Citizens, Not Suspects

A new EFA campaign "Citizens, Not Suspects" - its just getting started and is in response to the proposed new powers for ASIO that may include the ability to ADD, MODIFY AND DELETE files on ANY computer: http://www.citizensnotsuspects.org.au/

Nosey Nicola's November Nightmare

In case you havent heard Australia is having something of a data retention debate at the moment with the Australian Government, and in particular, Attorney General Nicola Roxon, looking to change the law to require ISPs to retain all user metadata for a period of 2 years. The explanatory YouTube clip from Nicola Roxon (embedding has been disabled) is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8_VHR_mtCQ

Electronic Frontiers Australia have commented on the proposal on their website here and here and in short, criticise the discussion paper that was released by the Government for not containing the information required to inform the public about the details of the proposal, and suggest that metadata retention creates serious privacy concerns for the general public. Jon Lawrence was interviewed by Triple J's Hack program earlier this week (Tuesday 30th October 2012) - you can listen to it here.

So. A campaign has been started in response to this. GenerationAlpha are asking people to CC Nicola Roxon on all of their emails so that she gets a fair idea of what kind of stuff the general public are actually doing on the internet. The bombardment of emails is to be a form of protest against the proposed changes to the law. The campaign is called Nosey Nicola's November Nightmare. Check out the YouTube clip:



I will make an effort to CC her on some of my emails this month - I hope you do too!