Directly quoting from the linked article:

ASD powers have been a source of controversy for the government, after the AFP raided News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst’s home in June 2019 over a news report suggesting the home affairs department was seeking power for ASD to spy on Australians. Dutton had claimed the story was nonsense despite publicly confirming its substance.

The straight-up lying by one of Australia's highest ranked politicians bodes poorly, and goes hand-in-hand with Federal Police raiding a journalists home. Yet this seems to be the Government that the Australian people want.

Australians have been comfortable for a while, and are generally disengaged from politics. Most Australians I know are more aware of American politics than their own.

Unfortunately real administration is boring - and should be boring. We want to avoid crises.

The media is certainly getting smaller—everywhere, not just in Australia—and important things aren't getting reported. The answer to that is pretty boring, though: pay your subscription fees already.

theguardian.com/au

michaelwest.com.au

theconversation.com

themonthly.com.au

All do decent analysis of policy and economics and holding government to account.

But it sure beats authoritarianism, at least there is a chance of making it work!

Gosh this is so true. My sister and I are Americans living in Australia, she recently posted celebrating Kamala being named Biden's VP and got 20+ negative/derogatory DMs from aussie men in her network. I can't believe they care so much.

Meanwhile, you rarely read much about Australian politics in social media besides satire (Batoota Advocate, etc).

I can assure you it’s not. The problem with Republics is that “one man one vote” does not translate into the majority getting what it wants. The loudest and most well organized political forces will get their way, even ones small in number or popular support. State security services have a long history of involvement in politics and media in the Anglo-sphere.

Let me know when we have a Greens deputy PM.

This is not a bug, it's a feature. Otherwise you let the big cities stomp over the towns and countryside.

I know, I know, pedantry is fun. But I don't think the Queen makes much of a difference to Australia's problems one way or another.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitution...

You can say that again, mate. -- USA

Australians have become, in my view (happy to be proven wrong), very conservative because of the fact we've had it so good for so long, and therefore are a bit weak / soft and will cling to whatever excuse is presented by politicians that will appear to keep the good times rolling a bit longer, no matter how illogical the premise or how much it sacrifices a future just too far away to be scary yet.

Climate change and broadband as two divisive examples. They cost too much. Standing athwart history yelling Stop!

Start yet another micro political party doomed to the fringes? Even Nick Xenophon gave up after a few years.

Revolution? If you can't succeed as a political party how are you going to build a revolution? And does the ends justify the everything-in-between, along with the very high likelihood of potential failure and after-effects of such failure?

Maybe the silent majority have just done the maths already?

Most of the problems in Aussie politics can be laid at the door of the Boomers, who vote in idiots because they don't understand the issues and are scared of change.

There's a lot of voters out there who are quite okay with the government doing what they think needs to be done to ensure national security.

Given evidence to the contrary they prefer to imagine it as a lie.

So it's not correct today that they condone anything the people in charge are doing for national security they repress the existence of the things they don't condone.

But there is none (relevant) enough.

Because most people care most about stability.

For the lower house, we've had many years of the balance of power in the hands of a small number of independents who get an outsized voice.

Yes, if you live in an non-swing electorate, that is strongly held by the incumbent, then you could argue that your vote doesn't matter, but only because there are more people voting for something else. Isn't that how things are meant to work?

Also the fact that (especially with a hung parliament which we've had for years) independents get an outsized voice is a bit of a two-edged sword. It's far more luck than anything else that determines who's in that vote-tipping seat and sometimes they demand all sorts of special-interest stuff in order to let things through.

Are you familiar with French politics? For all the crap Americans give them about surrendering in the world wars, the french have had the courage to sideline both their center right and center left parties and now the biggest parties are nationalist and socialist.

Pick a government you like and move there, instead of trying to change the government in the place you happen to be born in.

Voting with your feet also changes where you pay taxes. (Unless you are American, then you need to jump through some extra hoops to make sure your mother country doesn't get your money any more.)

