site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   640 thread views

Transnational Thursday for September 12, 2024

Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.

4
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Australia

I’ve been too busy to be a post-guy rather than a reply-guy recently, but I’m going to try to at least make a few posts to improve my seed-leech ratio. Anyways…

Since the arrest of Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov there seems to have been an uptick in governments pressuring messaging apps and social media to allow backdoor access.

Australia is no exception with the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Australia’s Security Service) Mike Burgess recently threatening to force tech companies to provide access to encrypted chats when presented with a warrant.

The article above quotes Burgess as saying:

“I understand there are people who really need it in some countries, but in this country, we're subject to the rule of law, and if you're doing nothing wrong, you've got privacy because no one's looking at it”

I find this somewhat lacking and one of the usual government tropes of ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide, you won’t mind if we violate your privacy’. That along with encryption is ‘being employed by terrorists, paedophiles, drug smugglers and human traffickers to conceal illicit activities and facilitate crime.’ so that’s why we need access to it.

Access to live information (say observing a chatroom) when presented with a warrant seems to be a reasonable request, but I suspect the government will go further and continue to attempt to force companies to change their software in order to meet the needs of intelligence and security agencies through creating backdoors and recording communications for later retrieval.

Edit: Inevitable small grammatical corrections

Elon I believe responded to this (the fines) by calling the government fascist: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1834215798858207667

https://www.reuters.com/technology/australia-threatens-fines-social-media-giants-enabling-misinformation-2024-09-12/

The bill hasn't yet passed but I can hardly disagree with Elon. The Australian govt seems dead-set on banning and censoring more and more. The E-safety commissioner wanted to globally censor videos of the stabbing on twitter because Australians could use a VPN to get around the national-level restrictions. After Elon told them to get stuffed they backed down but it sparked a cavalcade of politicians looking to sound tough by promising more banning and restrictions. All we seem to do is ban things - development, mines, pipelines.

And especially the internet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_Australia

There's an amusing scene where a senator goes around describing Eromanga Sensei. The man's calling was clearly to be a dodgy real estate developer, just look at the physiognomy. Why does anyone have to listen to him on what manga should or should not be legal: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bDmbo5dxgQg

Anyway, computing is inherently multi-purpose. Terrorists, paedophiles and drug dealers can use open-source software that nobody is in control of. Encrypted text messaging is not that hard! What is the government going to do then, backdoor every CPU? They'll have to get in line behind the US and China.

Likewise, it's unworkable to ban children from porn sites. Are they going to make everyone give their ID to every damn booru and sketchy Russian site? We have a massive surfeit of bureaucrats with too much time and money on their hands. Nobody ever wants to leave things alone, they have to work hard making a mess out of uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant realities:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/02/social-media-porn-site-ban-australia-trial-age-assurance

The Australian govt seems dead-set on banning and censoring more and more.

Yes. It's ham fisted and seems to mirror Canada's trajectory. I can appreciate that ASIO is given an unenviable job as the security service and if I took the King's shilling in Burgess's role I would advocate for more tools to do my job more efficiently. But this seems wrong and just looks like the govt pushing to make their lives easier.

Once the apps get a reputation as compromised, only the stupid and uninformed will use them (which to be fair is probably no small percentage of the criminal/terrorist franchise). The rest of the targeted will quickly find other comms methods (eg multiplayer videogame lobbies) and the rest of us will be stuck with 'this is why we can't have nice things'.

The E-safety commissioner wanted to globally censor videos of the stabbing on twitter because Australians could use a VPN to get around the national-level restrictions.

She's completely clownish and operates on Think of the Children OS v1.0.

All we seem to do is ban things - development, mines, pipelines.

Yes, because its convenient for those working in those roles. At the risk of opsec, I have experience working with the public service and know the mentality. How do we make our jobs easier on a limited budget without having to investigate the issue in depth? Let's ban it. Nanny state, safetyism etc.

I can extrapolate this to the EU which does this writ large.

Nobody ever wants to leave things alone, they have to work hard making a mess out of uncomfortable, sometimes unpleasant realities

Yes. There are edge cases. I am actually cautiously supportive of the social media ban for children because of the difficulties a lack of a ban would make for good parenting in isolation (eg telling your 12yo daughter she can't Instagram while she suffers social exclusion from her peers; it needs to be everyone).

But I also know that there's a reason no one likes to upload their docs to the net. No one can keep them safe. Data breaches everywhere. Also who the hell would ever provide ID for porn access?

It's a big mess, but that is no excuse for convenient shortcuts to Do Something.

Yeah banning social media is easier and more workable than porn, I'd be in support too if I wasn't worried about a slippery slope. Even just debundling this stuff from phones might be a good idea, it's not necessary to be installed on start up. Got a new phone recently and they auto-installed tiktok on it. It wasn't even a Chinese brand!

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats