Invasion of privacy to aid in fighting crime or drugs?

[laugh]

definitely a city dweller...do you only attend doofs with a portaloo & bottled water for sale?

im quite sceptical of vaccination. i myself & my sibling have been vaccinated (mother is a public health care system nurse), however i know two separate families with children that have mysteriously acquired autism from/after vaccination...not sure vaccination is as safe as its made out to be/sold to us. chances are those children would have lived a full & perfectly healthy life without the vaccine, as it is now they are relegated to our dismal disability system. i guess you got to look at the numbers and weigh up the risks/pro and cons.

pretty sure their life (aboriginal) expectancy has decreased since the invasion...not 100% on that though...all our filthy inbred germs & the introduction of our diet and our sweet nectar ambrosia alcohol may be partly to blame? i imagine if their way of life and them themselves were more respected we could drastically improve their life expectancy and situation in general. i find it hilarious that we just assume our way of life is that much superior...or is it that their way of life is inferior? again, thousands of years they tread this land, we have only been at it for a few hundred years yet we are running out of fresh drinking water & about to lose the reef just to get started...uranium anyone?

i think the vast majority of aboriginals if asked would of much preferred that we never turned up in the first place...im not sure flushing toilets & vaccinations are all that high on their necessity list or whatever...who needs sanitized water when we introduced metho?

things need to be improved, there is no question!! we have imposed & forced our failing system upon them...im all about a happy medium...although im no doubt probably just dreaming.

as for the steaks...kangaroo my friend, kangaroo steaks...its a much healthier meat anyways...i trust you killed that turtle humanely

ps sorry for the highjack 88brenno

 

[88brenno]

You seem to be missing the point, despite the life expectancy, they lived their life to the full extent and were not bound by society's expectations, they were happy and respected the land, at the rate were going there will be no resources left to have any kind of life.

Back in the old days before captain cock invaded, the general health of people was higher, not only mentally, but physically. People wouldn't even consider suicide, but in this day and age there seem to be so many illnesses that simply did not exist a long time ago, as the people were always occupied having fun and learning.

There was no xbox/pc/ whatever to keep your mind occupied, you would have genuine fun in the outback.

@laugh- Thats ok mate, I am enjoying the thread right there with your views.

 

[laugh]

^ cool man ^^^ i enjoy a little bustling with busty he's hearts in the right place just not sure about his head with respect

i guess its a trade off...but what is it that we have provided that they (aboriginals) couldnt have done without, anything? we are living longer so we can make more money for the man...it will be like the matrix soon where we are just hooked up to provide energy to the system. whats the point in living longer to just work more hours...i think id rather have the good life for 40 yrs & die with dignity and respect than live till im 110 hating my working life knowing all iv done is make my boss more money while fucking everything around me justified by $$$...fuck this system! hell in our system we cant even euthanise ourselves...seems pretty close to slavery to me

my parents HAVE to work like 10 yrs longer now just to be able to keep a roof over their head cause all their super mysteriously went missing.

back on topic to a certain extent...feel the palpable fear, its a bit old but still relevant imo

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/freedoms-are-losing-out-to-fear-20090813-ejst.html

how many of us are actually pressured about terrorism? how many terrorist attacks has australia had? what exactly is a terrorist, someone that doesnt believe in jesus christ or disagrees with the government...? what exactly is a terrorist? do they all wear turbans and smoke hash rather than drink piss

saw a show the other night about when the communists attempted to invade & take over afghanistan some years ago...its like history repeating...guess what the commies got whipped same as us capitalists are getting whipped & sent home with our tales between our legs...how many lives does it take to invade oil reserves & poppy plantations...too many!

 

[Busty St Clare]

For me there is a difference between getting back to nature and scratching for existence from day to day. I enjoy my down time, the aboriginal life was not all sitting around catching fish for dinner, it was daily survival, not Mon-Friday and two days off. If you want to sit in a cave and fight the elements 365/yr there is nothing stopping you, "the man" couldn't give two shits if you upped and went to live in the desert, so there isn't any point in complaining that you are a slave to money or capitalism. Back your things and go, just leave behind anything invented since the bronze age.