You are not only jumping to a new government policy, but the whole package changes. Including culture etc. Yes.

Many people around the world are looking to migrate. If borders were more open, many more people would migrate. About why? You could go and ask some of them. (Or as an alternative, Googling for 'why do people migrate?' gives lots of results to studies etc.)

As an aside, this is par for the course on our current government. They don't have policy, just lies and fearmongering.

> they behave much better...

https://medium.com/@rossformaine/i-was-googles-head-of-inter...

> decent custodians of their users data

They cannot protect that data from law and enforcement no matter what. De-anonymized, aggregated, ephemeral... no matter which way you look at it, data they collect is a ticking time-bomb. And because they amass so much, others that have similar business models are forced to follow suit, so much so that it has heralded us into an era where companies like Facebook [0], FourSquare [1] build and promote spyware without remorse or regret.

Smartphones have only added to the problem. It is madness to claim anyone in big-tech is "well behaved". I'd wager that they're well-behaved only when it is convenient [2].

> I trust Murdoch less than the government, much much less than Google

Peak Silicon Valley?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16363694

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19341079

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17581988

The claim is that Google does a much better job of protecting and securing your private information and not turning it against you than the Australian government - not that they do good things in general.

Yes, they monetize the browsing behavior they collect from you. Yes, they are able to use that to price products at $0 so others can't compete without also finding ways to monetize data. Yes, senior management will gladly take Xi Jinping's money. Yes, senior management will gladly sleep with subordinates. Even so, they are better custodians of user data than the Australian government or the Australian media.

And yes, they cannot protect their data from law enforcement - hence writing this letter telling the Australian voting public that if they don't want Australian law enforcement to compel Google to share certain data, they'd better stop this law.

Let me put this another way - if the Australian government ran a free email service, would you advise every Gmail user in Australia to switch?

False dichotomy? I think, as a technologist you'd agree we could do better than Gmail?

> The claim is that Google does a much better job of protecting and securing your private information

I concur, though (imo), it is a folly to assume Google would continue to uphold highest data-handling standards or could even keep all of the data secure despite employing world-class cryptographers and security researchers. [0] They may be better than most but their enormous cache is both a liability and a disaster waiting to happen.

If such laws mean they collect less data because they cannot stomach sharing it (nevermind whether for privacy or business reasons), that is a win? I think, we'd find out they don't care about privacy after all... just their bottom line.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22235756

No, actually.

I mean, yes, as a programmer I agree that it's possible to violate people's privacy less than Google does. You simply don't write the privacy-violating code, simple as that.

But as an employed person in tech I don't know who's going to do it. Reliably running a secure email service is hard. Companies are pushed by all sorts of pressures. I think a lot of us have realized, since a week ago, that it's not as realistic as we hoped to do better than Chrome. You can have world-class software engineers working for decades on an excellent, privacy-focused browser, and someone will come along and say that you're not monetizing it enough and lay you off.

So, in fairness, I host my email with Fastmail (which happens to be headquartered in Australia, even). But I pay for it, because I understand that this is how I avoid them monetizing me, and frankly, requiring everyone to pay for email is both unrealistic (in part for the reason you described about Google pushing the price ceiling to zero) and unfair (not everyone can afford it). I'm also aware that Fastmail is almost certainly worse than Gmail at resisting highly-skilled targeted attacks from APTs etc.; I've just decided that that's not in my threat model. If I happened to become a high-profile target, I absolutely would switch to Gmail and Google's Advanced Protection.

Google only cares about their bottom line, it's true. So does Fastmail - and fortunately for me, their bottom line is improved by me paying them instead of them monetizing me. And governments care only about power. There is some pressure on both Google's bottom line and the Australian government's power to be at least somewhat responsible: both could collapse if there was a serious breach of public confidence. The question we have right now is which pressure is stronger. The question we have for the long term is how we make both of those pressures stronger - ideally strong enough to support someone who does want to do better than Gmail for free email or better than Chrome for a free browser.

