The headline is a little misleading. It's much more terrifying than that. It isn't just Australia. It is the US, Australia, Canada, UK, and New Zealand all together (known as the "Five Eyes")[1]. Australia is just the country that put the memo together.
> The "Five Eyes", often abbreviated as "FVEY", refer to an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. [1]
In typical fashion, one country takes the lead (also happens with IP rights ratchets), and if/when it pans out, the others "follow that example" / harmonize / pick your particular bureaucratic mechanism and terminology.
There is no need to "pan it out" to other countries. If the law passes in Australia then other 5 Eyes countries can send their data to us, have it decrypted, and then have it sent back to the original country (this is one of the primary things that 5 Eyes exists for -- to allow for this sort of bullshit). Which means that even if such tactics are not legal in your home country, they can outsource the reprehensible shit to us.
Gee, I hadn't heard of that. The Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam only learnt of it when the Attorney-General raided ASIO, Australia's version of the FBI, in 1973. Wikipedia says UKUSA is pronounced yoo-koo-SAH. Rather appropriate - yakuza are "members of transnational organized crime syndicates"...
And is also the department that famously decided to conduct a mock hostage rescue training exercise in a 5-star hotel without obtaining permission or even notifying the hotel management and staff.
When ASIS operators were refused entry into a hotel room, they broke down the door with sledgehammers. The hotel manager, Nick Rice, was notified of a disturbance on the 10th floor by a hotel guest. When he went to investigate, he was forced back into the lift by an ASIS operator who rode the lift down to the ground floor and forcibly ejected Rice into the lobby.
Believing a robbery was in progress, Rice called the police. When the lift started returning to the ground floor, ASIS operators emerged wearing masks and openly brandishing 9mm Browning pistols and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, two of them with silencers[1]
Wow. Impressive. But still, it was in 1983. Victoria police managed to arrest some of them, with no casualties. And ASIS head John Ryan was eventually forced to resign.
I didn't go to the site, but the part about being able to hack sniper rifles is correct. It wasn't some complex nation-state level hack, it was just standard IoT device with poor security integrated into a rifle. The hack was done on the consumer version of one brand of rifle, thought the Army had ordered some for evaluation purposes. Here's an article about it:
Hopefully this isn't too political of a reply, but this is a great example as to why there is such a lack of interest in "smart guns" -- e.g., weapons that require a fingerprint, a special ring, or some other electronic safety interlock.
Not just because of the potential to be hacked, but also because electronics have a wider variety of failure modes as compared to the mechanical bits, most of which have remained both highly reliable and functionally unchanged over fifty, if not a hundred, years.
Especially when you consider that, at least when it comes to safety, there's so much low-hanging fruit on the education and awareness front.
Regardless of where you stand on the politics, it seems pretty straightforward that, in a country that today has more guns than people, that safety education should be part of school curricula at multiple points.
On that note, we should probably also make sure everybody knows how to properly use a fire extinguisher, and I'm not sure we teach that, either... :/
> “Operating independently from its governments...”
> Are the agencies involved not part of their governments? Am I missing something?
In Britain we'd probably make a distinction between elected government and civil service. I suspect the point being made here is of operation without sufficient legislative/executive oversight, which there seems to be at least some evidence for.
They are, among other things, paid by the government.
They are not independent of it, under no definition of any of those words. Maybe oversight is lax. Maybe oversight is perfect and everything happens exactly as the overseers want it.
None of that changes anything about the truth of the initial claim. "Independent of" is patently false, and an obvious attempt to sensationalise.
> The "Five Eyes", often abbreviated as "FVEY", refer to an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement