Tuesday, April 15, 2008

Follow-up to employee email snooping article

So the water becomes a little muddier here -- turns out the Attorney-General's office is quite well renowned for attempting to bring in crazy authoritarian initiatives to restrict Australians under the guise of anti-terrorism solutions.

According to Crikey today (subscription possibly required), some of the A-G's secretary's recent efforts include attempting to silence criticism of ASIO after they wrongly detained Izhar ul-Haque (rejected by the commission), others in the office helped Howard with his infamous "children overboard" mess and providing the false allegations of weapons of mass destruction that dragged Australia into war. Apparently it seems that this lot quite enjoy close relations with the private sector.

Bernard Keane writes in the above article:


The private sector, across areas such as transport, communications, IT and energy, is a willing participant in the process of establishing a system for monitoring and protecting their facilities and the public infrastructure they use, all in the name of preventing or effectively responding to terrorism. After all, the process allows companies access to government funding for the maintenance and upgrading of monitoring and information-collection systems they would otherwise have to invest in themselves, enables – in the name of greater security – the development of new regulatory requirements that raise the barriers to entry for possible competitors, and transfers an element of operational risk to taxpayers.


Still think this is all about keeping Australians safe?

P.S. for some fun acronym bureaucracy in the world of Critical Infrastructure Security (CIS), this is a good read.

5 comments:

Nick said...

Very clever, Mr Private Sector. of course, this practice has been going on for hundreds of years: my latest readings on censorship show that the Stationers Company in Early Modern England were the lobbyists behind some of their (later to be) draconian licensing laws. Why? because the censorship through licensing allowed them to inflict some hurt on foreign printing agencies. Too bad it came back to bite them. But lo and behold, John Milton and Areopagitica pulled them out of that mess. Too bad we remember his speech, but not the reasons it was needed.

Adam Man Tium said...

And that acronym site is rad. Talk about deliberate obscurantinism.

Adam Man Tium said...

I am sick of your tired leftist agenda here. What part of 'You are either with us or against us' don't you get? And to imagine that companies would fleece the government (i.e. Jane Tax-Payer) of money to increase surveillance of employees sounds like you are a commie.
Why are you against private enterprise?
What's wrong with freedom?
Why do you hate me?
If you have something to fear, perhaps you have reason to hide. [No, wait a minute. That's not what I mean.]
(Get out of my head, where's my foil hat?)
{I'm not paranoid and who told you?}

On a slightly less insane strand of thought, this type of surviellance and collusion between paranoid law-makers and power obsessed fuedal over-lords is not new. As Nick, overboard children and expelled Indian Doctors can attest, its not what you know, its who knows what about you.


--end transmission--

Catherine said...

My guilty secret laid bare at last! Don't worry comrades, our time will come!

And I don't know what you mean ... We were always at war with Eurasia!

Anonymous said...

See also http://andrewbartlett.com/blog/?p=2002