Google is among the highest spending tech lobbyists.

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/09/google-is-techs-top-spender-...

My point was Google has a lot to lose and lie about, too. Frankly, this letter by Google Australia comes off as a scare tactic than a honest plea.

So, then it becomes, "what can be done to reduce the amount of data collected and the risk it isn't protected?"

That's where this law appears to be a step backwards.

If you ignore who does it worst in pracice, the most important argument becomes apparent:

The Austrialian government is a democratically assigned entity; one that has (or should have?) checks and balances in place; one that is closely monitored as your various references prove.

Google, a foreign private entity has no such checks and balances in place. We don't vote in general elections for the new CEO of Google, we don't elect representatives into the board, and we cannot lean on transparancy laws to look into the kitchen at that private entity.

You may end up spending your entire life oppressed by your fellow citizens who may be indifferent towards your needs.

So I think there is a good reason for not having the government directly run everything. It wouldn't even mean democratic control over everything. It would mean bureaucratic control, very indirectly influenced by a democratic choice between a handful of parties once every 4 or 5 years.

Both government and voluntary agreements between individuals and companies have their place. What governments should do is make sure that our interaction with Google and other tech giants is indeed voluntary and transparent.

Even direct democratic control would be a nightmare. In practice the bureaucratic layer probably tempers the worst excesses.

In this particular case, if Google barely makes any money on linking to news sites, and the law says they need to pay a lot of money to link to those sites, then the obvious business decision is not to link to those sites at all, which will likely hurt news sites, because they get less visitors.

There are levels of regulation that will hurt the market, rather than help it, and this sounds like it might be one of those.

I recognise the right and need of democratic governments to regulate markets, but I also recognise that this can turn the government into an authoritarian seat of power, that serves power, rather than the people. This democratic accountability needs to work, needs to be used, needs to be obeyed by the government. So that makes it good that Google shares with the Australian public what's going on.

This is absolutely a big problem with democracy: on the one hand, it requires a free press to inform voters about the state of the country and the government, but on the other hand, there's no way to guarantee that the press will provide the necessary information; the press needs to be funded, but if the government funds it, the government controls it. If the people pay for it in a free market, then the press will publish what the people want to pay for, rather than what is necessary for them to know about their government.

And that a government is a better candidate to enable and ensure free press than a private entity: we can see this in action in e.g. China where either Google keeps away from, or companies self-censor to grab some Chinese cash.

Sorry for the confusion.

I think it's vitally important that press can exist and publish completely independently from the government. Yes, that does mean there need to be laws protecting the press from censorship and subtler forms of manipulation. But this particular piece of regulation looks like it's going to hurt access to the press by forcing Google News out of the country.

Furthermore, it sounds like only large news corporations can get money from this, which makes me wonder what that means for independent journalists and small news publications.

(Admittedly fake news is a big problem, but so is a government deciding what is true and what is false.)

I think the Chinese situation is bad. But that was not my point. The point was that a government is the entity to protect, enable and allow free speech; a private entity is not.

The Chinese example shows that when a government does not allow, or protect free speech, the private entity cannot solve it either. Google cannot enable free speech in China: only the Chinese government could do that.

I used this example to show that relying on private entities to protect freedom is not a very good one: you need a government that enables them; even if "enabling" means "not interfering" or "pulling back".

This is true in the ideal case. In practice, governments don't always enable and protect free speech. Even the idea that governments should do this is fairly recent, and constantly under attack.

> "Google cannot enable free speech in China"

This is true. But Google can warn people when free speech is under attack. And some companies do have a habit of fighting for free speech.

In the end, there is no single entity that can and should bear the entire responsibility of protecting free speech; it's up to everybody.

But I agree that democratic government doesn't automatically justify everything. Minority and fundamental individual rights are a problem. There are a lot of tricky issues with self referentiality if you think about independence movements for instance.

A similar thing could easily happen today.

