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Comment by Benjamin_Dobell | Hacker News Reader

> Australia first, your country next.

Absolutely, specifically if you're living in a country that is a member of the Five Eyes.

They've actually been surprisingly transparent that this is a coordinated effort. The Official Communiqué opens with:

> We, the Homeland Security, Public Safety, and Immigration Ministers of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States met on the Gold Coast, Australia, on August 28-29 2018, to discuss how we can better collaborate to meet our common security challenges.

Full read: https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about/national-security/five-...

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Additionally, it doesn't seem that there's anything in the bill that would prevent any of the information gained by a TCN/TAN from being shared with Five Eyes or other governments. While this might seem reasonable in the face of an international criminal/terrorist adversary, it is fundamentally security-breaking if private root signing keys that are requested as part of a TCN/TAN can just be shared with every Five Eyes government.

That means that the Australian government could just order a company to hand over their PKI/signing infrastructure (which is generally a global system) and then forward all of this information to the US or whoever else, completely outside of any judicial oversight.

I'm sure that the governments in question will deny this, and likely state that this is not their policy, but it doesn't seem to be specifically prohibited by the law and the intelligence community doesn't have a great reputation when it comes to respecting traditional legal values and due process (e.g. the FISA court in the US)

The 5 eyes nations are a true New World Order. This is terrifying, and we should not be allowing our sovereignty to be so easily usurped for the purpose of building this new order.

The others maybe, but new Zealand is no one's new world order :).

Aus + UK + US are the real drivers.

Aus the primary driver? A 25m population country with an economy smaller than California, and we're driving things.

Dutton is being fed from defense dollars, from the US.

Australia is kind of an entire continent, with big territorial national security concerns, so they might be a bit more independently interested than Canada.

Driving under the influence.

UK and Australia are the test beds. US is the target. From there it flows onwards and outwards. Like raw sewage over the Niagara Falls.

The AU my.health opt-out debacle[1] is similar. UK got in first, promised they wouldn’t sell the data then did so. AU then started by copying the UK’s best practice. So... fun times ahead.

They’re still trying to get the gun laws fit for size in the US but the political climate and history is too different. And the attempt on the health system via Obamacare didn’t quite take either. More time needed apparently.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/jul/22/my-he...

Putting this bill in the same basket as gun control seems a bit rich. However, comparing it to public health care is well off the mark. Medicare was first introduced in Australia way back in 1975, 35 years before the US. Access to affordable health-care is widely considered a basic human right, and Medicare in Australia widely considered a smashing success.

Actually, so are our gun control laws, and they were motivated by mass shootings on our own soil, namely the Port Arthur massacre, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi..., this wasn't some ploy by the US or the Five Eyes. The Australian public wanted this, and absolutely still do, myself very much included.

Actually my point was that the US gets changes after they are tested elsewhere. You didn’t address that.

So by omission you’re saying that the US won’t be getting these encryption laws. And that Australian style gun laws won’t arrive in the US either.

Ok then.

> So by omission you’re saying that the US won’t be getting these encryption laws.

Wait... what? Do you always structure your arguments by putting words in other people's mouths then argue against things they never said. In doing so you're wasting your's and everyone else's time.

Not only are you wrong in you assertion. If you'd paid even the smallest amount of attention to the context in which you're posting you'd realise this. I'm the OP for this sub-thread, I suggest you read what I wrote.

Now that we've got that aside...

> And that Australian style gun laws won’t arrive in the US either.

Just stop.

We're talking about the Assistance and Access Bill. Stop trying to validate some totally unrelated belief you hold by loosely latching on to valid arguments that myself and others have made here. The reason I responded to you is that I want to make it perfectly clear to anybody reading this...

I do not hold your views. These are not related issues.

Medicare was introduced in the US in 1966.

Woah, my apologies, thanks for the correction.

I had meant to compare Australian Medicare to when something equivalent was introduced in the USA. However, I really don't know much about the US system. I had very much incorrectly assumed that the Affordable Care Act had introduced legislation bringing in changes making it fairly comparable to Australian Medicare. Alas, that doesn't seem to be the case, they're still extremely different systems.

Also, a little extra research tells me that what I consider to be "Australian Medicare", wasn't actually introduced until 1984, which is when our healthcare became universal.

The Australian public worship war and are utterly ignorant of the graves they live upon. Are they really your metric for how it should be?

I'm not sure where the "worship war" idea comes from. I've never heard anyone state something like that before. What are you referring to specifically?

However, Australians are far from perfect. In particular being isolated geographical means lack of exposure to other cultures and leads to a significant portion of society being "casually racist", which sucks. All our modern political parties are a joke as well, and due to our small economy we are in many ways a puppet of the US i.e. this bill.

So no, I don't think we're a metric for how it should be. But the really depressing part is that with all the negativity I've just listed (and there's certainly more), we still have our shit together more than a lot of other countries. That's far from being a reflection on Australia being "good", rather it's a reflection on how bad a significant portion of the world is.

P.S. One positive thing about Australians is that the majority of us aren't particularly patriotic. So we will happily admit to how big of a disgrace our country can be!

Count the war memorials in your city. Now count the memorials to the Stolen Generation, and try to find anything that acknowledges Australias own ethnic cleansing history.

> try to find anything that acknowledges Australias own ethnic cleansing history.

Where do you live? You're very clearly entirely ignorant about the issue you've raised:

http://museum.wa.gov.au/explore/articles/national-apology-st...

Our Prime Minister issued an official apology for the abhorrent acts that took place and led to the term "the Stolen Generation". That doesn't even remotely make those acts okay, but to suggest that it's not even acknowledged by the Australian people is just outright ludicrous.

EDIT: By the way, there's also something called "National Sorry Day", which is kind of a big deal in Australia, I suggest you Google it.

6th largest 'defence' budget in the world.

SIXTH...

Reference please.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute ranks Australia as 13th, at 2% of Australia's GDP[1][2].

Which is below the worldwide average of 2.2%, although given our geographic remoteness and relative security, I absolutely agree that it's too much.

The International Institute for Strategic Studies places Australia at 12th.

[1] https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/files/1_Data%20for%20all... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_...

Five eyes? At least they all have a say in what happens even though they don't listen to anyone but their friends. How about the 14 lapdogs?

14 lapdogs

Help us out! When I google this term I just get "best breeds" lists.

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