The so-called Islamic State ‒ a ragtag bunch of rebels occupying a chunk of land about the size of Tasmania half a world away, is hardly a threat to anyone — except if you happen to live in Iraq or Syria. American Homeland Security are quite clear on that

Yes, there may indeed be 50 or 60 Australians fighting with them, but that doesn’t make them a threat here in Australia — particularly after ASIO summarily cancelled their passports. Any supporters these foreign fighters have in this country ‒ a miniscule number at most ‒ are surely able to be easily monitored using existing laws and, if they commit a criminal act, arrested and prosecuted under the existing criminal law.

The real reason for these new powers has got nothing to do with Islamic State, or ISIL, or ISIS ‒ or whatever they are called this week ‒ but they are to do with closing down scrutiny of Australia’s spies and the Government unpublicised activities.

ASIO have been caught with their pants down on two majorly embarrassing occasions since the Abbott Government took power last year.

The first occurred when the ABC and Guardian Australia published leaks from former U.S. intelligence operative whistleblower Edward Snowden that our spies had tapped then Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s mobile phone for 15 days in 2009. These revelations caused a major rift with Indonesia and is still a lingering source of tension.

It was not long after this event, on January 28, that Abbott first used his famous “team” epithet, while denouncing the ABC in an interview with on 2GB with his friend, right wing Sydney shock jock Ray Hadley [IA emphasis]:

“It dismays Australians when the national broadcaster appears to take everyone’s side but our own and I think it is a problem.

“You would like the national broadcaster to have a rigorous commitment to truth and at least some basic affection for the home team, so to speak.”

Abbott went on to call Snowden a “traitor”, saying the ABC “seemed to delight” in publishing his information:

“And of course, the ABC didn’t just report what he said, they took the lead in advertising what he said. That was a deep concern.”

Abbott reaffirmed his position in a subsequent doorstep, going on to condemn the ABC for working with the Guardian, or as he put it:

“… touting for a left wing British newspaper.”

There were no surprises when the vindictive Abbott left it for his broken former rival Malcolm Turnbull to announce an efficiency review of the ABC a couple of days later. This review has now called for the ABC’s budget to be slashed with some important investigative news programs, such as Lateline, in the firing line. Turnbull has also flagged cutting $200 million from as ABC budget already cut deeply in the May Budget, blatantly breaking a clear election promise.

These terror laws will stop whistleblowers exposing the Government’s undercover operations through the media.

The problem with this is that the Coalition ‒ under Tony Abbott, avowedly “open for business” ‒  is seemingly not above using the security services in an improper way to assist private individuals and corporations. Under the new laws, any whistleblower seeking to expose the security services, for instance, helping an Australian big business on the behest of a cabinet minister looking for a cosy post-parliamentary sinecure will now be shut down and any journalists assisting locked up for a long time.

These security laws, therefore, can be seen as the next stage in the Abbott programme to hamstring the ABC as an effective source of scrutiny of Government activities.

But, even more importantly, they will make Australian journalism generally reluctant to expose the Government’s undercover activities, as this could lead to them being sent to prison for a decade.

Australia’s spy network was again in the spotlight in December last year after Attorney General George Brandis ordered ASIO to raid the Canberra offices and home of barrister Bernard Colleary, a former ACT deputy chief minister, who was representing East Timor against Australia at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague.

This is not democracy. No wonder they don’t want a Federal ICAC.

The Islamic State is a mirage as far as we are concerned here in Australia. It is not an existential threat to us. The grave threat, in truth, is new security laws that stifle freedom of speech, remove privacy protections, gaol journalists and serve, in the end, to limit scrutiny of the Government and its operatives.

Moreover, providing new powers to secret agents, which also provides them with civil and criminal immunity is an outright danger and threat to us as citizens. It makes these shadowy figures immune to prosecution and therefore, effectively, unaccountable for their actions. Under these laws, frankly, spies can kill us and fear no recourse.

Under these laws, there is no-one to watch the watchers. Now that is truly terrifying.

In truth, we probably expect our extreme right wing Government to implement these sorts of outrageous and unwarranted laws; certainly we can see why they are doing so. It is, however, the weak acquiescence by their so-called Opposition that is most criminal part of this affaor.

We know the ALP under Bill Shorten do not want not a cigarette paper between themselves and the Government on immigration and security matters. This is the exact small target strategy using so brilliantly and effectively by former Opposition leader Kim Beazley during such events as the Tampa Affair and Children Overboard.

However, politicians who unnecessarily sacrifice the rights of the people in the interests of popularity and power show themselves up as unsuitable for high office.

By supporting these so-called “anti-terror” laws ‒ which have nothing to do with preventing terrorism ‒ the ALP, under their current milquetoast leader, have followed the Coalition so far to the right, they are no longer truly a progressive Opposition.

And now more than ever, as the Government shuts down scrutiny and proposes gaoling journalists, Australia needs a progressive Opposition