The coalition Hitler lead had around 240 of 580 seats. They didn't have an absolute majority because they weren't even near having any kind of majority. Of course a hundred of the other seats were held by communists and those went up in flames after the Reichstag fire and the subsequent ban on left leaning political organisations.

> A similar thing could easily happen today.

The last time a German government tried to outlaw an opposition party it ended up with the courts throwing the case out for involving too many law enforcement moles.

Whether someone should be allowed to campaign for genocide depends on the laws of the country. In modern Germany platforms like that are explicitly forbidden. But the laws of the Weimar Republic were more value agnostic.

I'm pointing out some differences between a private entity and a goverment, which the parent commenter either ignored, or forgot to mention when comparing said governement with said private entity.

They've been decent custodians to data they force users to give. It's like complimenting whoever stole my bike last year for taking good care of it.

The only right way forward is to be parsimonius with data. Never pass it along, never collect it (if possible).

But I don't have such a thing, not because it's impossible to create one.

You are asking for a paradox.

Still, I think we should be careful with our words, especially lately as words are being redefined out of apparent expedience.

So, tedious or pedantic as it may be, I feel obligated to gently push back and point out that no force is being used in this circumstance, and that this situation is indeed not comparable to one in which actual aggressive force is being used, as in your bike theft example.

> I think we should be careful with our words

I agree, but this goes both ways. So first, you shouldn't assume I didn't mean a word I choose to use just because you disagree with the usage (though in itself disagreeing is fine of course). Second, don't change my word 'force' to 'aggressive force', a term I never wrote (giving the sentence a whole new meaning).

Lastly, there was no "aggressive force" involved in stealing my bicycle. Someone took it in the middle of the night without my agreement (=coerced me to "give" the bicycle to them) in the same way that Google takes my data without my agreement.

So if you agree with the usage of 'force' in the bicycle case, I don't see an issue of using the same verb in Google case.

Again, feel free to disagree, but please don't change my words:-)

Since you reject that assumption, I'll respond to the former instead:

There's a clear difference between the two scenarios - one uses physical force (the stolen bike example), the other (Google) does not. For this reason alone, they are incomparable.

Regarding "aggressive force": I never claimed you used the phrase. I'm merely characterizing the stolen bike example. There are two kinds of force that can be used in this context - aggressive and defensive. Aggressive force is force used against a person or their property against their will; defensive force is force used in prevention of aggression. Stealing a bike is clearly an example of the former.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough.

It's like complimenting whoever stole my bike last year for taking good care of it.

I don't necessarily buy this argument. They collect a lot of data, and we could argue whether they need to collect so much data, but that is not necessarily 'stealing' your data.

So yes, I feel it's fair to call it stealing my data.

No, no it can't. I don't know how the media managed to get this so wrong and how so many people just accepted it without questioning it.

The law explicitly limits, and limited from the start, the effect that a government request could have [0]: a request cannot introduce a "systemic weakness".

Some relevant quotes of what a systemic weakness can entail:

- "one or more actions that would render systemic methods of authentication or encryption less effective"

- [when targeting a particular person] "any act or thing that will, or is likely to, jeopardise the security of any information held by any other person."

Note that this is a restriction on the "effect" that a notice can have. It's not just the the government can't ask for this, it's that the government can't ask for anything that would result in this.

So no, there are no backdoors.

What there is, is a a requirement to assist when it can be done in a way that doesn't have any of these effects. For example if the government wanted to intercept WhatsApp messages, it could require that WhatsApp introduce a hard-coded identifier into the app and if a user matches that identifier, then copies of every message would be sent to the Australian government. This doesn't introduce any systemic weakness and doesn't compromise anybody else's data, so should be permitted.

And I don't see how the above could be considered a "backdoor", as it requires that the app be pushed through the app store, a capability that WhatsApp already has.

[0]: http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997...

