Somebody over on Reddit [1] went through all the submissions (there was a consultation period) and summarised and tallied them [2]. Fully 99%+ of submissions were against the bill. A sad day for democracy indeed. A church in Tasmania was in favour, because child pornography.
Lots of people reporting that the offices of MPs and senators were inundated with calls today and over the last few days. Twitter was on fire too. Ignored, just like the expert testimony before the PJCIS. Who do these fools think they were representing?
Today I watched my country's democracy die via livestream, with the words "Labor withdraws all amendments".
> Who do these fools think they were representing?
The US government and their agenda to spread similar laws in their country and across the world.
Labor was always on board with the core of the legislation; likely as they were aware of some unreported Five Eye's agreement that Australia will be the 'thin edge of the wedge' to introduce such laws worldwide.
Any amendments proposed wouldn't have changed the goal and was simply the basis for some political theatre to look like such a law has been considered and debated by the politicians. The outcome had already been decided a lot earlier than that point.
Voters? I don’t mean to be snarky, but while Tweets, submissions and letters may inform the content of bills in democracies, but the counts of these are not numerically representative of much, apart from the feelings of people who feel strongly about an issue.
As Churchill said, the strongest argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. The voters are getting what they voted for.
There's some seriously shady things going on for this bill to have seen the light of day.
For me, this was the 50tone block of concrete on the lead coffin on the rotting cadaver of a political system that serves humanity in a balanced manner.
> Who do these fools think they were representing?
The same interests they are always representing. Themselves. The organisations and lobbyists that got them voted in. The organisations they're looking forward to offers of high-priced consultancies and directorships after the next election.
Don't forget the voters who elected them. Do you see the voters running to the polls and voting for someone else when crap like this gets passed? Of course not. Therefore, the voters implicitly consent to it.
Oh hey, pwnies from reddit here! It wasn't just me, it was myself and a bunch of my coworkers over at Atlassian. As one of the larger Australian tech companies, many of us are somber today to see this passed.
Hard to say. The final text of the bill with the amendments that got added this week haven't been published officially yet (https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat... only the first reading is available). Once it is we'll have to do a full review from legal - it's something a bunch of us are wondering internally right now. There are a lot of loopholes in the bill, so it's hard to say what things we'll be required to do, if any. The bigger impact will be on the world view of the tech scene in Australia. Needless to say this is very damaging, and there are concerns that we wont be able to handle any European data in Australia as it could be a potential violation of GDPR. Again though, that will have to wait until we finish the legal review of the bill and how it impacts us.
In talking with some other companies, some of them are looking at potentially moving any role that would have the ability to compromise encryption outside of the country. That way there'd be no way any employee could be legally forced to implement any backdoors or weakening of encryption. That's an extreme measure and is probably overkill right now as the loophole that states you don't have to do anything to weaken your security will likely be used as a challenge against building in any backdoors. We'll have to wait and see how things pan out.
> That's an extreme measure and is probably overkill right now as the loophole that states you don't have to do anything to weaken your security will likely be used as a challenge against building in any backdoors.
I saw that, but another part of the bill that I've seen (on a cursory review, and as a non-professional) is the sweeping, extreme secrecy measures surrounding the execution of any part of the bill.
Basically, my understanding is that you can't tell me as a customer if you've been required to compromise my privacy.
So say you even take the extreme measure and ship some sensitive roles overseas. If for any reason that's not enough, and your government requires you to surrender some of my data, then you will be legally unable to tell me.
That will destroy all trust.
I like Atlassian and am extremely sorry to see this happening to you.
Any internal discussions about moving out of Australia?
I've read an interpretation that indicates that all Australian citizen employees are now essentially compromised, as they could be compelled under penalty of jail time to insert backdoors into an application without informing their employers.
>The Synod has some hesitancy about ‘safeguarding national security’ being one of the objectives of the notices, as it is not clear what additional activities this captures that are not criminal activities. For example, notices to address terrorist activities are already about enforcing criminal laws as would be notices targeting foreign espionage. We have a concern that ‘safeguarding national security’ might mean the desire of a government of the day to target civil society groups and individuals that oppose its policies or to target whistleblowers that expose wrong-doing by the government of the day. It would be good if the explanatory memorandum of the Bill includes an explanation of what non-criminal activities are intended
to be caught under ‘safeguarding national security’ under the Bill.
I submitted comments during the review period, but I just got an automated response asking me if they could publish it -- long after all the "town hall" discussions. They clearly didn't give a fuck what the Australian public wanted.
Everyone is misreading this comment. OP meant: democracy failed, but the good submissions restore faith in humanity. All the people who wrote in were on the side of common sense.
The people who wrote in do not represent the voting public, they're just a vocal minority. The voting public elected these lawmakers, and will happily re-elect them.
Yea, that's what I meant. At least the people seemed to be overwhelmingly opposed to it, and trying to vote against it. RIP to internet points on that comment, lol.
There was 300ish responses. The tech community and savvy individuals are strongly against it, but the vast majority of people don't care or absolutely don't understand what's at stake here.
As with most deeply technical issues, it is hard to communicate to the general population exactly what the proposed problem and solution is, so the politicians are allowed to freely pass legislation (without understanding it themselves mostly) without much opposition besides the vocal minority.
> One monkey in particular, Helen, [...] was a macaque monkey that had been decorticated; specifically, her primary visual cortex (V1) was completely removed, blinding her.
Wow, go humans. But I guess this is nothing in comparison with what the commercial farming industry gets up to :(
Yeah, if that got a squick reaction then don't go looking up too much animal-based research. We do all sorts of ugly things to animals in the name of science. :/ But we learn all sorts of interesting and useful things from it, so... it's one of those trolley problem things.
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/a3j466/assistanc...
2. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1dowpZ_Xtr1N_DgkHJN8i...