Believe it or not life expectancy for Western men in 1900 was a bit over 45. Modern medicine has doubled that in little over 100 yrs. I can't find the life expectancy of Aborigines pre 1780 but no evidence exists that would convince me that a life out in the wild would have been easier than what European civilization has bought them. Of course alcohol and disease is the biggest concern now days but there is nothing stopping any Australian from saying No and living sober.

 

[laugh]

your telling me about the aboriginal way of life...i appreciate that, thanks for the schooling! pity all the aboriginals dont get such an equal education...its a shame that, guess you cant win em all.

mate you wouldn't even be allowed to live nomadically in the desert these days, i'm sure there would be a permit & taxation required...are there any nomads left in australia? they probably saw the bright light and walked towards the nearest umm hospital or perhaps bottle shop ey brah.

i'm surprised you would be so kind as to leave me the desert, thats pretty generous of you!...what if i wanted to pitch my hut (or live in a cave with a bronze age axe/spear/boomerang) somewhere like"Djubuguli" thats umm "Bennelong Point" in Sydney you know somewhere half decent where i could live comfortably with abundant wild life and fish or would all the white folk shoot me or incarcerate me for trying...if we are honest with ourselves we know the answer and it aint pretty? would i need a nsw fishing licence, could i trade it for some pippi or yam or fish? i mean why didn't all the white folk invade & move out to the desert and leave anywhere half decent/coastal for the aborigines to live...thats right we did we left them all the shitty mishes up and down the coast...pushed out of the towns and treated like animals? haha what a silly & selfish joke bro! you are aware of what hypocrisy means right? if the aboriginal people are so happy with our invasion & our brutally imposed way of life & greedy capitalist system they got a funny way of showing their appreciation...yeh its their fault

so if im relegated to the waste lands or the place uninhabited by the white folk the generous desert what happens when the white folk want to come out to the desert and mine all the 'resources' like uranium...where would i go then?

why so defensive of the man & capitalism? is it a perfect world we live in, couldn't be improved upon at all...equality is running rife? capitalism may be working well for the wealthy at present but it cannot & will not continue because it is based on ever increasing growth...well shit our resources are finite and we cannot continue the current growth rates it is just not possible...shit is beginning to hit the fan now & by the time we are old and wise life is going to be much more difficult than we have it now...id call that a failing system...how can we continue the growth rates? capitalism has had a good run its time for something better i think we all realise that?

 

[footscrazy]

This has got way off topic

Interesting debate though. Please calm down on the antagonism though, I don't think it's necessary or respectable to start getting personal if someone disagrees with you. I think many interesting points have been raised, but they're getting drowned out in the emotion.

laugh, a book that may interest you is 'The Biggest Estate on Earth', which describes the complex land management practices Indigenous people have used over tens of thousands of years in Australia. I've started reading it and it seems excellent, though I haven't got around to buying it yet.

As an environmental scientist particularly interested in sustainability myself, I've done quite a lot of research into environmental change over the quaternary period (particularly 250,000 years ago to the present) in Australia. First off, I'll say that I think capitalism and sustainability are contradictory. But I think a romanticised view of 'Indigenous people' as a single entity completely in tune with nature is also simplistic, and obscures the reality, that 'Aboriginal' doesn't mean one thing, and refers to a huge variety of different cultures, practices and ways of life. Furthermore, Indigenous people have had a significant impact on the landscape, through their landuse practices, and have an extinction record rivalling Europeans - they are widely believed to have hunted the megafauna (with the exception of the kangaroo) to extinction.

I think the way Indigenous people were treated was abhorrent, and I think there's a lot that can be learnt from Indigenous practices -I believe they worked far more with the land than the European culture ever has. Too many of our modern farming practices, urban planning, house design and the list goes on, are transplanted from Europe and that just doesn't work here. We can force it to happen, but working with Australia's unique climate, landscape, flora and fauna etc is likely to be more efficient, productive and sustainable in the long term. The fact remains though, the biggest reason for the lower impact Indigenous people had on the land, was due to their much smaller population size. Their way of life is simply not possible in Australia now, with a population of the size we have. However wrong what happened was, we simply can't go back now. We have to come up with new ways to live more sustainably.

