Happy mass surveillance day!
Today is the day that the Turnbull government’s mandatory data retention scheme comes into force.
Yes, while our own PM who uses secure messaging services and a private email server to communicate, he wants to make it as easy as possible for our national security authorities to spy on the rest of us.
How will we be celebrating? By locking down our online communication. Here’s how you can, too:
- Be careful how you use social media, and set your privacy settings as high as possible.
- Use an offshore or non-ISP email provider, and take a lead from Turnbull and use an encrypted messaging app.
- Use an offshore Virtual Private Network, or VPN.
- Use Tor and PGP.
- Use smartphone call apps to make video and voice calls.
These won’t offer you complete protection, but they’ll make violating your privacy much more difficult and more expensive. For a plain English explanation of these services, plus all the background to the new laws, read Bernard Keane’s definitive guide to data retention.
– Number 3B: get a VPN plan that supports multiple devices and configure VPN to always run on your smartphone. Confirm that it transitions properly between Mobile Data and WiFi (and back).
– Number #3C: configure your VPN to launch and connect at startup on your laptop/PC.
Use an offshore VPN provider (that doesn’t keep logs) but is there any issue with using their Australian servers for better performance?
I wouldn’t “on” him?
I am wondering though if this might be useful. Can we ask for the government to help finding emails, contacts, messages that we accidentally delete or simply can’t find?
Is there a contact email address, or are there several, where we could send such requests? Or best just to send to the AG and maybe copy to our local member, the PM, their shadows, and whichever government agency might help? I am looking for an email I KNOW I had in march tis year, its not on my laptop or desktop, or the server….if some official could be employed to assist in these circumstances I could just get on with my life…
When will They decide that, as with taxation, legal avoidance becomes illegal evasion and thus make the attempt to encrypt an offence, in and of itself.
Not that one has anything to hide but the thought crime of wanting to frustrate BigBro?
Ms Pugh has the right idea – we cannot uninvent mass surveillance but we can demand that the mechanism be available to us – after all it IS our information.
The reverse ID card – with it, each citizen is thus able to access every iota of their personal data vacuumed up by the beast.