katlington posted:

Or recycling other's arguments without understanding or care for context. That would explain not just the terms they use but also why their arguments are really dumb. It's not an original Pro Hart, it's a 3 year old playing with paint. Fun to lol at though.

quote:

A chilling step closer to Australian secret police

Jonathan Holmes
Foreign journalists are falling off their chairs in shock at the brutality of our data retention law, yet we hardly blink an eye.

For days, we've been scaring ourselves silly, because a few Melbourne teenagers might have planned to attack police officers with knives on Anzac Day. Good on the cops for nabbing them, but hardly an existential threat to our society.

Meanwhile, nine days ago, the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 became law, after passing through both houses of Parliament with Labor support.

The more power you give any organisation, the more light needs to be shone on how it uses its power.

A record of your electronic communications – who you call, or text, or email, or message, when you do so, and where you are at the time – must now be kept by your service provider for a minimum of two years. And more than 20 law enforcement agencies will have access to those records without the need for a warrant, and without (needless to say) anyone informing you.

Well, Attorney-General George Brandis​ asks, how worrisome is that? After all, before this law was passed, your metadata was available to 85 agencies.

"The only change that this bill makes to the relationship between the state and the citizen," he told the Senate, "is to introduce safeguards in relation to the access of law enforcement agencies to metadata, which were not there before."

In particular, Senator Brandis addressed the so-called "chilling effect" on investigative journalism that the media feared would result from the authorities' ability to scour reporters' metadata in search of their confidential sources. That's been fixed, he assured us. The new act contains "a large and detailed architecture for the protection of journalists ... which forms no part of the existing law".

So it does. And I've been brooding about that architecture for the past two weeks, as I sat for many hours on aeroplanes, courtesy of the ABC's Foreign Correspondent. I've talked about it to journalists in Paris, Washington and New York, specialists in reporting on terrorism and counter-terrorism. And when I described one particular facet of the act to them – one that has received minimal comment here in Australia – they nearly fell off their chairs.

Division 4C of the amended act lays down that if a law enforcement agency wants to search a professional journalist's metadata in pursuit of his or her source, it first has to get a "journalist information warrant" from an "issuing authority" - usually a judge or magistrate - or in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation's case, from the Attorney-General.

The authority should only issue the warrant, the act says, if the public interest in doing so outweighs various other public interests, including the source's right to privacy. The authority must also weigh in the balance any arguments made by a public interest advocate.

This curious person – a senior lawyer (of course) with the necessary security clearances – will be appointed by the Prime Minister, no less. And, in the soothing words of the opposition defence spokesman, Labor's Stephen Conroy, "the PIA will be empowered to stand in the shoes of the journalist and argue why it is contrary to the public interest to issue the warrant".

Well fine. Except there's a Kafkaesque catch-22. The public interest advocate will not be able to inform the journalist or news organisation that a warrant has been sought, so the advocate cannot be briefed on any public interest aspect of the story, or any particular reason why the source should remain confidential, that is not already blindingly obvious.

Indeed, this public interest advocacy will not be public. It will be utterly private: one lawyer secretly trying to persuade another lawyer why a spook or a copper should not get access to a reporter's source, while the reporter – and, of course, the source – remain in blissful ignorance.

And here comes the kicker: the clause that had those foreign reporters falling off their chairs, but was barely mentioned by anyone, so far as I can see, in the parliamentary debates about the bill.

Section 182A of the new act says anyone who "discloses or uses" information about a journalist information warrant – about whether one has been applied for, or has been granted, or exists, or even does not exist - can be sent to prison for two years. Think about that.

What possible justification can there be for this extraordinary provision? After all, these warrants need have nothing whatever to do with terrorism or national security. They can be issued to any agency that is investigating pretty much any crime (including, presumably, the crime committed by any Commonwealth public servant who leaks official information to the media – see section 70 of the Crimes Act).

Section 182A is of a piece with the increasingly draconian enforcement of secrecy that Australians have blithely accepted since 9/11.

The 2003 act, for example, authorises ASIO to detain and question people for up to seven days, even if they are not suspected of complicity in a terrorist act, and prevents them from telling anybody that it has happened. The 2014 act says anyone who discloses information about a "special intelligence operation" can be imprisoned for up to 10 years. And there are many more such examples.

In the course of the debate on the new Data Retention Act, Conroy made this extraordinary statement: "Labor is determined to ensure that our national security and law enforcement agencies absolutely have the powers that are necessary to keep Australians safe."

