We can't blame the LNP for all of this. All of the surveillance related bills passed in the last 10 years have been bipartisan.
I'd also go as far as to say this is what Australians want. Many people believe these laws won't be used against regular citizens and will assist in law enforcement efforts.
They’re the main ones pushing all these laws in. I am disgusted at Labor for their part but the core responsibility is 100% with the current Government.
Just look at what’s happening now - in the last few days - Morrison and Joyce claimed they’re going to bring a bill to outlaw anonymous posting on social media sites - for the sole reason that some people were talking about a rumour that the just departed NSW deputy Premier was allegedly having an affair with Joyce’s daughter… That’s just an insane basis for legislation!
I didn't make that comment to have a political discussion, only to remark on the public's attitude to surveillance laws.
However, I would like to point out the legislation to force people to provide ID to use social media and dating sites has been in the works for some time.
One thing is that the way Australian political parties work is very different to US. In US although president Biden is a democrat not all the senators from his party approve what he wants, they have some independent positions. So there are people in Democrat party who will speak against some policies. That doesn't usually happen in Australia. If it was then opposition can at least try. The few times that has happened in on personal ideological grounds like same sex marriage etc.
We absolutely can blame the LNP, because they are the Goverment, they draft the laws, they introduce them as Government bills in the parliament, they put them on the notice paper, they determine the sitting schedule that allows them to be debated and passed, they have the majority on the House committees that scrutinise them and they direct the Governor-General to provide royal assent.
They also are the the Ministers that promulgate regulations under those bills and direct their Departments to implement them.
It wasn't a "bipartisan bill". The Opposition had zero input - they moved amendments that were rejected by the Government.
I've explained how the LNP is responsible for it - it was their bill, written by them and passed through a process they control.
Make no mistake, they had the numbers to pass it regardless of what the Opposition did on the floor. The Opposition's vote either way was merely symbolic - and frankly I find it hard to fault them for making the cynical political calculation that their future political chances could only be hindered by a pointless vote against it.
In regards to metadata retention, the shadow Comms Minister at the time outright said Labor had no plans to amend or repeal the legislation if elected.
I don't buy this "they're secretly anti-surveillance!" line. They are complicit.
It's also puzzling how you imply that amending these bills would fix them. As if one more check and balance would make them not a horrific disaster. In fact, Labor's "amendments" to "fix" the AA bill was adding mandatory judge approval for mass surveillance -- sounds fixed to me!
Labor are pro surveillance and have been for a very long time. They have voted for every single surveillance bill. Their MPs ignore feedback about surveillance from constituents.
Implying they should trash fundamental principles by voting for this stuff just to cling to power is pretty weak. They won't change anything, they support it.
The metadata retention bill that Labor vehemently supported has already been viciously abused. Originally touted as being a bill designed to combat terrorism and child abuse, it's now used to investigate things like littering(!!!). Federal police have been caught using it to stalk girlfriends repeatedly. Labor support this.
The ALP were in government for 6 years between 2007 and 2013. What bills like this did they pass when they were in charge?
I don't imply that "amending the bills would fix them". I am pointing out that the Government rejected all other input on these bills, so they cannot be meaningfully described as "bipartisan".
Implying they should trash fundamental principles by voting for this stuff just to cling to power is pretty weak.
I imply nothing of the sort.
"Cling to power"? What power?
I am stating that voting against a Government bill that has the numbers to pass anyway is a quixotic action, and in this case probably both a strategically poor option.
You know what's a fundamental principle? The principle that you get the laws that the Government you vote in wants to make. The Opposition can't save you from the Government you voted for.
What do you believe is the role of the opposition if not to oppose/raise awareness about contentious legislation?
By definition they represent the minority (or else they would be the government) so almost any action they take will be "quixotic".
To me the fundamental job of the opposition is to point out the failures of the government and paint alternative paths forward. The opposition can move the public sentiment and there are enough poll watchers in the government to respond to pressures.
They have done this so they're not portrayed as soft on terror by the (mainly Murdoch) media. Yes, they're complicit, but I doubt they would have instigated this level of law if they were in power (though it's not out of the question).
