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To me Australia Day is a day to think a little more about the people who made Australia what it is. A decreasingly semi free country.
The Australian states started as English prisons. We still don't have any guaranteed ' rights ' and any that were part of English law can be legislated away by state or feral governments. We may have signed UN treaties, but they depend on feral law for there application here.
It has been more than fifty years since the feral government has acted in accordance with our constitution's written word. eg taxation.
Consider these events and people:
Reverend Samuel Marsden ( the flogging Parson ), assistant to the chaplain of the colony, then the chief Anglican clergyman in New South Wales, he recognized no other religion or denomination. Unsuccessfully tortured Irish prisoners for information at Toongabbie.
Vinegar Hill 5-3-1804 Irish political prisoners tried to escape from English imprisonment. Philip Cunningham was hung without trial by the New South Wales Corps ( Botany Bay Rangers).
The Currency Lads, born free in the colonies. They had no ' Ticket of Leave ' because they were not convicts and no identification because they were free. However under the ' Bushranging Act ' anyone could be arrested on suspicion of being an absconder. Since there weren't many police most arrests were made by ' farm constables ', ' trusty ' convicts. So it was common for free men to be arrested and chained and shackled by convicts. They then had to travel to somewhere with records, often Sydney. So it was not uncommon for a fee man to march in handcuffs 250 miles or more to prove they were not convicts.
The Eureka Stockade 3-12-1854 A clash protesting the denial of civic rights and excessive taxation.
Rottnest Island 19-4-1876 An English ship fires in an attempt to stop an Irish political prisoner escaping on a US whaler.
Rothbury 16-12-1929 Several men were shot, one died, by police during a union protest.
So for the benefit of all the people who say ' It can't happen here. ', it already has.
Here in Australia there are Australian's that have been in solitary confinement for more than two years now, on remand. That's right, they have not been proven guilty, yet they are in solitary confinement here!
Australians are much better off than most of the people in the world. However we cannot be ' free ' till we have rights. Rights that are simple to understand. Rights that can not be misinterpreted by lawyers. Rights that can not be changed by governments.
"Effectively, Australia is now the only modern Western country that must face the challenges of the present age and the changes in the institutions of government without a constitutional, or even statutory, charter of rights to temper political autarchy with occasional judicial reminders of fundamental freedoms that must be respected," Justice Kirby.
http://smh.com.au/news/National/Call-for-human-rights-to-be-protected/2006/02/21/1140284066164.html
"Human rights have taken a battering by two forces - terrorism and terrorism laws," NSW Attorney-General, Bob Debus. "In some sections of the community, human rights are viewed with as much suspicion as a van with blacked-out windows parked near an embassy."
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/human-rights-now-a-dirty-idea-says-angry-debus/2006/05/19/1147545529286.html
The New South Wales Police Minister wants to search every ones' SMS messages without a warrant.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200701/s1831129.htm
And you may not be able to board a Qantas aircraft if you are wearing clothing that they object to.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200701/s1831156.htm
Powers handed to Australian intelligence agencies to combat terrorism have been misused. Powers brought in because of the ' War Against Terrorism '. This simply looks like the feral government playing follow the leader with Bush. In fact in 2003 the Australian Government won the Most Egregiously Stupid Award for ' a litany of pointless, irritating and self-serving security measures '.
Stephen
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.
Freedom is a well armed sheep.
. . . . . .
" I just saw a van drive by with the company name 'Seafood Solutions'. I must admit, I didn't know seafood was a problem. -Martin Kristos "
http://www.ebearweb.net
Bujinkan: Martial Arts of the Samurai and Ninja
http://www.ebearweb.net/bujinkan/
Stephen's Snaps
http://photo.ebearweb.net/
This week Guam photos.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
Technology that exposes your dirty linen
The 7th of January 2008
Once-wary Australians accept their daily lives being monitored, writes Damien Murphy.
BIG BROTHER is washing you.
The washing machine of the future may not only wash garments according to the instructions on the clothes but secretly collect information for telemarketers, political parties and anybody else with an interest in people's dirty linen.
The Australian Law Reform Commission says washing machines could be fitted with radio frequency identification equipment, known as RFID, which stores information and transmits it to a data-processing system.
A discussion paper by the commission on a review of Australian privacy law lists the "bugged" washing machine as one of the myriad controversial technologies that are stealthily shaping the way we live.
"Some uses of RFID technology raise privacy concerns," the discussion paper says. "In particular, concerns arise about the ability of agencies, organisations or individuals to surreptitiously collect a variety of data related to the same person; track individuals as they walk in public places (airports, train stations, stores); enhance profiles through the monitoring of consumer behaviour in stores; and read the details of clothes and accessories worn and medicines carried by customers.
