Another very concerning law is about "fixated persons", which was bought in with big budgets and huge teams of detectives solely dedicated to going after lone wolf terrorists, so far the only person charged is a former mining executive who was a respected lawyer and Head of Compliance at one of Australia's biggest gas companies (One of the largest gas exporters in the world.)
She turned whistleblower on some corrupt deals and environmental coverups involving certain fracking leases and the government. After contacting the Mining Minister about it over the space of a few months, instead of investigating, the Minister referred her to the police, she was then deemed a "fixated person", which involved incarceration without charge, being taken to a mental institution and forcibly injected with anti-psychotic drugs for months. Eventually a judge decided she could go home. All media coverage of it is banned in Australia until the trial is finished, which has been postponed at every hearing for over a year now, time heals all wounds I guess.
It's naive to think that those in power wouldn't abuse such laws. I'm all for giving police the powers they need and perhaps even more as long as there is transparent oversight and it's targeted, but the complete opposite is happening in many places on Earth right now. Monsters flourish in the darkness.
Holy shit. Maybe I'll stop complaining about the US plastering the names of the accused all over if this is the alternative.
So it’s actually inverted outcomes from what you described, secret is normally good, (with obvious exceptions, such as the case in point) and public is normally bad.
Yet it seems to be abused here in order to protect cozy relationships between a certain big business and the government. Whistleblowers proven correct should be held up on a pedestal and highly respected, not thrown to the wolves with little chance of future employment.
This will obviously never happen because it's far more lucrative to draw trials out for years.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_abuse_of_psychiatr...
Process for any whistleblowers:
- Don't go to your boss
- Don't go to the authorities
- Don't go to anyone who may be remotely suspected of having any involvement or benefit from the activities
- Research how to protect your identity online (this is a bit recursive, as researching how to protect your identity online may set off flags if you are suspected as the whistleblower)
- Burner phone
- Burner laptop
- Burner email address(es)
- Tor
- public wifi (know where the cameras are in the area and make sure you're unrecognisable on them, stake it out in winter when it's more acceptable to have your face covered with a scarf or something)
- Contact a respected journalist that's NOT in your local area
- Try to make sure the journalist has the facility to allow documents to be transferred by a SecureDrop system or similar
Australia's federal political-class appear to be deep in the pockets of mining companies given the extent of the resistance to renewable energy. I'd almost consider it naive to go to a politician about any kind of mining-related corruption in Australia.
Edit: Just noticed CPAHem's post saying it was QFTAC that got Fiona Wilson 'committed'. The Q stands for Queensland. To give you an idea of how protective the Queensland political class is of the mining and energy status quo, they're trying to get a NEW Coal Power Plant built in Queensland, and they have enough power behind them that the Federal Government is not flat-out saying no. There are no banks, Australian or otherwise, willing to fund the building of a new coal power plant because it's so far from financial viability that even existing coal power plants are shutting down because they can't compete on power prices.
A while ago the name of a senior state politician was pending trial on child pornography charges, there was a massive undertaking to ensure his name never got mentioned in print for the few months before trial.
[0] https://www.gofundme.com/barrister-needed-for-fiona-wilson
http://www.blotreport.com/australian-politics/are-the-though...
[1] https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/queenslan...
The mainstream media are highly aware of the case, they are all legally blocked from mentioning it until the trial is finished.
A good article on the fixated persons unit by a QLD lawyer: https://independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/queenslan...
The moment, I hope things are improving and people become more involved and don't stand for this ..., things like these pop up as a form of disillusionment.
Her mistake I guess was contacting the minister or the minister's circle, who are probably in on this?
P.S. It seems the whistle-blower protections in Australia are ... lacking to say the least. Anyone care to pitch in? I can find a bunch of articles with horror stories.
http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-28/witness-k-and-berna...
> It covers [...] device vendors [...] as long as they have "a nexus to Australia"
> But what if the suspect stores the keys themselves? In that case, the government would pull out the big guns with a second kind of order called a technical capability notice. It forces communications providers to build new capabilities that would help the government access a target’s information where possible.
> What if the communications provider doesn’t want to help? Then they could face penalties from the government, or "injunctions or enforceable undertakings".
Yeah, right. But the precedent is alarming, because what is happening (and you see it with other "pro law enforcement" or "pro privacy" legislation too) is governments are giving themselves broad enforcement powers to ask for things and then only using it when push really comes to shove. This they-can-but-they-probably-won't approach towards enforcement is dangerous as it removes predictability in favor of government subjectivity. What does it mean in practice? It can mean that while Samsung or Apple would give them the middle finger resting on their size/leverage, a smaller company can't do that. So the enforcement agencies proportionalize their punishments to the amount tolerable without citizen backlash.
Everyone should just remember this tactic when we go around praising laws with big punishments for big companies just because we happen to like the spirit of the law. And also remember this when people call us stupid for questioning subjectivity of statute enforcement or the lack of statute enforcement in general when new versions of these laws are crafted.