[AusNOG] Telstra agreed to retain [Australian] data for US authorities

[Heinz N]

> On Sat, 13 Jul 2013, James Hodgkinson wrote:
> ... when did this all become ok? Who voted in a democratic process to allow
> this? :(

Ha! Just say "think of the children" or "War on Terror" and you can get 
ANYTHING passed. People are just SO stupid. Average clients are not 
interested in understanding secure VPNs or why using gmail is a really bad 
idea: 
http://www.techweekeurope.co.uk/comment/nsa-prism-surveillance-mit-immersion-121202

I constantly beat my head against a brick wall because all of this privacy 
stealing stuff is just SO convenient and easy to use, and people don't see 
their privacy as a priority.

Eventually people will realise that maybe hosting their own SMTP servers 
and insisting the same with people who they want to deal with securely is 
not such a bad idea. (Yes, yes I know about deep packet inspection). Maybe 
even something like just using SSL for every ad-hoc connection: similar to 
TOR network. Modern PCs can certainly handle the small overhead. We need 
to start thinking about those things on an everyday basis. When Big 
Brother finds that he has a massive decrypting task, the pendulum will 
have swung back to where it should be.

Maybe even PGP might get a bit more interest: it has been around for ages 
and already did everything we need today in the 90's.

Having worked in all sides of the industry, I am deathly scared of just 
how much privacy is already lost. I could rant on for ages. But the bottom 
line is if the customer doesn't care then the dollars won't be there and 
suppliers won't bother to supply it.

H.