Twenty-five years ago, the New Yorker published a cartoon that became the most republished in the magazine’s history. It depicts a canine sitting at a computer, looking down at its friend, a smaller pooch, and saying, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog”. 
It captured well the reality of the time. In the early 1990s internet, you could communicate with anyone and browse websites in almost complete anonymity. The tools to track you down or get your “real name” did not exist. 
Today, things are different. Increasingly, our electronic devices are connected to the internet and, intentionally or unintentionally, are used to spy on us. Almost all of our personal information is harvested. 
What data? 
The scandal involving data firm Cambridge Analytica and tech giant Facebook is one aspect of the problem of data privacy. Writing in the Washington Post, Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly note:
“We’re really talking about two kinds of data here. The first kind is ‘content’ – the photos, videos, status updates, news articles and other baubles that Facebook users are posting for their friends, or the whole world, to see.
“The second kind of data goes behind the curtain. It includes users’ location information, their web browsing history, and the inferences that Facebook draws about them to tailor the kinds of ads they see. For example, Facebook might infer a user’s ethnicity and political affiliation and use those inferences to show more relevant ads.” 
The problem goes well beyond Facebook. The business model of most of the internet is built around surveillance and data harvesting. 
Computers are becoming part of almost everything we use daily: cars, fridges, phones, televisions. And they all produce enormous amounts of data. For example, walking out of your house each morning produces data; your mobile phone sends location data along with your speed and direction of travel. 
If you take the phone from your pocket and use it, you’re producing even more data: what websites you visit, who you call, text and email, which emails you open and what links you click on, who you are friends with, what you say and even at what angle you’re holding the phone. What you search for in Google is recorded and owned by it, and can be directly linked to you.
Our phones are constantly listening. “Assistants” such as Google Now or Siri learn to recognise your voice. From the moment I say the word “okay”, my phone will record 20 seconds of audio, and that data is stored and owned by Google. It can tell the difference between the questions, “Okay, where is a good place to eat?” and “Okay, Google, where is a good place to eat?”
Today, when we talk about data and surveillance, we’re not simply talking about what you do on the web – we’re talking about almost everything you do, from the moment you get up in the morning until you go to sleep. And, if you’ve got a fitness tracker, how well you sleep.
Obviously, some data trackers are useful. Through Google maps we can find restaurants, be given directions while driving and so on. Facebook allows us to stay in touch with friends and family around the world, makes friend suggestions and recommends groups we may find interesting – 25 percent of US users of the social media platform say it has made their lives better, according to a recent YouGov/CBS News survey.
The problem is that we use these tools precisely because they are so useful – and free. But, as the saying goes, “If you’re not paying, then you’re the product”. All the data we produce is a valuable commodity to be bought and sold. While private companies spy on us for profit, states and governments harvest information for mass surveillance.
You’re the product
In the early days of the internet, there weren’t a lot of ways to make money from it, and payment for services or content never took off. As with newspapers, radio and television, advertising became the key way that websites could generate revenue – but the key difference is targeted advertisements. 
Tailored advertisements solve one problem that the advertising industry has always had. John Wanamaker, a capitalist in the United States in the 19th century and widely seen as a marketing pioneer, once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half”. For example, if Rolex markets its timepieces on TV or radio, a lot of poorer working class people who can’t afford the watch will nevertheless see or hear the advertisements. That is wasted money in the eyes of the company. 
The internet allows it to target people with a particular income, gender and purchase history. To do this, websites must collect users’ data. This has become key for some of the biggest companies on the planet. Almost every website now collects data on who visits its site; and it is in its best interest to collect as much data as possible on us, so it can be sold to advertisers.
According to security expert Bruce Schneier, “These companies are analogous to feudal lords, and we are their vassals, peasants, and – on a bad day, serfs. We are tenant farmers for these companies, working on their land by producing data that they in turn sell for profit”.
And profit they do. Last year, around US$200 billion was spent on online advertisements in the US alone, the majority of that going to two companies: Google and Facebook.
The amount of data Facebook harvests allows it to offer advertisers incredibly detailed targeting. On its website Facebook tells advertisers that they can “select people based on their prior purchase behaviours, device usage and other activities. For example, if you’re a shoe shop you can target people who’ve recently purchased shoes”.
And you might be surprised at what groups can be targeted. Last year the investigative news organisation ProPublica discovered that, for $30, it could buy ads for people identified as “Jew haters”. This is not the first time Facebook has had unscrupulous advertising categories. 
Last year it was reported that the company was offering advertising targeting Australian teenagers based on their emotional state, which they organised into 10 categories: worthless, insecure, defeated, anxious, silly, useless, stupid, overwhelmed, stressed and a failure. 
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, in 2014 Facebook conducted a social experiment on nearly 700,000 people. The company altered the number of positive or negative posts in users’ newsfeeds to see how it affected their moods.
This is a company that not only sells our private data, but uses the information to manipulate our emotions so that companies can sell us things that might help fix our emotional state – all to turn a profit. 
So when you hear Mark Zuckerberg complain that data his company collected have been misused, think of a weapons manufacturer complaining about wars. Profiling and misusing data is Facebook’s business model.
This level of spying is not limited to the online world. If you go into a shopping centre, you’re producing more location data – which shops you visit, which supermarket shelves you go to and how long you look at advertisements in the store.
If you’ve been to the big ones, you may have noticed that they provide free wifi. This may seem like a nice offering, but read through the privacy policies. An example from one of the large centres in Melbourne: it records the “different areas of a centre that you have visited and your present location within a centre … [and] websites accessed”. How is this used to market to you? Sue Mitchell wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald about Westfield’s spying:
“When a customer shopping for suits in a department store googles a rival e-commerce site, a report is sent to the retailer’s marketing team, which may choose to respond by sending the customer an email offering a discount.” 
Marketing company Val Morgan claims that its new system of electronic billboards tracks 2 million Australians every week in shops around the country. Using facial recognition, the company tailors advertisements depending on a person’s age, gender and mood (based on facial expression).
This enormous amount of detailed data is increasingly being used and analysed by insurance companies, security firms, companies such as Cambridge Analytica, employers and the state as means of mass surveillance.
It’s not just about individuals. We live in the age of “big data”, in which data are pooled and analysed. And it is being used to discriminate against social groups.
Institutionalised data collection and discrimination have existed for a long time. An example was the policy of “redlining” – banks in the United States refusing loans to African Americans or poor if they tried to purchase a house in a particular suburb. The banks drew red lines on maps to guide mortgage brokers in enforcing segregation. Civil rights legislation in the 1960s outlawed such policies. 