"These concerns are exacerbated by the fact that individuals may not be given notice that the products they purchase or the objects they use contain RFID tags and may not be given the choice to remove or disable RFID tags."
This technology is already widely used: examples include keyless car entry; security tags on clothing, CDs and other items in department stores that activate readers at exits; animal tagging; timing marathon runners; and access control for secure premises.
Increasingly Australians are being bar-coded and scoped. Their whereabouts are checked, along with the company they keep. How they make money, how they spend it - all is monitored in the name of progress, profit and private and national security.
Marcus Einfeld's court case last month provided irrefutable proof that nobody is ever alone in a big city any more.
Charged with 13 offences relating to traffic infringements, the former Federal Court judge was committed to trial after leaving a spoor of credit card, mobile phone and bridge toll transactions and closed-circuit television appearances that a bloodhound with a head cold would have had no difficulty following.
But the tracking of Einfeld only reveals the tip of the iceberg of security and surveillance technology piggybacking on living in modern society.
Australians had been sceptical about the surveillance industry and associated identity checks. But the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11, 2001, and subsequent terrorist outrages changed much of that. And while law enforcement agencies' activities have expanded considerably to fit new laws and demands, other surveillance industries and programs have enthusiastically jumped on the "new world order" band wagon and grown exponentially.
Data-matching and data-mining allow information generated by people doing ordinary things - such as using automatic teller machines, paying with credit cards, using shopping loyalty cards or smartcards, writing cheques, renting cars or videos, sending or receiving emails or surfing the internet - to be collected and collated, often without the subject's consent or knowledge.
For instance, how does a supermarket corporation that has acquired a new dairy business, say, on a Bass Strait island, go about grabbing a share of the cheese market?
The chain already possesses much information about its customers, courtesy of credit cards and bank-controlled shopping loyalty schemes linked to purchase receipts. So particular customers pop up buying a southern NSW cheese for years and the chain can make an educated guess about their purchasing power and habits and correlate the information with census information about incomes in particular local government areas. Then it can send emails trying to persuade people to sample the Bass Strait product.
Once people carefully husbanded their identities, and that privacy was respected. For years the only piece of paper people were happy to carry was a driver's licence.
In 1987 Bob Hawke's government pulled a double dissolution in an attempt to get its proposed Australia Card legislation through the Senate. The ID check for Australian citizens and resident foreigners arose partly out of the ease with which drug runners wandered in and out of the country but voters remained unconvinced.
As a consequence Australians were lumbered with a tax file number, a sort of watered down version of the American Social Security number that, together with the Medicare card, targets small fish by permitting greater scrutiny of the link between welfare and tax.
For the hundreds of thousands who came to Australia as immigrants, the absence of ID checks symbolised the new freedoms they had embraced.
Authoritarian regimes were skewered as Big Brother in George Orwell's book Nineteen Eighty-Four, published in 1949. The two words were synonymous with one-party states and dictatorships for years. However, just as globalisation, the internet and money markets made Australians surrender to a brave new world where surveillance was king, the sense of incipient threat that Orwell's words symbolised was drained away with the 1999 arrival of the reality television franchise that eventually saw totalitarianism give way to "turkey-slapping".
The proliferation of online transactions and a trend towards a cashless society means thieves no longer need to steal a wallet when they can steal an identity.
Billions are being spent to counter identity theft. Research into "gait DNA" enables a computer to make identifications by matching a person's facial image to gait, height and weight. Also being investigated are body odour measurement and ear geometry.
Traditionally Australians have been wary of such "Big Brother" developments but opinion polls show that - like Americans and the English - Australians now tend to support more rather than less surveillance.
The executive director of the Australian Homeland Security Research Centre, Athol Yates, said security and surveillance technology boomed in Australia after 2001. Although many expressed concerns, he said, most had come to accept the intrusion, especially after closed-circuit TV helped identify the London bombers in 2005.
"CCTV has become so commonplace now that people just don't notice them anymore," he said. "When the public becomes aware that a security technology can or is being abused or is ineffective, then that is the strongest safeguard against governments or organisations abusing the technology."
The Law Reform Commission has been conducting an inquiry into privacy in the brave new world of global communication. In an indication of the climate surrounding the issue, nearly 10 per cent of submissions made to the inquiry were confidential.
Its final report to the Federal Government is due by March 31.
SMH 7-1-8
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/technology-that-exposes-your-dirty-linen/2008/01/06/1199554485298.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
. . . . . .
If you shoot a mime, should you use a silencer?
http://www.ebearweb.net
Bujinkan: Martial Arts of the Samurai and Ninja
http://www.ebearweb.net/bujinkan/
Stephen's Snaps
http://photo.ebearweb.net/
This week Guam photos.
Simply nice photos, Landscape, Seascape, Underwater, The Northern Beaches Sydney.