It's just not easy though. It's one thing to sit there and spew vitriol at capitalism, but quite another to offer up any realistic alternatives. I agree that sustainability can't, or wont happen under capitalism. But I don't know what a better system would look like. Those interested in alternatives might be interested to look at georgism/geoism.

 

[thestudent14]

I'm more with Busty on this one, there's nothing stopping us from living away from civilisation and going off to do our own thing, it may be a hastle to get certain permits/licences but it's definitely doable. You speak of our parents working an extra 10 years to pay off their house, but the Aboriginals houses 100 years ago don't compare to any modern house in the slightest, nor did they have plumbing / hot water / electricity. I whole heartadly agree that they were much much better for the environment but every Aboriginal I've ever spoken to about the topic love living in modern Australia and are grateful for what the west has brought here despite how wrong it was to take land from their ancestors.

I like Busty would rather live longer in a modern lifestyle than the way's of the past. I agree that more Aboriginals in parliment would be a good thing, but purely based on what they say not because of the colour of their skin. If you think that Aboriginals would run the country better because of their race and history then I think whilst you're heart is in the right place, that statement is in fact actually racist and perhaps you should re-assess. I know particularly in N.T a lot of Aboriginals live in severe poverty, it's a problem that our country does try to tackle but I definitely think needs work. A lot of these families struggle to survive, but as busty stated before this country was invaded aboriginal life was a struggle for survival. The resource's we work with are finite, but a great deal of research goes in to ways to minimilse the resources we waste. It's still beyond me that Australia doesn't run off Nuclear power as we have the most Uranium anywhere in the world (23% of the global uranium). And nuclear power is the most economic, and is the most environmental form of power apart from renewable (wind, solar etc.) I'm getting off topic so I'll just stop here.

 

[spacejunk]

As an environmental scientist particularly interested in sustainability myself, I've done quite a lot of research into environmental change over the quaternary period (particularly 250,000 years ago to the present) in Australia. First off, I'll say that I think capitalism and sustainability are contradictory. But I think a romanticised view of 'Indigenous people' as a single entity completely in tune with nature is also simplistic, and obscures the reality, that 'Aboriginal' doesn't mean one thing, and refers to a huge variety of different cultures, practices and ways of life. Furthermore, Indigenous people have had a significant impact on the landscape, through their landuse practices, and have an extinction record rivalling Europeans - they are widely believed to have hunted the megafauna (with the exception of the kangaroo) to extinction.

^ absolutely spot on foots. especially agree with the bit about capitalism (or, at least capitalism as we know and practice it) being mutually exclusive with true environmental sustainability.

i think busty's doing his usual clown act to rile everyone up - which is a shame, because there are often some intelligent ideas in there with all the attempts to get a reaction.
australian indigenous cultures - as you rightly point out, foots - are/were many are varied.
busty may be right in saying that pre-white colonial aboriginal australians' life was "not all sitting around catching fish for dinner" - but so what if what you are implying by saying that is effectively the case??
apologists for colonialism have a tendency to argue that "nothing was being done with the land, so it was there for the taking". pretty much the gist of 'terra nullius'. this is really just a hideous reflection on anglocentric thinking - that if you aren't using the land for a specific (agricultural) purpose, you are wasting it.
in a land of plenty - for those who know how to find, catch, trade, store and make it - agriculture made little sense on this continent before the white man arrived. in a hot and arid place, i'm sure survival very often was "all sitting (or standing/spearing) around catching fish for dinner"
the tragedy is that a great amount of human knowledge - the knowledge of this land - was lost when the pastoralists, the squatters and the missionaries moved in.
i doubt many "city dwellers" would last long in the australian outback elements even with the best of intentions. pre-invasion australia had an elaborate series of cultural exchanges, indigenous understandings of the natural world which are now fading from our collective memory. it's a harsh continent out there. huge stretches of land without any sign of water or anything obvious to eat.
even seasoned hikers/mountaineers perish fairly regularly when they get lost. it really isn't as simple as "oh, i'll find some water, i'll catch some food, build a fire; she'll be right".
through materialistic anglo-european cultural eyes, a desert-dwelling people may seem 'primitive' or their lifestyle may seem simple or lazy. but in harsh, unforgiving landscapes, people adapt in the only way darwinian evolution knows how.

