War on the Internet

Update: videos from this event are now available at: http://vimeo.com/efaoz

Update: Julian Assange is recording a video that wll be played at this event.  For anyone unable to attend, we'll be streaming the whole event here: http://www.livestream.com/efa_oz

Electronic Frontiers Australia, in partnership with the Australian Greens, is proud to present:
War on the Internet, an event featuring:

• Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
• Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
• Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
• Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing

When: Saturday 21st January 2012, 3.00 - 5.00pm

Where: Trades Hall, Corner Lygon & Victoria Streets, Carlton, Melbourne 3053

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ZDNet are reporting today that the Australian Federal Police are pushing the government to pursue aggressive mandatory data retention policies, forcing ISPs to collect information about your internet use and preserve it in case you are one day suspected of wrongdoing.

The article quotes AFP assistant commissioner Neil Gaughan as saying that they are pushing the Attorney-General's Department and other agencies to implement the new regime, the existence of which was revealed in June this year despite high secrecy. We have drawn attention to the worrying proposal in the past.

According to the article, the police say this explicitly "includes web searches and histories". Despite the incredibly sensitive nature of the information being sought, we have yet to hear an account of precisely what crimes this might help solve, or by what mechanisms it would do so.

As we wrote just yesterday, when your job is to stop criminals, other considerations apparently take a back seat to any measure that might help you accomplish that. But we rely on the government to balance the wider interests of the community. In this case, we worry they are derelict in their duty. With discussions occurring far away from the public eye, we have no assurance that privacy issues are being taken into account at all.

Indeed, today's article describes the policy as a balancing act between "what the private sector would like based on cost, and what we would like to do based on history and law enforcement capabilities". It's clear that the police want as much data as they can possibly get. If cost to ISPs is the only consideration, who is standing up for the rights of innocent users?

Stay tuned as this issue develops.

The Australian reported today on alarm by Federal police at the opportunities the NBN will provide to cyber-crooks. "The inherent risk of the NBN is that it could facilitate the continual growth and sophistication of online criminal syndicates' ability to commit cyber offences against online systems due to the attractiveness of the increased speed," they said in a submission to a Parliamentary enquiry.

The problems with this line of reasoning should be immediately obvious. When your mission in life is to thwart crime, you apparently start to see all change through the prism of your own job.

Solving and preventing crime is, certainly, easier in a simpler and slower world. The police are right in saying that the NBN will bring new opportunities for crooks. As bandwidth increases, new and complex services will proliferate, more transactions and commerce will occur online, and international boundaries will blur even further. Communications will become more difficult to trace. To the enterprising fraudster, hacker, or even child pornographer, the NBN will be a boon.

It's also true that new roads help bank robbers execute their getaway. Is this an argument against road-building?

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It recently came to light (thanks to some good reporting) that the Government has been fishing around with ISPs for their support on a new and radical data retention policy. This would legally oblige telcos to retain large amounts of data about their customers' communications activities in case law enforcement needed them at some point in the future.

We know this because some in the industry have spoken out, quietly, about the meetings. The Government, it would seem, would prefer to conduct them in complete and total secrecy.

Ben Grubb at the Sydney Morning Herald today shared some documents he obtained under Freedom of Information about the briefings between the Attorney-General's department and the industry. The screenshot below is indicative of the rest of the document - besides the page numbers, nothing substantive is left uncensored. Even the glossary of terms is heavily elided. One can only imagine the officer responsible for the editing must have made a few trips to the stationery cupboard for a fresh texta.

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After a very short consultation period, the Attorney-General's Department is soliciting comments on its exposure draft of 'computer network protection' amendments to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cth).

EFA's submission addresses our key concern that the proposed legislation provides a very broad exception to the prohibition on interception of network communications for the purposes of ensuring that a network is 'appropriately used'. This is a very broad category that means that all network operators in Australia will be able to monitor the substance of communications that pass over their network for compliance with their Acceptable Use Policies - the terms of which could include nearly anything. The AGD suggests that this is necessary to increase security, but have not shown any convincing justification why the contents of communications need to be examined nor why the scheme should extend beyond corporate networks to all Australian networks - including consumer ISPs.

This proposed changed threatens to radically alter the ability of network operators to intercept, store, and disclose information passing over their networks. There are no safeguards to prevent disclosure to law enforcement agencies or third parties. It is entirely possible for these new provisions to be used to examine P2P filesharing data for copyright violations, for example, and to disclose any captured information to copyright owners.

EFA contends that this exposure draft is far too broad and unjustifiably infringes the privacy of Australian internet users. We call upon the Attorney-General's Department to critically examine the proposed legislation and tighten the exceptions to the broad prohibition on interception to a clear set of defined purposes and parties.