However pretty much every closed-source communication tool already has this systemic weakness, so the government doesn't have to ask for it to be introduced. WhatsApp, Facebook, Google etc. can all, today, as we speak, choose to push out an app update with code to send plaintext copies of a specific person's messages to Australian law enforcement/intelligence. There's nothing new here.

Open-source tools though do not have this vulnerability. Signal for example has reproducible builds and the Australian government cannot require it to remove them so that it can covertly intercept individuals' messages.

My point here is that contrary to reporting in the tech media, the law doesn't and cannot require that any backdoors be introduced. It can only require that existing ones be used.

The linked article is about planned changes that haven't yet been legislated - "Details of the new powers – which will require legislation – are not contained in the strategy"

Countries face internal security threats. For example, in the UK, the 7/7 bombers were British, ditto the Manchester and London Bridge attacks. In fact most terrorists who attack Britain are British. Are MI5 not meant to spy on Brits?

Maybe, but can you guarantee they will be good custodians tomorrow, even if they are good custodians today? Privacy is a unique problem, in the sense that it only takes one incident (intentional or not) to ruin reputations/lives etc. The best course of action is not to look for good custodians, it is not collect even one piece of data that is not absolutely necessary.

It is really about if you trust Australian gov or the US gov.

Google is a company.

I very strongly disagree. I will explain below, but first want to comment on:

> but they behave much better than the Australian government

Yes, sure, I agree. But this is a function of impact, to me. A government has much greater ability to negatively impact me than a corporation does, in that a government can outright decide to murder or imprison me, while it would take much greater effort for a corporation to do so.

So, yes, of course I trust Google more than I do any government.

But, with that said, as far as companies having my data go, Google is exactly the company I don't want to have my data. Here's why:

Why do we care if any company has our data? I think (at least for me, personally), two reasons immediately spring to mind: the data could leak to criminals who will use it to try and defraud or blackmail me, and the company might sell my data.

But why do I care if companies sell my data? If its just those two reasons, then it really just boils down to increasing the risk of hacks/leaks, but that doesn't sound like the complete picture to me. No, I also care about a company itself directly misusing my data, not just selling it to someone else (why would they want it?). So we need to define what we mean by "misusing".

For me, it means using the data against me, which, in the case of companies, typically means using it to psychologically trick me into giving them money. This is exactly the business Google is in. Their bread and butter is in figuring out ways of making me click on adverts in order to spend money on something I wouldn't otherwise have (or would have bought elsewhere). Google's entire business is built around the very reason I don't want companies to have or sell my data!

Of course Google tries to put a positive spin on it, like they are only trying to show me the most relevant things based on my interests, in order to tell me about things I didn't know about but want to know about. I don't buy it for a minute. As long as Google show me adverts for (or even have them on their platform) outright scams[1], malware or exploitative garbage like Raid Shadow Legends, I cannot believe their motives are anything but to do whatever makes consumers pay their clients money (so that they in turn keep spending money on Google). If that happens to match up with something that benefits the consumer, great, but if it also happens to be detrimental to consumers, Google doesn't care. The very fact that they willfully keep serving adverts (and don't have a way to report them, certainly don't act on reports) for actual blatant SCAMS and fraud, malware and exploitative content is proof of this.

So, no, Google have not been decent custodians of their users data, they are the very company we want to protect our data from in the first place. The fact that there are worse actors does not change that.

[1] Recent HN post about this very subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24175924

But Google has exactly this. First, it collects and saves all its users' data, and can build very detailed profiles of probably each of us. Second, and perhaps more importantly, all the information going through their systems is also piped to the NSA, i.e. spying by the US government. This is what Edward Snowden revealed.

Murdoch may have illegally wiretapped celebrities, but Google legally "wiretaps", well, everyone - on their "wires".

My understanding is that this turned out to be untrue. Wikipedia isn't super clear on this point, but I think it backs me up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...

I don't especially like News Corp but their media properties are key to providing an alternative view to liberal news coverage across English speaking countries. In any case the solution to all of this is breaking Google up into its component parts and making them pay tax.