However, with big data we’re seeing “weblining”. It is now common for banks to lower your credit limit if you shop at particular outlets. A couple of years ago, a US man, having returned from his honeymoon, received a letter from American Express informing him that his credit limit had been lowered by $7,000 because “other customers who have used their card at establishments where you recently shopped have a poor repayment history”. 
It’s well known that welfare can be denied based on your marital status. We now know that the US Internal Revenue Service carries out bulk analysis of people’s Facebook photos to determine their relationship status. And it is now common when visiting the US that people have to hand over their mobile phones and show their Facebook profile before being approved entry. 
Further, location information from mobile phone towers is accessible by the state. This was used in 2014 by the Ukrainian government, which sent a very Orwellian text message to thousands of its citizens who had attended a demonstration. The message read, “Dear subscriber, you have been registered as a participant in a mass disturbance”. 
The same technique has been used in the US to monitor union demonstrations. In Melbourne, Victoria Police use data from mobile phone towers to estimate crowd numbers at events. Whether they use it for demonstrations is not known, but the point is that the police have the ability to do so.
The more you look at big data and how it is used, the more the line blurs between private surveillance by corporations and surveillance by states. 
Thanks to whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, we know that the US government has access to all the data described above. And through the intelligence agreement known as Five Eyes, the governments of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia have it too. They have access to it because they have collected it themselves, through agreements with private companies, or through hacking or compulsion. 
When Yahoo refused to be a party to domestic spying, the US government threatened it with a $250,000 daily fine. The company acquiesced. Microsoft, Google and Facebook did not put up even token resistance. We know the most about US domestic surveillance because of Snowden, but it would be naive to not think that other countries don’t do the same things.
A system of surveillance
To appreciate how normalised surveillance has become, we need to understand the coming together of a few factors. First is the rise of the internet and of mass data collection by corporations. Second, data storage has become very cheap, and computers are powerful enough to analyse quickly and cheaply mountains of data. 
There have also been political factors: the “war on terror”, revolutions across the Arab world, the rise of a new left, the decline of the US as the dominant power in the world, the rise of China and increasing geopolitical tensions.
The “war on terror” began this new era of erosion of civil liberties. The security apparatus of most states has been strengthened, including greater police powers and increased domestic surveillance. There’s also an increasing level of international espionage. All this has led to a situation in which the interests of corporations and the state have become firmly intertwined – particularly with regard to intellectual property and technological breakthroughs.
Some of this is hardly new. The 1950s Communist witch-hunts in the US involved detailed data collection and surveillance. The formation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was about spying on the political left and monitoring dissent: if you went to an anti-Vietnam War protest, then you likely got a file and may have been followed by agents. What is different now is the scale. In the past ASIO had to employ vast resources to follow people around. Today they can track anyone with fewer resources.
The driving factor in all this is capitalism – a system divided by class, in which the top 1 percent of the population owns and controls the vast majority of the world’s wealth. Being a minority, the wealthy need political institutions, laws, police, armies and mass propaganda to protect their position. 
A central aspect of capitalism is social control, either through direct force in dictatorships or through the illusion of democracy we have here in Australia or the US. Mass surveillance is now becoming a part of this social control. This is more obvious in countries like Turkey, Ukraine and China.
We shouldn’t overstate the impact surveillance has on political struggle; the weakness of our trade unions, the decomposition of social democracy and the collapse of the left, which began well before big data arrived, are more decisive factors. But in a period of weakness, increasing surveillance only reinforces the trends. 
Public servants today can be sacked for private social media posts critical of government policy. It is standard company policy that staff emails can be read by management. Last year, Westpac announced that in some workplaces cameras using facial recognition would be deployed to “read the mood of staff and tell managers if a pep-up is needed”. These are bound to affect people’s confidence to stand up for their rights in the workplace and to speak up about politics more broadly. 
Challenging the surveillance state
Whistleblowers have shown us the full extent of the surveillance state. But exposing it is no guarantee things will change. This is one tragedy of Edward Snowden. 
He exposed the domestic spying of the US. But four years later, almost every spying program continues. The level of surveillance in the US is greater today. In Australia we have mandatory metadata storage of everything we do online. Similar programs have been introduced in the UK, Russia and other countries.
Yet one important thing we learned from Snowden’s revelations is that modern encryption, done right, works. 
Keeping information private using encryption is a very old practice. For example, more than 2,500 years ago, the ancient Greeks developed a device called a Scytale. It was a hexagon-shaped piece of wood which a user would wrap leather around and write a message. When unwrapped, it would appear as gibberish. Only a holder of the piece of wood, who re-wrapped the leather around it, could decipher the message. 
Later, Julius Caesar developed a system – in cryptography it’s called the Caesar cipher – for the substitution of different letters in messages. This was his preferred way of encrypting private and military communications.
Today encryption has come a long way with modern computing; it has also become universal. Unlike when different states would have their own methods of encryption, their own machines with specific settings – such as the Enigma machine used by Germany in World War Two – today the same methods of encryption are used for internet traffic and phone data, no matter where you are in the world.
Why does this matter? 
As nation states increasingly spy on each other, they’ve had to develop tools that monitor internet and communications traffic as a whole and break into consumer products such as iPhones. So in the 21st century, the logic of inter-state espionage is mass surveillance. 
Half of all internet traffic is now encrypted, but governments are trying to break through the barriers. Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, British prime minister Theresa May and the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, among others, have been pressuring tech companies to build “back doors” into their encryption systems so that communications can be read by government agencies. 
If tech companies relent, it will be only a matter of time before everyone’s data becomes publicly available. It’s vital that we oppose any attempt to do this. We have a right to privacy – the right to communicate with who we want, free of government surveillance. 
While we need whistleblowers, we need to understand that surveillance has become a key part of modern capitalism. Not just the growing advertising industry, but political crisis, imperialism and the more unstable world we are heading toward are all drivers of expanded surveillance. 
So it will take much more than reform or stronger regulation of data collection. We need to get rid of this whole system that puts profit above all else and seeks to turn all aspects of our lives into a tradable commodity. That will require a political and economic revolution. That might sound like an impossible task. But, in part, the prospect of it is precisely why states are so concerned with mass surveillance. As Snowden said in 2013:
“In the end the [government] is not afraid of whistleblowers like me … [Chelsea] Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned or powerless. No, the [government] is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public … and it should be.”