Only if they admitted to doing it… The Access and Disrupt bill isn’t actually to do with evidence gathering. The way I see it happening is one agency would come up with a cover reason to hack you under that bill, which you or even other parts of the Government like the public prosecutor wouldn’t ever know about (it’s secret and there’s no obligation to inform anybody).
As far as most people would be able to tell, the Federal Police would have just raided you on an anonymous tip, seized your computers and found material you never knew was there…
It’s still heinous misconduct, but they’ve legalised 80% of the process and the level of secrecy around these agencies is so ridiculously high and the accountability so low, so it’s a lot less of a stretch now than it was just months ago - if they really feel you deserve it…
How would you know it occurred? The approval system for this is secret. It would require that Signals actively come forward and say that they did this, when some other government body finds the material and charges you with a crime.
You would need to both know it happened, and be able to prove it happened, and the usual targets for something like this (journalists) can usually only suspect the former at most.
It's one of the most dystopian laws I've ever seen.
Yes, but not as easy a defense as in the US. Since Ridgeway v The Queen ('95).
However, entrapment as a legal defense is less an overall a defense and rather a reason to exclude a particular piece of evidence from the case. There will also likely be no punishment for those who attempted the entrapment, even if the evidence ends up being excluded.
Australia does have other mechanisms by which something similar may sometimes be used, such as conflict of interest (such as in the Lawyer X trials) are more appropriate defenses, where the US may simply use entrapment.
They are bipartisan, but that does not necessarily imply that Labor would have enacted the same laws if they were the government.
They are waving through these laws so that they cannot be portrayed as "weak on security/law-and-order" by a predominantly hostile (read: News Corp) press.
It is extremely disappointing to see Labor raise all sorts of concerns about similar legislation and then wave it through anyway when the Libs refuse to make any amendments.
Yes, well that’s why I want some good independents (even Greens would be better than what we have now) holding the balance of power. The two party system isn’t working.
“It was used for an old version of the Apple Watch app, specifically to run the heavy lifting of rendering maps on your phone & then send the rendering to the Watch app. This dependency was removed with previous improvements to Apple’s OS & our app. Therefore, we’re removing this API from our iOS codebase."
The explanation is good, but that's a heck of a permission to allow. I hope Apple wisely took special precautions to make sure Uber wasn't using other functions that permission allows.
I don't see how this is reasonable. I can grant needing to do the rendering on the phone, and pushing to the watch, due to resources. But why does it need access to the screen? Is the phone not capable of rendering to a buffer in memory? (Or, because that just doesn't sound plausible & given the name of the permission in the article, can iOS not separately permission access to the screen & rendering to a buffer?)
I believe the API gave you control over the framebuffer (r/w), so theoretically it would have been possible for Uber to read and store buffer data to record your screen.
I don't know, but still sounds a bit fishy to me. Rendering to a buffer and then turning that buffer into bytes is a standard feature of any graphical OS - and iOS can't do that without hogging the entire framebuffer and granting security-critical permissions?
Also, how was this supposed to work if the user wanted to switch to another app while keeping the map open on their watch? Doesn't this mean the phone would have force-mirrored the waych the entire time? This feels like a pretty unpolished and impractical UX.
Finally, if the entire point of the permission was to draw on the screen, why would it require access to the buffer while in the background? Or was the permission simply not fine-grained enough?
Further to this, Apple auditing that Uber is not abusing this permission is pretty easy: they could reasonably have Apple engineers embedded in the team at Uber – something that would make sense for the scale, Uber is a US company, based in CA, so dealing with it in court would be possible and a fairly well-defined process, Apple could even have engineers trace the application properly during App Store review to check what it was doing at runtime, or put very stringent requirements on _how_ the entitlement was used at the code level to make it easier for them to enforce usage.
None of that scales to the millions of developers they have on their platform, but for such a key application, for essentially marketing purposes for the Apple Watch product launch, sure.
> Further to this, Apple auditing that Uber is not abusing this permission is pretty easy
Are we talking about the same company using Greyball to fool local authorities not just abroad, but also in the USA? Taking into account total lack of moral integrity in their top management, I would not believe in anything they promise.
This is exactly my point – there's very little trust needed because Apple can verify/audit one company far more than they can the millions of registered developers.
I'm not saying I agree with it, I'm saying I can understand why they did it, why it works, and that it's likely possible to do safely.