there is a great romanticisation of indigenous sustainability - a myth of humans having a natural place in this ancient ecosystem, beyond that of hunter and yes - causing a great many extinctions. what people perhaps forget in all of this is that we are all human beings, with similar drives and instincts - just different ways of acting them out.
humans seem driven more than most animals of living beyond their material means, of destruction and killing for the sake of ego and status. this is probably found in most human societies, i imagine. it's that ape mentality. as far as i know, humans are the only apes that ever lived in australia, and we were an "invasive species" to start with.

are humans capable of true sustainability? perhaps, in the current world we inhabit, this is unlikely. we can heal the sick through the winter, our elderly live long lives, and all the while we consume more and more. when we were more vulnerable to the earth's climatic extremes or natural thinning of numbers - then sustainable humanity may have been a part of the world's natural ecosystem. but we've gone beyond that - into a world of unimaginable comfort for some, and dirty squalor for others. i would love to think the next step is that we are able to use that human ingenuity for the purpose of obtaining self-sufficience of energy, that our endeavours will some day not cost the earth.
"progress" is such a contradictory notion. it's meaning varies completely on the context and individual values.
sometimes i think we only regress (in terms of the 'big picture') but i love having this view challenged too.


how did we get to this topic????

haha sorry i thought used car salesman or politician would be too offensive...particularly in our current political umm environment

maybe i should become a preacher? tax-free earnings, right?

edit -

I whole heartadly agree that they were much much better for the environment but every Aboriginal I've ever spoken to about the topic love living in modern Australia and are grateful for what the west has brought here despite how wrong it was to take land from their ancestors.

^
i think this is an entirely different conversation. yes, the modern world has its conveniences - it's benefits and it's percieved stability. environmental impacts aside, the social harm inflicted on australia's indigenous inhabitants is some of the most extreme imaginable.
white colonialists earnestly (it seems) believed that these folk were unable to look after themselves, their children, their wellbeing - or the survival of their communities. arguably this was an excuse to rid the land of people that lived on it, so it could be cleared for pasture)
there was concerted effort to take young aboriginal kids away from their families and teach them "white" "christian" "civilised" ways to live. this went on for decades, robbing entire tribal groups of their ancient traditions and oral history, their language, spirituality and culture.
it is a wound that has not healed, and is unlikely to for a long time yet.
let's not confuse western industrial society's comforts and the dark, bloody history of this continent...(whilst we stray even further from the topic at hand)

 

[footscrazy]

in a land of plenty - for those who know how to find, catch, trade, store and make it - agriculture made little sense on this continent before the white man arrived. in a hot and arid place, i'm sure survival very often was "all sitting (or standing/spearing) around catching fish for dinner"

through materialistic anglo-european cultural eyes, a desert-dwelling people may seem 'primitive' or their lifestyle may seem simple or lazy. but in harsh, unforgiving landscapes, people adapt in the only way darwinian evolution knows how.

+1. For subsistence, hunting and gathering involves less output of energy than agriculture, per capita. The benefit of agriculture comes when food production is outsourced to some members of society, to sustain other members of the population involved in alternative trades. It's only when agriculture can relieve some members of the population of the burden of finding food that they can focus on developing alternative practices and skills.

However, of utmost importance in this equation is climate. Agriculture depends on regular seasonal patterns to develop, which Australia doesn't have - south western Australia, for example, has the the most variable rainfall in the world. Societies have settled and flourished in Northern Europe only because without fail, Spring has followed Winter, and people can plan to stockpile enough food to get them through Winter, because they know, invariably, it will break.