Michael Kandelaars

It’s not just Facebook – surveillance is the business model of the internet

The National Broadband Network should have been one of the most successful and popular infrastructure projects in Australian history. Instead it has been plagued with drama; the construction has taken considerably longer than planned, and the technology has been significantly downgraded.
As for the delivery of “super fast” broadband, the experience of many is slower internet speeds and higher prices. In 2013, Australia ranked 30th in world for internet connection speeds. Despite billions spent on the NBN, Australia is now ranked 50th.
How did it come to this?
In April 2009, then prime minister Kevin Rudd and communications minister Stephen Conroy announced the NBN project and the publicly funded NBN Co to construct it. The plan was to rip up the outdated copper network owned by Telstra and replace it with high speed optical fibre.
This fibre would go directly to people’s homes (fibre to the premises or FTTP), delivering internet speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps), which could later be upgraded to 1,000 Mbps or faster. By comparison, the median speed for people on ADSL2+ internet plans over copper is around 12 Mbps.
The Abbott government, elected in 2013, with Malcolm Turnbull as communications minister, completely overhauled the roll-out for the NBN. Citing concerns about the cost of the NBN, it scrapped fibre to the premises in favour of a slower fibre to the node (FTTN) plan. FTTN involves the construction of nodes (washing machine-sized green boxes in the street) to which high speed internet access is delivered through fibre, before the old, slow copper wires deliver it the rest of the way to your house. It’s the equivalent of a job half done, but passed off as complete and dressed up with a fancy acronym.
These nodes are outdated technology and ensure that the NBN will be slower than it should be for millions of people. Laurie Patton, the executive director of Internet Australia, pointed out in June, “NBN won’t admit their use of ageing copper is a mistake that will cost billions to replace … It’s not really an upgrade anyway because they’ll have to rip out all the copper wiring and the so-called ‘nodes’ will be redundant”.
Only around 22 percent of Australian premises had FTTP installed under the original plan. Now the remaining 78 percent will get the inferior FTTN or some combination of HFC (hybrid fibre coaxial), wireless or satellite technology – usually known as MTM (multi-technology mix, but known better as Malcolm Turnbull’s mess).
From a technical perspective, it is easy to see that Labor’s initial plan for the NBN was superior to that of the Liberals. But the broader issues that plague the NBN today were there in the beginning.
(As an aside, it should be remembered that while Stephen Conroy planned faster internet access, he also campaigned, unsuccessfully, for the government’s right to block websites deemed inappropriate. Two months after announcing the NBN, Conroy earned the title of “internet villain of the year”, bestowed by the 11th Internet Industry Awards in the UK. The award is given annually to “individuals or organisations that have upset the internet industry and hampered its development – those whom the industry loves to hate”. But I digress.)
The biggest problem with the NBN has been the focus that it must be profitable. Despite being publicly funded, NBN Co is planned for privatisation within five years of construction being completed. Both Liberal and Labor accept the view that government expenditure is not about social good, but more an investment so that a small handful of people now and in the future can enrich themselves.
The NBN created a fantastic opportunity to renationalise a large section of Telstra by decommissioning the old copper wires without compensation. NBN Co instead struck a deal with Telstra to pay the company $11 billion over 30 years; $5b of that was just to gain access to the exchanges and duct networks.
If that weren’t bad enough, the deal was renegotiated under Turnbull. It is now estimated that, over 55 years, NBN Co could pay Telstra up to $98 billion – primarily for access to its infrastructure. FTTN maintains Telstra’s monopoly over the copper wire infrastructure.
It hasn’t been golden handouts only for Telstra. Turnbull also oversaw the appointment of former Vodafone Australia boss Bill Morrow to lead NBN Co. He is currently the highest paid public servant in the country, “earning” $3.6 million last year.
For all these faults, though, at least people who were lucky enough to get FTTP connected are all getting fast internet, right? Wrong. The pricing scheme that the NBN has introduced has encouraged internet service providers to deliver slower speeds to end users.
The NBN charges a per-megabit amount to ISPs, which then on-sell it. This is known as the connectivity virtual circuit (CVC) charge. An ISP might purchase 1,000 Mbps capacity, and then sign up 100 people on an “up to 25 Mbps” plan. If only 40 of those 100 people are using it at the same time, then they’ll all get their top speed. But if all 100 are using it, it could be fast for some and painfully slow for others. This model makes it profitable for ISPs to sign up as many people to the slowest plans, and purchase as little CVC capacity as possible.
This on-selling and underselling ensure that NBN Co makes a profit and the ISPs make a profit. But the end user pays for a service that is likely more expensive and unreliable than their previous ADSL2+ connection.
If the purpose of the NBN was not primarily to make a profit, the CVC charge could be reduced significantly and the faster speeds that the NBN is capable of could be delivered. Just as health care and education shouldn’t be seen as profitable enterprises but vital social services, internet access should be the same.
The NBN should be fully funded and fibre rolled out to every building in the country. If the government is after some suggestions of where to find the money, the exorbitant pay packets of the NBN executives and Turnbull’s investments in the Cayman Islands would be a good place to start.