"Absolutely" – what a dangerous word. Absolutism has no place in a democracy, especially not when it is applied to national security agencies. The more power you give any organisation, the more light needs to be shone on how it uses its power. To meet the terrorist "threat", we have been granting our security agencies and police forces more and more power, protected by ever more obsessive secrecy: more power, and more secrecy, than any comparable democracy in the world.

It is no exaggeration to say Australia is on the way to creating a secret police. What a triumph that is for the terrorists.

Jonathan Holmes is a Fairfax columnist and a former presenter of the ABC's Media Watch program.

Nonsense posted:

I'm going to regret this...

I am a lecturer at a prominent University in Sydney - teaching post-graduate media and communications.

50 percent of my students are international students... and I struggle to even speak to them conversationally, let alone understand a huge chunk of what they turn in when they write their assignments.

18 months ago, I had a student who could barely ask me where the bathroom was... and the assignment she turned in, from paragraph to paragraph, varied between unintelligble nonsense and perfect, crisply-written English.

so I Googled the English language bits - and then spent 2 hours cataloguing every website from which she had cut and paste 70% of her assignment.

I reported it to the faculty, we went through an enormous amount of departmental bullshit, we got to the end of semester... and her final mark was 48%.

Her parents threatened to sue - and I thought at the time 'good luck doing that from Beijing...'

The department changed her grade to 50%, she passed, and graduated with the rest of her class that year.

I don't know why I bother, sometimes... it breaks my heart - because I'm lecturing with exactly the same postgrad degree that these students are cheating their way towards.

Nonsense posted:

I'm going to regret this...

I am a lecturer at a prominent University in Sydney - teaching post-graduate media and communications.

Nonsense posted:

I'm going to regret this...

I am a lecturer at a prominent University in Sydney - teaching post-graduate media and communications.

50 percent of my students are international students... and I struggle to even speak to them conversationally, let alone understand a huge chunk of what they turn in when they write their assignments.

18 months ago, I had a student who could barely ask me where the bathroom was... and the assignment she turned in, from paragraph to paragraph, varied between unintelligble nonsense and perfect, crisply-written English.

so I Googled the English language bits - and then spent 2 hours cataloguing every website from which she had cut and paste 70% of her assignment.

I reported it to the faculty, we went through an enormous amount of departmental bullshit, we got to the end of semester... and her final mark was 48%.

Her parents threatened to sue - and I thought at the time 'good luck doing that from Beijing...'

The department changed her grade to 50%, she passed, and graduated with the rest of her class that year.

I don't know why I bother, sometimes... it breaks my heart - because I'm lecturing with exactly the same postgrad degree that these students are cheating their way towards.

Badger of Basra posted:

So I just saw that post about Australian concentration camps giving a five year old PTSD, does that happen often?

Murodese posted:

Yeah, don't worry too much. This poo poo happens everywhere.

Mithranderp posted:

e: you really have to ask how they're getting into your courses in the first place. There's supposed to be a minimum English standard for most courses (like IELTS or some poo poo), but people with extremely limited English skills are still being let in by the thousand.

Mithranderp posted:

The thing is, you can't really blame the international students themselves (though yes, they should be making an effort to do the work, but if you have limited english skills this is nigh on impossible) but the Uni, who basically preys on their families. "Get a degree at a prestigious Australian University! Pay lots and lots of money for your child to be exploited for our profit! YAY!".

Murodese posted:

Yeah, don't worry too much. This poo poo happens everywhere.

Murodese posted:

Lot of our plagiarism cases fall to the side because lecturers are too busy to chase up anyone other than the most greivous of repeat offenders.

Murodese posted:

Lot of our plagiarism cases fall to the side because lecturers are too busy to chase up anyone other than the most greivous of repeat offenders.

Bifauxnen posted:

"loving asylum shoppers",

quote:

One asylum seeker on the island told Guardian Australia his friend who was “living in OPC2 [the detention centre] and hasn’t got his verdict came to our camp to say goodbye”.

“He said he wants to go to Cambodia, get the money then find another smuggler to go somewhere else,” they said.

Negligent posted:

Actual quote from noted right wingers, the guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/apr/22/australian-officials-on-nauru-may-have-breached-terms-of-cambodia-agreement

Asylum shopping confirmed.

Zenithe posted:

Isn't it ridiculously easy and common just straight up pay people to do assignments for you?

Mr Chips posted:

Asylum shopping:

hooman posted:

Negligent posted:

A person who has money seeks out a criminal to help him or her get what she or he wants.

Morally it's no different to hiring a hitman.

Mr Chips posted:

Negligent posted:

If you seek out a criminal with the intention of paying him or her to engage in criminal conduct for your benefit you bear moral responsibility.