Those same conditions just aren't present in Australia. Agriculture is not productive or efficent in a land where seasons are not predictably defined, or rainfall is not guaranteed to come. Hunting and gathering and firestick farming in Indigenous Australians is not a primitive behaviour but the most highly specialised of adaptive behaviours - the most predictable and efficient sourcing of food for the conditions that prevail. Modern agriculture in Australia is only so productive because of technology - particularly fertilisers and irrigation, but this isn't sustainable. Indigenous Australian cultures are also marked by cooperation - another adaptation to the harsh environment also seen in the flora and fauna of Australia more than anywhere else in the world, as opposed to the competition seen elsewhere.

 

[Black Rabbit of Inle]

are humans capable of true sustainability?

Any person with the least bit of knowledge and tact can (through trial and error) set up a 100% self sustaining lifestyle. It may take a while and you may have to rely on modern conveniences in the beginning, but it is possible.

Even if the entire world become self sufficient, with the advances in modern medicine, and overpopulation, we are going to face the problem of living 'too long' of a lifespan. It will eventually come down to having to cull the elderly or impose breeding restrictions. It's something I haven't heard many speak of and I don't think there is a plan in place if it happens.

 

[footscrazy]

Any person with the least bit of knowledge and tact can (through trial and error) set up a 100% self sustaining lifestyle.

It may be possible for any person to become completely self sufficient, but it's still not possible for every person to do it, and that's the main problem.

I question the validity of the first statement too, because I think in the vast majority of cases an individual who claims to be 'self sufficient' has simply transferred their footprint spatially or temporally. For example, someone who buys a solar panel has simply offset the energy required to produce the panel to the manufacturer (and, manufacturing solar panels uses far more energy than they ever regenerate). Self sustaining does not equal sustainability.

 

[Black Rabbit of Inle]

It may be possible for any person to become completely self sufficient, but it's still not possible for every person to do it, and that's the main problem.

I question the validity of the first statement too, because I think in the vast majority of cases an individual who claims to be 'self sufficient' has simply transferred their footprint spatially or temporally.

I use the term 'self sufficient' with that in mind.

Forgoing the use of any modern comfort (post 1900), it is very possible.

 

[thestudent14]

I don't think that's true about solar panels foots. They're designed to outlast the energy required to manufacture them. And to say other wise would defeat their environmental purpose which is widely accepted, furthermore to say that they will never catch up is a flawed statement as they can last endlessly AKAIK. The one on the MarsRover for example whilst only small, generated power to one of the rovers for over 18months and they only stop working if they end up with dust over the lens's or stays night for 7+ month that their is 0% energy left, then only need a fraction of a % to be able to recharge the panels themselves.

The myth is that it takes more energy to produce solar panels than the energy they produce from the sunlight.

Crystalline silicon PV systems presently have energy pay-back times of 1.5-2 years for South-European locations and 2.7-3.5 years for Middle-European locations. The U.S. is less than 1.5 years currently.

The accounting life estimate for solar panels is 20 years typically, but they last longer than that, many are guaranteed for at least 20 years, with no definite end due to time.

That's old technology, nothing new here, no inventions, it's been this way for 20 years, I know because I installed solar panels in 1984 and they're still going strong.

There are new panels that will improve that number as well as output per size.

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070822061105AAiyY0G


As far as people becoming completely self sufficient, I saw a doco (it's pretty weak called doomsday preppers). But anyway on one of the episodes a husband and wife are preparing for THE ZOMBIE APOCOLYPSE! Having said that they've put great effort into making themself completely sustainable, they have animals that they can harvest or get eggs from, they use the methane from the shit of the animals and themselves for their gas stove. Filtered water tanks, small self made wind power generators and a basic plumbing system. I 'm not saying this would be completely self sustainable, but it was definitely quite close.

 

[88brenno]

I saw an episode where they predict yellowstone volcano to erupt, if that were the case i dont see those wind powered generators doimg much.