Who’s to blame for the NBN clusterf*ck?

In the wake of the recent terrorist attacks in London, there is a renewed attempt by global governments to increase surveillance of the internet.
Taking aim at encryption, Malcolm Turnbull stated that, despite it being “a vital piece of security for every user of the Internet … encrypted messaging applications are also used by criminals and terrorists – at the moment much of this traffic is difficult for our security agencies to decrypt, and indeed for our Five Eyes partners as well”.
In June, attorney-general George “Darth” Brandis, along with his Five Eyes counterparts from the UK, US, Canada and NZ, met in Ottawa to discuss ways to weaken encryption and pressure the tech industry to build back doors through which they can spy on global communications.
<a href="http://socialismsydney.com/"><img alt="Socialism Sydney" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/RF%20-%20Socialism%20ad_8.jpg" /></a>
In response, a joint statement by 83 organisations and individuals from these five countries opposed these plans. The executive officer of Electronic Frontiers Australia, Jon Lawrence, said, “Calls to undermine encryption in the name of ‘national security’ are fundamentally misguided and dangerous”. Jim Killock, executive director at the UK’s Open Rights Group, said, “Security experts and cryptographers are as united in their views on encryption as scientists are on climate change”.
At the time of writing, we don’t know what decisions were made at the Five Eyes ministerial meeting, but new attempts to circumvent encryption reflect the ways that state surveillance has changed since revelations from US whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In 2013, Snowden shocked the world when he revealed that the US and its allies had created the largest and most complex system of state surveillance that has ever existed. One of the US National Security Agency’s most invasive programs was XKeyscore, a searchable database with millions of people’s emails, web browsing histories and more. This also allowed for real-time monitoring of almost any individual around the world while they used the internet.
Just four years later, the state of computer security has changed immensely, making this surveillance more difficult. According to a report published in February by the Electronic Frontiers Federation, more than half of all internet traffic is now encrypted. The expansion of Virtual Private Network services and use of the Onion Router (TOR) has made it easier for everyone to remain anonymous online. However, the development that is of most concern to the likes of the NSA is the widespread use of encrypted mobile devices and messaging applications such as Signal and WhatsApp.
These applications use a method called end-to-end encryption in which messages are encrypted, and the tools to decrypt those messages exist only on the device of the sender and receiver. Therefore, a company like WhatsApp cannot read the messages sent through its servers. As a WhatsApp spokesperson said in 2016 as part of an ongoing court case brought by the Brazilian government, “We cannot share information we don’t have access to”.
Years before James Comey began presenting himself as the supposed good guy of the US establishment, the then FBI director railed against the use of domestic encryption tools. In 2015 he stated, “If the challenges of real-time interception threaten to leave us in the dark, encryption threatens to lead all of us to a very dark place”.
He pressured companies such as Apple to build back doors to bypass encryption. While the intelligence agencies recognise that they cannot currently break modern encryption algorithms, they have focused their resources on trying to get around them by hacking directly into mobile devices.
This strategy was demonstrated in March when whistleblower website WikiLeaks released Vault 7, the largest ever publication of confidential documents leaked from the CIA. Additional leaks this year by hacking group Shadow Brokers have further revealed the extent of the intelligence agencies’ hacking capabilities. These documents show that the US has been developing, purchasing and stockpiling security vulnerabilities in Apple and Android mobile devices. Exploiting these vulnerabilities has allowed them to read WhatsApp or Signal messages as they are being typed or read.
One of the most damning leaks in Vault 7 revealed that the CIA had discovered how to turn Samsung Smart TVs into covert listening devices, even when they are turned off.
The recent WannaCry and Petya ransomware attacks, which caused immense damage across the world, both used security holes codenamed EternalBlue that had been stockpiled by the CIA and deliberately left open. While the CIA did not intend these vulnerabilities to be used in this way, it is the inevitable result of keeping software insecure and creating back doors.
With leaks from the CIA and the NSA exposed, these security flaws are now being fixed, making it more difficult for the agencies to continue their spying activities. This explains the increased push from Five Eyes countries to force tech companies to install back doors so they can bypass encryption.
However, the argument that states should have the right to bypass encryption to stop terrorism simply doesn’t hold up. It would be ludicrous to suggest that turning Smart TVs into listening devices is about stopping ISIS. It has always been about developing tools for mass surveillance, and now increasingly for espionage and cyberwar. This has been seen before. For example, the worm Stuxnet was written by the US and Israel and used to target Iranian nuclear facilities.
It is not a question of whether governments will one day use these hacking techniques for domestic surveillance – they already do. On 30 June, it was revealed that Centrelink has been paying Israeli hacking company Cellebrite to break into mobile phones. The methods used are the same ones Cellebrite developed in 2015, when it helped the FBI break into an iPhone as part of the San Bernardino terrorism case.
It is now known that government departments such as the Australian Tax Office and the Department of Employment have paid around $500,000 to Cellebrite for equipment and training to hack into phones.
In the debate about metadata storage, George Brandis was adamant that the government wasn’t after the content of Australians’ communications, just who we are talking to. These new revelations and the entire debate about encryption show that the content is exactly what they are after. No matter the justification, we should resist any attempt to weaken encryption and our right to privacy.