People smuggling is a crime. By supporting people smugglers, wealthy asylum seekers are culpable for deaths at sea.

Tokamak posted:

This is what the government has reduced us to, a cryptoparty
nsf001:smashthestate

quote:

Bjorn Lomborg centre: leaked documents cast doubt on Abbott government claims

Date
April 22, 2015 - 11:49AM

672 reading now
Comments 73

Lisa Cox, Matthew Knott

It was the Abbott government's original idea for the University of Western Australia to host a think tank created by the "sceptical environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, according to leaked talking points.

The government will provide $4 million over four years to bring Dr Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre methodology to Australia at a new centre within the University of Western Australia (UWA) business school.

In the talking points, obtained by Fairfax Media, UWA says it does not plan to spend any money on the centre and that it believes government funding will largely cover its cost. The government has previously stated that UWA would also contribute to the centre and that the government is contributing only a third of its estimated cost.

While Dr Lomborg accepts the science of human-induced climate change, he is a controversial figure because he has argued that the risks of climate change have been overstated and it is more important to tackle problems such as malaria.

He has campaigned against the Kyoto Protocol and the use of carbon pricing as a solution to cut carbon emissions, instead favouring investments in research and development.

Since the centre was announced, there has been speculation, including among university staff members, about how the centre was conceived and how it came to be funded.

Last week a spokesman for Education Minister Christopher Pyne said: "The government is contributing around a third of the total cost of the centre based on a proposal put forward by the University of Western Australia and Dr Lomborg's organisation."

But in talking points circulated to UWA staff members, David Harrison, UWA' s head of corporate and government affairs, provides a suggested answer to any students or colleagues to the question: "How did the Australia Consensus Centre come to UWA?"

"UWA was approached by the federal government," the talking points state.

"We saw it as a good opportunity, not only for the university's reputation as a global leader in higher education, but also as a way we could make a positive difference in addressing some of the biggest challenges facing the world today."

Fairfax Media understands that government ministers, following discussions with Dr Lomborg, had the idea of bringing his methodology to Australia and approached UWA about hosting the centre. The university then submitted a proposal to the government that was accepted.

Dr Lomborg has links to some of the government's most senior figures.

In November, Trade Minister Andrew Robb had a meeting with Dr Lomborg and later tweeted a picture of them together. "Had a good chat with Bjorn Lomborg about the power of trade in eliminating poverty," Mr Robb tweeted.

In March, Foreign Affairs Minister Julie Bishop appointed him to a reference group advising on Australia's foreign aid programs.

Tony Abbott quoted Dr Lomborg in his 2009 book, Battlelines, to explain why it doesn't make sense "to impose certain and substantial costs on the economy now in order to avoid unknown and perhaps even benign changes in the future".

The UWA talking points state: "Australia Consensus Centre will focus on applying an economic lens to proposals to achieve good for Australia, the region and the world, prioritising those initiatives which produce the most social value per dollar spent.

"We don't expect everyone to agree with the work of the centre, but we are looking forward to the debate and the sharing of the ideas to find the best solution."

The establishment of the centre comes as the UWA has moved to axe other research facilities and academic staff in the sciences.

It is understood some UWA academics are disgruntled by the decision to give $4 million to Dr Lomborg for the new centre amid the cuts.

The university has axed its world-renowned Centre for Water Research, led by scientist Jorg Imberger, winner of the most prestigious award in his field, the Stockholm Water Prize.

In March, UWA justified the decision by saying the centre was running at a loss and has suspended Professor Imberger amid an investigation for alleged misconduct.

In an email to supporters of the Climate Council on Friday, former Australian of the Year Tim Flannery said it was "extraordinary" that the government had abolished the Climate Commission "which was composed of Australia's best climate scientists, economists and energy experts" on the basis of lack of funding only to find the money to "import a politically-motivated think tank to work in the same space."

"Mr Lomborg's views have no credibility in the scientific community," Professor Flannery wrote.

"His message hasn't varied at all in the last decade and he still believes we shouldn't take any steps to mitigate climate change. When someone is unwilling to adapt their view on the basis of new science or information, it's usually a sign those views are politically motivated."

Negligent posted:

good faith [...] Australian government

Lid posted:

So this is happening.

Negligent posted:

If you seek out a criminal with the intention of paying him or her to engage in criminal conduct for your benefit you bear moral responsibility.

People smuggling is a crime. By supporting people smugglers, wealthy asylum seekers are culpable for deaths at sea.

Negligent posted:

This guy wants to abuse Cambodian hospitality and fund crime with money provided in good faith by the Australian government. That's criminal.