 

[Juvenile]

So with the clock ticking on the implementation of metadata collection, who here is taking steps to stop their's ending up in the database?

I must say with local police and who knows what other government agencies being able to access metadata, I'm probably going to abandon this bluelight account. I'll probably only visit bluelight via TOR or possibly VPN.


The idea of the 5 eyes xkeyscore is scary enough, but my understanding is it's mostly just 3/5 letter agencies with access to this.

Who knows who will end up with access to everyone's browsing history with what is coming. ATO? Private investigators ? Medicare? Private Health insurance? Prospective employers? Backhats when they inevitably gain access to it?

 

[billbuilds]

@laugh
Maybe I did come across a bit harsh at first, I just get frustrated when I see people make claims that I find ridiculous and are often un-informed. I pry myself on learning facts and putting the pieces together of what is and isn't related and this is a topic that interests me greatly. If you want to know more about my childhood, I went to a poor primary school and a below average highschool. My parents whilst both very intelligent people, my Mum suffered from a serious gambling addiction so don't think for a second that my family would be richer then you. This was not the type of gambling problem of a couple hundred dollars a week.
This was a gambling problem that cost us everything, our house, our cars, any valuable assets, and more importantly My dad will be paying off my Mothers bills for the rest of his life (more money then I care to share telling) so don't think for a second that I'm someone who's had life handed over to me easily.

I currently work two jobs and attend uni full time, it's not easy, it's fucking hard underpaid work. But I want to be an Engineer, truth be told one of the only things I care about more then Drug Reform is the environment. I hope to one day be in a position to make changes to our policy's with air and solar energy and if possible nuclear.

Becoming a mental health care professional is a really good job and it's definitely something I admire people who choose to work in that field.

The reason I got so annoyed before was because I see people's rants, and I just don't think their helpful and I actually believe them to be counter-productive. Having said that I stand for freedom of speech first before all else so I'll always support your right to say what you want to say and as a rule I try not to be judgemental. I've seen small freedoms get taken away over the last decade, things like people being able to smoke on the streets of Brisbane, or the police having the ability to give you a fine for swearing in public (AFAIK this has never been enforced but I don't believe that they should have this power),or the fact that heaps of beach's you can no longer walk your dog or fly a kite at (even though nothing ever goes wrong) or the fact that the police in Victoria can search whats on your person any where at any time to look for weapons (which I have no doubt is being abused to bust people for small amounts of drugs.

I hate the idea that our country will be able to look into everyones computers or phones and see what we've been saying. The idea is scary.

But I don't believe that most of the people in power are actively trying to take freedoms away, they see them as answers to problems without looking at the bigger picture and with a whole generation of people who were brought up with propaganda saying "Just Say No!" they're views have become skewed because they believe drugs to be a bigger threat than what they are.

I brought up those examples before to show that my eye's are very open and pay a hell of a lot of attention to the world around us. But you have to look at whats happening all around the world to see where Australia is headed. We're a vastly isolated country from most of the first world countries, it means targeting things like our internet connections and phone connections in their eyes is going to be a way of getting a step ahead. If they ever did get to a point like this though, any criminal who had files to hide I'm sure they could find a way around it, or as any smart person would do talk in code on their phones. But the progress I see doesn't start here, or the other side of the world, it's already starting everywhere. Each year country's get more acceptant of cannabis, and I suspect Ecstasy will soon follow into a more mainstream discussion (where cannabis has been for about 30 years).
With the success that I believe the legalisation of that drug will bring other country's will follow, it's already been starting. Sure at the moment it's still too unpopular in Australia on a political level to suggest such a thing, but as the next generation starts to grow up the hate of drugs is decreasing and the love of freedoms will become a more popular agenda again.