Weakening encryption is an attack on our freedom

The Turnbull government’s recently announced $230 million Cyber Security Strategy is hypocrisy of the highest order. Hot on the heels of introducing mandatory metadata retention to spy on all of us, Turnbull now tells us he’s concerned about our security online – so concerned that he felt the need to use the word “cyber” 402 times in this 67-page document.
While the strategy is being pitched as a defensive plan to protect Australian businesses against cyber attacks, the devil is in the detail. It states, “Australia and its allies will work together internationally to promote norms of behaviour that are consistent with a free, open and secure Internet”.
Yet for years the “norms of behaviour” of the Australian government and its allies have been to weaken online security and use the internet as a tool to spy on citizens.
Whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that Australia has been one of the ominous “Five Eyes”, working closely with the US National Security Agency (NSA) to create a “supra-national intelligence organisation”.
You can vote Liberal, or you can vote Labor, and you can be confident that when it comes to national security we read from the same song sheet. <cite class="quote-attrib">– Bill Shorten</cite>
Snowden’s revelations have confirmed that the biggest threats to cyber security come from states including Australia and the United States. Turnbull, however, has a different interpretation, writing in his introduction to the document:
“As the Snowden revelations demonstrate, often the most damaging risk to government or business online security is … the ability of an insider to cause massive disruption to a network or obtain and distribute classified material.”
The classified material released by Snowden has exposed that the United States and its allies have created the largest and most complex system of state surveillance that has ever existed.
One of the NSA’s most invasive programs revealed was XKeyscore, a searchable database with millions of people’s emails, web browsing histories and more. This also allowed for real-time monitoring of almost any individual around the world while they used the internet, all without warrants. As Snowden told the Guardian in 2013: “I, sitting at my desk, [could] wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president”.
The Australian government has not only participated in creating this global surveillance regime but also carries out its own surveillance in Australia and the region. In 2013, it was revealed that the Australian Signals Directorate had attempted to monitor the phone calls of the Indonesian president and several senior officials.
Australian spies disguised as aid workers also bugged the cabinet room of the East Timorese government to eavesdrop on its discussions of maritime border negotiations with Australia. More recently, the Australian Federal Police spied on several journalists who have exposed the appalling conditions of refugees in Australian-run detention centres.
One of the most revealing aspects of the strategy is its admission of the Australian government’s ability to carry out cyber attacks. As ABC political editor Chris Uhlman pointed out:
“There is one extraordinary admission in the plan. Buried on page 21, it says, ‘Australia’s defensive and offensive cyber capabilities enable us to deter and respond to the threat of cyber attack’ … The government is sending a message: it has the ability to launch cyber attacks of its own.”
On the one hand, Turnbull is telling us that Australia needs to be defended against cyber attacks, while on the other he admits that the Australian state can pre-emptively launch these same attacks against others. The pop culture myth that hackers are just teenagers living in their parents’ basements ignores that the most dangerous hackers and viruses come from the security apparatuses of nation states.
The most well-known example of this is the Stuxnet computer worm, which successfully targeted the Iranian Natanz nuclear facility in 2011. Widely seen as a joint US-Israeli attack, Stuxnet destroyed centrifuges in the nuclear facility by forcing them to spin out of control.
Ilias Chantzos, a senior director of security firm Symantec, told the Guardian in 2011:
“Before Stuxnet, the possibility to attack [a control system] using cyber was explored theoretically but was more seen as in the realm of cinema and creative science-fiction-thriller writing. Now it is a real-life scenario.”
This is a frightening future, yet the admissions in the Cyber Security Strategy show the Australian government is keen to be a part of it. However, little opposition is expected in parliament, as Labor leader Bill Shorten has expressed full support for Turnbull’s new plan.
“You can vote Liberal, or you can vote Labor, and you can be confident that when it comes to national security we read from the same song sheet”, he said.

