Tuesday 10 March 2015

Australians not in favour of Coalition sending more troops to fight Isis – poll

Australians not in favour of Coalition sending more troops to fight Isis – poll

 Iraqi forces fighting
Islamic State




Tony Abbott speaks to troops



Tony Abbott announced last week that Australia will send another 300
troops to Iraq alongside forces from New Zealand on a joint training
mission to train the Iraqi military. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP



The Abbott government’s recent decision to deploy more Australian
troops to train Iraqi forces is not popular with the Australian public,
according to the latest Essential poll.



Fifty per cent of respondents in the new poll published Tuesday
disapproved of sending more Australian soldiers to help train the Iraqi
forces currently fighting Islamic State militants.



Only 36% approved of the decision – and only 12% of the Essential sample think an increased Australian military presence in Iraq will make Australia safer from terrorism.


The prime minister confirmed a week ago
that Australia will send another 300 troops to Iraq alongside forces
from New Zealand on a joint training mission to train the Iraqi
military. The fresh deployment is expected to begin in May, and will
involve regular Australian forces based in Taji, north-west of Baghdad.



The deployment is supported by the Labor opposition.


The Essential poll indicates a majority of Coalition voters approve of the deployment, but 60% of Labor voters disapprove.


The latest poll also charts a high degree of scepticism about whether engagement with the conflict in Iraq is beneficial for Australia’s national security.


Tony Abbott says regularly that he understands Australians are
reluctant to reach out to far away conflicts, but this particular
conflagration is reaching out to us – citing domestic counter-terrorism
risks posed by radicalisation.




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But
30% of the Essential sample think sending more troops to Iraq will make
Australia less safe from terrorism. Only 12% believe engagement will
make Australia safer.



Nearly half of the sample think the current deployment will make no difference to the domestic security outlook.


Evidence given by MI5 to the Chilcot inquiry into the war in Iraq in
2003 confirmed the US-led invasion substantially increased the threat of
terrorist attacks, and was a significant factor causing radicalisation
of young Muslims.



This testimony backed the observation of the then Australian police
chief, Mick Keelty, that the Iraq invasion was likely linked to
terrorist acts, such as the Madrid bombings in 2004. Keelty was
lambasted by the Howard government for departing from the official
government line on the war.



On broader political indicators, a separate poll, the Newspoll, published by the Australian newspaper on Tuesday, recorded Labor
restoring a commanding lead over the Coalition. The two-party preferred
result had Labor federally on 55% and the Coalition on 45%.



The prime minister’s satisfaction rating increased by three points in
Tuesday’s survey, which is within the poll’s margin of error.



Essential also recorded a favourable movement for the prime minister.
Abbott’s disapproval rating dropped six points since February – and
there was a 2% increase in his approval rating.



The government has been in the process of dumping unpopular policies
in the wake of efforts by backbenchers to spill the Liberal party
leadership.



Monday 2 March 2015

Data retention — great news for criminals and foreign companies –

Data retention — great news for criminals and foreign companies –

Data retention — great news for criminals and foreign companies








There are two clear winners from Labor’s decision to cave in
to Tony Abbott’s terrorism and child porn hysteria and wave through
Australia’s biggest-ever mass surveillance scheme: criminals and
overseas communications providers.



The copyright cartel might count itself a winner as well,
although the extent to which that is true now rests with the
Attorney-General’s Department and the government’s legislative drafters.



As Crikey has explained ad nauseam, data retention
won’t work to improve crime clearance rates. We know that because in
several countries overseas both data retention and more far-reaching
surveillance schemes have been demonstrated not to help the cause of
fighting crime and terrorism. But why will crooks and terrorists benefit
from data retention? Data retention will generate tens of petabytes of
data. The problem with more data available to authorities is that,
inevitably, it will lead to more “false positives”
— potential leads for investigators and counter-terrorism agencies that
require investigation, but which turn out to be dead ends (although, in
one case, not before an academic spent three weeks behind bars
after his family was held at gunpoint). For a resource-constrained
agency, investigations that lead nowhere are a misallocation of precious
time, money and staff that could be better directed at pursuing real
perpetrators. Just ask the Danish police, who complained of being overwhelmed with information from the Danish data retention scheme.



The other big winners will be foreign companies that offer
encryption, anonymisation and ephemeral message services. VPN companies
in particular must be delighted with the imposition of data retention,
since it will encourage further mass market interest in Australia in
their services as Australians decide it’s time they went dark (not to
mention enabling them to access US-only media services). But services
providers who offer encryption will also benefit — Google, for example, is moving to offer end-to-end encryption on Gmail. Ephemeral message apps are also growing rapidly in popularity
(politicians have started using Wickr to message each other, while
imposing data retention on the rest of us — and if Luddite politicians
are using it, you think criminals aren’t?).



How do we know this shift to more encryption will happen?
Because it already has, according to the Public Service’s scopophiliacs,
the AGD, who told JCIS that the problem of “[losing] reliable access to the content of communications” has worsened since “the Snowden disclosures”.



Data retention will simply encourage more people to hide
their personal data from  — literally and figuratively — unwarranted
surveillance, thereby making the problem data retention is intended to
address worse not better. Of course, that’s not a problem for
security agencies, because as per AGD’s invocation of the growing use of
encryption as justification for data retention, that will merely
provide the basis for further demands for surveillance powers. Data
retention will not be the last attempt to expand mass surveillance in
Australia; agencies will demand, and get, more and more power to monitor
us.



As for the copyright cartel, data retention should prove a
winner for them, because it will provide a trove of data that they can
access using discovery and subpoena powers in civil litigation to pursue
file-sharers foolish enough not to use a VPN. It will also be used by
the Australian Federal Police, which lately has been at pains to insist
it would not be used to go after file-sharers, but which can’t undo the
damage caused by the honesty of AFP Commissioner Andrew Colvin himself,
who admitted in October “illegal downloads, piracy, cybercrimes,
cybersecurity. All of these matters, our ability to investigate them is
absolutely pinned on our ability to retrieve and use metadata.”



There’s a fly in that particular ointment. The committee
recommended that data retained solely for the purposes of the data
retention scheme not be accessible to civil litigants, such as the
copyright cartel. However, it suggested the Attorney-General be given a
regulation-making power to provide for exceptions to that prohibition.
Given his track record in bending over backwards for the copyright
cartel, no one seriously expects that George Brandis would refuse a
request from his good friends at News Corp or Sony to enable access to
the vast trove of data.



As for consumers — well, we’re the big losers. We’ll have to
pay a surveillance tax for the privilege of being spied on by our own
government, through both taxes and higher ISP costs to fund this vast
scheme. And when — when is the correct word, not if — 
our data is stolen by hackers, there’s not even a guarantee we’ll even
be told about it — there’s no mandatory data breach notification system
in Australia, though JCIS wants one legislated sometime this year.



Welcome to the world of mass surveillance — a world where
those with nothing to hide have plenty to fear, and criminals and
terrorists can feel more secure than ever.