A huge part of politics is people not wanting to upset the mass's, and often that means coming down harder on the minority. But as times change and drugs start being treated as medical issues you will have to see a change in the way politician's prioritise their goals, and whilst sometimes tragedy's do occur like . I still believe that a lot of people are starting to see them as medical issues. When there is something that is strange to someone and has a potential for harm their instincts is to ban it and stop it. But in these days and times, methods of keeping true statistics hidden from the general public are a thing of the past because of social media or websites like erowid and bluelight. And finally the Drug War has been going for 40 years, it seems like forever but it's also only one generation, we may not see a huge change over the next 20 years, but once our kids generation are Adults I can't see how they would want something that has failed as badly as The Drug War to keep on going.

I have more, but if I wanted to keep writing I should write a blog entry instead.

It dosent matter where someone comes from, i come from a very intelligent family (hard working, not rich and entitled but very intelligent), In direct lineage only going to my grandparents there are 9 PHD (and higher) level qualifications (one side was from working class so only 2 of my grandparents educated), and all of my cousins but 1 have been to uni (dont bother trying to count Masters, Bsc ect). But none of that stopped me from ending up where i am, i suffered from lesser drug addiction like OTC and precription and absolutely hate the stuff, only to go on to harder drugs with the full knowladge of what would happen to me (sourced H, needles and all the research needed to learn to be a junkie without talking to anyone else, just a computer and nothing but time)

l see the personal freedoms being taken away, all my mail is opened by customs, i feel like im being watched and set up constantly, (although this is iikely stims), and in a few days i willl be completely fucked when my benzo supply runs dry with no plan of action. I still bluelight via the web although i should get a new account [this one reminds me of when i was a shit head 12 yr old comming down to learn how to score, but ended up being scared of my addictions and neededinge the adivce of others which i wont forget. Im so paranoid that i can imagine this post being read out in a court room, but my hard drive has been removed from my computer and burried in a cave a few km's from here.

FUCK ME i do i need help.

Drugs are bad for some people, espescially me who has no control what so ever. Unfortunatly because customs checks all my mail, $1,000 of mushroom supplies are likely going to be burned (NOT PSYC ones, just eating and looking pretty), unemployed so im just having fun trying to grow all the different species and learn the science. i would love to leave the city and get back to nature, where i dont need drugs. All i have to do is eat to survive but i cant even be bothered doing that. Anyway just ranting, ive got to get my life in order and im completely unable to do simple tasks, my mind is broken and i keep telling myself that its all in my head and your not about to have your door kicked in, ive spent the past week looking for some logs from a tree. (If anyone has any of the Quercus spp. (Oaks of any variety and cousins, not just english oak with big acorns) in their yard and would let me cut of a limb, problem solved. I need some need bluelight friends to talk to... Hit me with a pm if you want to talk. sick of my own thoughts, phones broken, no car, computer in parts in various location, most of which ive forgotten.

The police should get the powers for the reasons that they outlined (terrorism) but i know its going to creep and sooner or later its just going to be another tool in every cops bag of tricks, at least i know the NSW cops arnt after me. im dumb enough to hand myself in to see if they had any warrants out on me, haha (they dont, lovely sargent at the desk suggested that maybe ice isnt such a good thing to be doing. i may be dumb but i only ever hurt myself.

 

[billbuilds]

and if that isnt enough. i already know where the oaks arehere here and here, every tree type, location and all its data is registered, even if its in your house people can report seeing them haha.

 

[chugs]

So with the clock ticking on the implementation of metadata collection, who here is taking steps to stop their's ending up in the database?

don't worry. The entire idea is almost impossible to implement.

I must say with local police and who knows what other government agencies being able to access metadata, I'm probably going to abandon this bluelight account. I'll probably only visit bluelight via TOR or possibly VPN.

this is the irony of the situation. If Law Enforcement want access to your information they can do so under section 282/283 of the Telecommunications Act and do not need to provide a warrant. The only need a warrant to do a interception.

Now if the cops wanted to know about you - Juvenile - they'll obviously have to know who you are in order to look at your data so thus the only difference is that they should have a little bit more then what they normally get in a 282 request for information.

I'll explain the problem in a moment but anonymity is going to be a powerful thing

The idea of the 5 eyes xkeyscore is scary enough, but my understanding is it's mostly just 3/5 letter agencies with access to this.