The government is the real threat to cyber security

Today, 13 October 2015, is the day that Australia’s internet access lost its freedom. Mandatory retention of metadata is now in full effect. While even the US government is moving to close down some of its domestic spying programs, the Australian government, with the support of the ALP, is increasing its domestic surveillance.
All of the metadata from your phone and internet access will be stored for at least two years. What websites you visit, when you visited, who you email, who you make phone calls to and more – all will be recorded and stored.
While the content of websites and text messages won’t ordinarily be recorded, the state has retained the right to record these for targeted individuals. Full warrantless access to this information will be granted to at least 22 government agencies, including the police, ASIO and potentially even the Australian Tax Office.
The justification for metadata retention is to stop terrorism. That is rubbish. Similar anti-terror programs internationally have been thinly veiled domestic spying programs.
A 2013 report by a US National Security Agency review board even claimed: “[T]he current storage by the government of bulk metadata creates potential risks to public trust, personal privacy and civil liberty”.
Referring to metadata retention, whistleblower Edward Snowden told a London conference in March: “They’re not going to stop the next attacks either … because they’re not public safety programs. They’re spying programs”.
Expanding the surveillance state
Bulk metadata collection is not the first state surveillance regime, but it marks a significant expansion of the state’s powers. For years, metadata have been used by the police and ASIO, yet agencies have been limited in what they could view due to the data being stored only for short periods of time.
Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) figures show that, over the past five years, more than half a million data requests have been made each year. According to a 2014 ACMA report, the requested data were largely “phone, web browsing and location data” of Australian citizens.
This new mass surveillance program raises the question of who will fund it. The federal government has allocated $131 million. But that will not cover costs, which are estimated to be more than $300m. The shortfall will have to be paid by individual internet service providers (ISPs), who will likely raise their prices as a result.
Australian ISP iiNet, which has spoken out against metadata retention, said that costs could go up by as much as $10 a month for each user.
Not only will we be spied on; we may also have to pay a monthly spying tax.
The new laws, along with the intellectual property provisions in the recently signed Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, also give corporations greater rights to sue individuals and shut down websites that allegedly infringe copyright.
In April 2015, the Federal Court ruled in favour of providing Dallas Buyers Club LLC the names and home address of all Australians who downloaded the movie of the same name. It is more likely that metadata will be used for future cases like this than will be used to stop terrorism.
In 2014, then communications minister Malcolm Turnbull criticised media corporations for being too soft on online pirates. In an interview with Sky News, he said: “[R]ights owners are not keen on taking people to court … [they’ve] got to be prepared to roll their sleeves and take on people … Sue people; sue mums, dads and students”.
Now they have the green light to do this.
Avoiding the net
There are many legal means to evade the new laws. The use of tools like TOR (The Onion Router) or virtual private networks (VPN) allow internet browsing without government surveillance. These tools encrypt your web traffic and route it through multiple computers, making tracking and detection much harder, although they are not foolproof. If only a few individuals use these tools, they are easily noticed by authorities – so the more people who do, the better off everyone is.
The Onion Router
A good way to evade surveillance is by obscuring your metadata using the Onion Router (TOR).
TOR works by sending your website requests through a large multi-layered (like an onion) network of computers across the globe. The computer that eventually accesses the website is someone else’s at the end of the network.
TOR also encrypts your internet traffic, making any metadata it generates unreadable to prying government eyes. Its effectiveness is evidenced by it being a common tool used by whistleblowers around the world to hide their online communications.
TOR can be downloaded at torproject.org.
Virtual private network
Virtual private networks (VPNs) allow secure remote connections to their networks via the internet. They work similarly to TOR by encrypting your internet traffic, but they don’t go through the same multi-layers that provide its anonymity.
If you are connected to a VPN in the United States, any website you visit will think that you are also in the United States because that’s where the computer actually requesting the data is from. This is a very effective way to get around accessing content that is blocked in Australia.
There are many free and paid VPNs available, such as HotSpot Shield, IPVanish, CyberGhost and TigerVPN. Purchasing and setting up a connection is quite straightforward. It’s as simple as signing up with a VPN provider, downloading and installing their application and selecting where in the world you want to be connected to.
<hr />
The author can be contacted at <a href="mailto:michael.kandelaars@gmail.com">michael.kandelaars@gmail.com</a> using this <a href="https://redflag.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/backups/keys/mkandelaars.asc">public key</a> if encryption is required.

Metadata retention (and how to avoid it)

Edward Snowden continues to live in Russian exile with little prospect of returning home to the United States. In a recent interview with Al Jazeera journalist Mehdi Hasan and whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, he spoke out about his past and plans for the future.
In 2013 Snowden exposed how the US, along with its many global partners, had developed the largest and most complex system of state surveillance in history. Snowden in 2006 began working in IT security for the CIA, and later for the defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton with the National Security Agency (NSA). In time, he began to question the many surveillance systems he had access to. One in particular gave him “the authority to wiretap anyone, from you, or your accountant, to a federal judge, to even the president if I had a personal email”, he said.
Snowden was no radical, but came to see the state’s secretive operations as dangerous and undermining of democratic society and personal liberty. “I came from a federal family. And when you’re someone like me who grows up in the system believing everything the government says is likely to be true because ‘why would they possibly lie to us’ and you find more and more clear evidence that … the public [is] being misled … you have to think about how that would change your view, how would that change your personality, what would you do?”
Russia granted Snowden temporary asylum until August 2017. Despite being forced to live in exile he says he’s willing to return to the United States on the condition that he’ll be “guaranteed of a fair trial where I can put forth a public interest defence”.
Ellsberg, who was charged with espionage in 1971 for releasing the Pentagon Papers, which detailed the secret expansion of the Vietnam War and exposed the systematic lying of the Johnson administration, explained to Hasan that there is little likelihood of this.
The Obama administration has overseen an unprecedented attack on whistleblowers. Of the 10 people who have ever been charged under the 1917 Espionage Act, seven have been during Obama’s presidency and all have been working in either the US armed forces or intelligence.
“[Of] all the whistleblowers who’ve been tried under president Obama,” Ellsberg said, “none of them has had a fair trial. I did not have a fair trial and could not have had under the Espionage Act which did not permit me to even tell the jury ever why I had copied the Pentagon Papers”. The charges against Ellsberg were later dropped when the Nixon administration was found to have engaged in unlawful activities to discredit him.
On the question of Snowden’s return Ellsberg continued, “I don’t think he can ever come back to America, unless the law changes very significantly. I think the intelligence services will never forgive him for embarrassing them and curtailing their illegal activities”.
Snowden continues to speak out despite the US establishment baying for his blood. As he explained, when “the legality of the times are becoming more and more divorced from the morality of our daily lives … you ultimately have to make a choice about what do you have a greater commitment to – the law or to justice”.
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The author can be contacted at <a href="mailto:michael.kandelaars@gmail.com">michael.kandelaars@gmail.com</a> using this <a href="https://redflag.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/backups/keys/mkandelaars.asc">public key</a> if encryption is required.