Who knows who will end up with access to everyone's browsing history with what is coming. ATO? Private investigators ? Medicare? Private Health insurance? Prospective employers? Backhats when they inevitably gain access to it?

Ok so i work for a telco. I play in metadata all day long. I've seen into the dirty souls of you bastards and its filfthy in there.

However there are limits. So lets have a think about how it works in terms of the collection of data/information.

Every five minutes your telecommunication company is capturing the to/from/port/protocol and a few bits and bobs of the traffic that is passing between you and your service. That is stored in a log along. That's it and its capture and storage is a huge undertaken. But this information doesn't contain the actual payload of your TCP/IP packet. It doesn't contain the URL, or what was transmitted i.e. a post on blue light. Capturing that additional information would be an immense undertaking. The storage system for the to/from IP address stuff is huge. For the small telcos I worked for we were talking about 50TB of logs just for 6 months. Worse the quality of the logs would be degraded as time went on i.e. the system would delete parts of the information in the logs.

Now out of a few thousands employees in the telcos i worked for that did this there would be a handful of people who knew of this IP logging system and of that only 1-3 or so who would regularly use i.e. that was basically me. So all of that data was being captured for the odd complaints that would come through i.e. You billed me lots for crap i didn't download. Using this IP logging system was insanely difficult and personally it took me years to learn how to use effectively.

Think about how many IP addresses your computer connects to at any given moment. We're talking thousands on a daily basis. Just working out excess usage was hard enough.

Now what is being suggested but is no way being clarified by the government is the idea that your ISP is meant to capture more than then what computer you connected to and when. Its implied that they want to know what was carried when you connected to the other party. So the actual packet, the payload. The contents of the traffic. How they'd do it for HTTPs/VPN/encrypted traffic is beyond me but what whatever. The amount will be huge.

It's just stupendously insane really. Like in 2014 Australians used petabytes of internet. Its pretty much impossible to calculate but external traffic from outside of Australia came to petabytes and is quickly predicted to hit exobytes within the next ten years. The traffic within Australia would have been absolutely massive. The services your ISPs offer, proxies, transparent caches, FTP, peering and all the rest of it accounts for insane quantities of traffic. Then you have traffic that companies generate. All of those retail chains have VPN's that carry data between the shops back to the head-offices, all the traffic the corporates create and so on. What about government departments. They generate huge amount of traffic and their ISP's networks don't differentiate between the traffic carried for Juvenile or Federal Police - so basically all that government traffic needs to be stored. What about SKA (Square Kilometre Array)? Will Arnnet be excused? SKA alone will create more traffic then the entire internet!

With that in mind imagine capturing all of that traffic. Better still to make it easier imagine the data centre, if it was all collected into one place, necessary to store all that information. We're talking about exabyte storage.

Of course there is no centralised location for the capturing of all this data. The government has put the onus back onto the telcos to setup the storage system. So there are like 500 ISPs and a good 10+ major carriers. All running their own storage and access solutions.

Then you have a final problem. So let's pretend the telcos aren't bankrupted trying to do this and these huge mounds of data is available to law enforcement and government agencies. How much of it will they actually use?

I know, having worked with law enforcement agencies that outside of a few thousand investigations a year that the vast majority of the data will never be used or viewed. The entire scheme will cost hundreds of millions (probably billions in the end) and 99% of the data will never be used.

We haven't even talked about the data storage required for capturing phone metadata. Again are they talking about capturing the payload/content of the calls? GPS coordinates? switch data, geography of the a and b-party? International switching data? SMS's, texts? The list is huge and the storage would be even bigger. Indeed in the metadata section alone for voice services there is a huge amount of data that is deleted at the switch level. Just capturing will be huge let alone making it accessible for years. Even if the data capture requirements were less then what I've theorised about what the government has implied on that front is already something that is beyond the technical capabilities of our telcos.

At the end of the day the data will not be used, will cost hundreds of millions, billions to store and for the most part won't make any difference to investigations. Though I can see the government using it for incredibly petty and awful ways.