Exiled, but Edward Snowden remains defiant

One of the most high profile terrorism cases in Australian history is falling apart. “Anzac Day terror plot”, screamed the major newspapers on 18 April after 200 police raided homes in Melbourne. At the time, Victorian acting chief commissioner Tim Cartwright told the media that the young men arrested, “planned to carry out atrocious acts on Anzac Day”. Now, it’s clear that the facts got in the way of the story.
From the beginning, the media frenzy surrounding this case obscured the basic details. Of the five people arrested, only two were charged with terrorism related offences. But neither was charged with preparing an attack or planning an attack. The charge was “conspiracy to commit acts done in preparation for, or planning, terrorist acts”. Thought crime in any language.
At the time of the arrests, I wrote in Red Flag: “We don’t know what the two young Melbourne men were thinking. But … the nature of the current charges, should give anyone pause before leaping to the conclusions that the police, the media and the political right want us to”.
These words ring true after the news that terrorism charges against 18-year-old Harun Causevic have now been withdrawn due to a lack of evidence. This is a significant turn of events. Particularly as the specifics of Causevic’s arrest were used as proof of the need for wide ranging preventative anti-terror laws. In truth it now proves the opposite.
Causevic was the first person in Victoria to ever have been locked up under a Preventative Detention Order. In the early hours of the morning on April 18, police raided his family’s home and arrested him without charge. Causevic’s father alleges that during the arrest the police beat his son, breaking his arm, and destroying property in their home.
In court his father said, “My son was injured 20 days ago [and] nobody helped him ... he had broken ribs, arms, nobody came into jail to help him or give him medicine …This is terrorism on me and my family, they broke $20,000 [worth of goods] in my house … my son didn’t do nothing.”
Causevic was denied bail and for the past four months has been held in an isolation cell in prison.
The day after his arrest, the Herald Sun ran an article entitled “Anzac Day plot a call to arms in support of our rigorous anti-terror legislation”.
It explained how this case proved the need for tough Preventative Detention Order laws and how these “and other safeguards are working to protect us”. This argument is now in tatters. Instead of stopping alleged terrorism, it is the government, police and the media who are terrorising innocent Muslims.
Harun Causevic and his family have every right to feel vindicated that the case against him has collapsed. Vindication, however, will not make his bones heal any quicker or erase the memory of four months in isolation.
His case is a reminder of the lengths to which an unpopular government will go to whip up anti-Muslim racism. 
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The author can be contacted at <a href="mailto:michael.kandelaars@gmail.com">michael.kandelaars@gmail.com</a> using this <a href="https://redflag.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/backups/keys/mkandelaars.asc">public key</a> if encryption is required.

Innocent: Anzac terror case highlights anti-Muslim hysteria

Government funding for students at elite private schools is set to exceed that for students at public schools by 2020. That is the shocking conclusion of a comprehensive report released in July.
Private school, public cost: how school funding is closing the wrong gaps estimates that government funding for Catholic and independent schools is growing at a faster rate than for public schools.
The report’s authors, Chris Bonnor and Bernie Shepherd, write that, despite recent government focus on closing the gap in student achievement, “The only gap being closed is that between government funding of its own schools and its funding of the schools that are considered to be ‘private’”.
In 2012, then opposition leader Tony Abbott, speaking to the Independent Schools Council of Australia, referred to this funding gap as an “injustice”. Let’s consider what Abbott’s justice looks like.
Data from 2013 show that private schools received on average 73 percent of what public schools received from the government. The report estimates that by 2020 the figure will be 104 percent. Government funding for Catholic schools will be $12,650 per student and the remaining private schools $11,900 per student. Each public school student will be funded only $11,800.
Not all these private schools are like Scotch College – many service people who are not that well off. But the trend points to the increasing privatisation of education. That can only be a bad thing. It will lead to greater differentiation and a far more unequal distribution of education resources.

Elite schools getting more handouts

Not content with monitoring the internet, the Abbott government now seeks to censor it.
In March, the Coalition passed legislation to store every Australian’s internet metadata for up to two years. Now <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/digital-life/digital-life-news/australian-senate-passes-controversial-antipiracy-websiteblocking-laws-20150622-ghuorh.html">legislation has passed the Senate</a>, with Labor’s support, that will force internet service providers to block access to certain websites.
Censoring the internet has been attempted by many governments around the world. Britain has had similar website blocking laws in place since 2011, with minimal success. China’s “great firewall” is one of the most expansive, yet it has countless loopholes used by political dissidents. Even my old high school tried to block websites but could never outwit its students, who always found ways of getting around the restrictions.
After passing the metadata retention laws, attorney general George Brandis admitted, “I’m not saying it’s easy to get around, I’m allowing for the possibility that it may be got around”. Actually it is easy to get around. Here’s how.
Use the onion router
When you normally visit a website, your computer makes a direct connection with the server the site is hosted on. The IP address of the sending and receiving computers, along with what is requested, forms the basis of metadata.
In Australia, this metadata is now stored for at least two years and can be analysed by the government and police. A key way to evade this surveillance is by obscuring your metadata using a tool called the Onion Router (TOR).
TOR works by sending your website requests through a large multi-layered (like an onion) network of computers across the globe. The computer that eventually accesses the website is someone else’s at the end of the network.
TOR also encrypts your internet traffic, making any metadata it generates unreadable to prying government eyes. Its effectiveness is evidenced by it being a common tool used by whistleblowers around the world to hide their online communications.
TOR can be downloaded at <a href="http://www.torproject.org">torproject.org</a>. It comes bundled with a custom version of Firefox that is configured for the TOR network. Once installed, it will launch this browser and will take you to a special “checking” website to confirm your browsing is now secure. This page will also alert you to any updates to the software, which are important to heed if you want to stay secure.
Take note that only this browser will use the network. TOR is also available for Android devices by searching for “Orbot” and “Orweb” in the Play Store. It is not currently available on Apple devices. Some products in the Apple Store do claim to be TOR clients. None are officially endorsed or independently proven to be secure.
Use a virtual private network
One limitation of TOR is that the rerouting significantly slows down your connection. It is not useful for any serious downloading such as on file sharing networks or streaming content that may be blocked in Australia.
In June 2013, the Standing Committee on Infrastructure and Communications published a report recommending that Australians should bypass such geolocation blocks. The fastest way to do this is with a virtual private network (VPN).
These types of networks are commonly used by universities and other organisations. They allow secure remote connections to their networks via the internet. They work similarly to TOR by encrypting your internet traffic, but they don’t go through the same multi-layers that provide its anonymity.
This means that the government can’t immediately access your metadata. If you are connected to a VPN in the United States, any website you visit will think that you are also in the United States because that’s where the computer requesting the actual data is from. This is a very effective way to get around accessing content that is blocked in Australia.
Despite the fact that legislation has been passed to allow the Australian government to block certain websites, use of a VPN will get around it. The government’s filter most likely would work by blocking websites by their IP address. By using a VPN, you would never directly visit the blocked IP address. Instead your VPN provider would. It would then send the website to you. The other logical flaw with blocking websites by IP address is that the website in question could just change its IP address to get around the filter.
There are many free and paid VPNs available, such as HotSpot Shield, IPVanish, CyberGhost and TigerVPN. Purchasing and setting up a connection is quite straightforward. It’s as simple as signing up with a VPN provider, downloading and installing their application and selecting where in the world you want to be connected to.
As long as the connection is maintained, all of your internet traffic will route through the VPN. Like TOR, many providers also have apps available for mobile devices to ensure you are secure wherever you go.
A few important things to consider when using a VPN are the security protocols used and the provider’s attitude to privacy. Each VPN provider will offer a range of different encryption methods that you can select with varying levels of security.
The most secure is OpenVPN (sometimes called SSL/TLS), followed by IPSec and L2TP. PPTP has known vulnerabilities and you should avoid services that offer only this method.
Whether your provider records your metadata or “logs” is an important consideration. Use of a VPN hides your metadata from immediate collection by your internet service provider or government. But your VPN provider might still collect it. Some providers have been known to hand this information over to requesting governments or corporations. Others refuse to keep any logs on their customers.
Doing your own research is important for finding a VPN provider that meets your needs. There are many websites such as Lifehacker and the Australian consumer advocacy group Choice that have some useful reviews of VPN providers and how-to guides for further information.
All attempts by the government to censor and monitor the internet need to be opposed. However, the reality is that vast monitoring is already happening. The suggestions above are not exhaustive but are important steps people can take to make our increasingly surveilled lives a little more secure.
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The author can be contacted at <a href="mailto:michael.kandelaars@gmail.com">michael.kandelaars@gmail.com</a> using this <a href="https://redflag.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/backups/keys/mkandelaars.asc">public key</a> if encryption is required.

How to beat Australia’s internet surveillance

On 18 April, 200 federal and state police officers raided seven houses in Melbourne, arresting five young men. The pretext for the raids was preventing an imminent terrorist attack. Victorian acting chief commissioner Tim Cartwright alleged that the young men “planned to carry out atrocious acts on Anzac Day”.
The subsequent media frenzy, however, has already dramatically obscured the known facts of the case.
Of five, three have been charged, two with terrorism-related offences. But neither has been charged with preparing an attack or planning an attack. The charge is “conspiracy to commit acts done in preparation for, or planning, terrorist acts”.
This is thought crime. For instance, “conspiracy” could be telling someone that you’re going to Google something. Or perhaps more specifically, a Muslim telling someone that he’s going to Google something.
For the first time in Victoria, police used a Preventative Detention Order to detain one of the men, an 18 year old from Hampton Park. Such orders give police the power to detain someone for up to 14 days without charge. This man was held in custody for three days before being released and re-arrested and charged.
His father alleges that, during the initial police raid, officers beat his son, breaking his arm and ribs.
Another arrestee, Aboriginal teenager Eathan Cruse, was viciously assaulted by police during one of the other raids. His father Glen told Fairfax Media that police gave him a “boot right in the head and they said, ‘Shut up, you Abo’, and I could hear Eathan … getting knocked out cold”.
His sister told Fairfax how she “woke up to a sniper pointing [a gun] at my head at 4am … We had all of them come into the house, they kicked-in the doors, tear gas was used and they cleared each room. They pulled my nine-year-old brother out of his bed”. His mother Anja said that after they were done with Eathan “there was a pool of blood on the floor”.
The events contain an echo of the Guildford Four case – young Irish wrongly convicted of terrorism in 1975. All of the evidence used against them was obtained under torture by British police while the four were held without charge. It took until 1991 for their names to be cleared.
According to professor Greg Barton from the Global Terrorism Research Centre, speaking on ABC radio on 20 April, information gained from someone subject to a Preventative Detention Order “can’t be used in subsequent legal proceedings”. But the charges against these two men and the police powers used are among the most draconian in the Western world. Exactly what was said and done to the young injured man while he was in custody we may never know, but we should assume the treatment was awful. After all, if the police were prepared to break his arm and ribs in his own house – where there were witnesses – what might they be emboldened to do in private?
Gerry Conlon, one of the Guilford Four, in 2009 compared his case to the modern treatment of Muslims: “What has been happening in Britain since 2005 has created the same sort of conditions that helped to lead to our arrest. The same procedures are being followed – arrest as many as you can and present a circumstantial case in the hope that at least some of them will be convicted.”
We don’t know what the two young Melbourne men were thinking. But Conlon’s words, and the nature of the current charges, should give anyone pause before leaping to the conclusions that the police, the media and the political right want us to.
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The author can be contacted at <a href="mailto:michael.kandelaars@gmail.com">michael.kandelaars@gmail.com</a> using this <a href="https://redflag.org.auhttps://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/backups/keys/mkandelaars.asc">public key</a> if encryption is required.

It’s not just Facebook – surveillance is the business model of the internet

Who’s to blame for the NBN clusterf*ck?

Weakening encryption is an attack on our freedom

The government is the real threat to cyber security

Metadata retention (and how to avoid it)

Exiled, but Edward Snowden remains defiant

Innocent: Anzac terror case highlights anti-Muslim hysteria

Elite schools getting more handouts

How to beat Australia’s internet surveillance

Terror raids contain echo of Guildford Four case

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