[AusNOG] OT: Police Wardriving. Where else but QLD!

[Mark Newton]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 09:46:07AM +1000, Sean K. Finn wrote:

 > "The project was officially launched yesterday

AusNOG carried a thread about this very topic about two years ago.

It carried a certain amount of irony, because it was happening
at about the same time that the Minister for Communications was
berating Google for "the worst privacy invasion in human history,"
or some similar ignorant twaddle, at exactly the same time that
the Queensland Police were doing exactly the same thing.

None of this is very new, Queensland Police don't appear to have 
learned anything from their previous efforts either.  Last time
they did it it was harmless and made no noticeable difference to
anything; this time will be the same.

When Government agencies participating in anti-fraud 
initiatives come out with advice like this:
https://twitter.com/#!/DBCDEgov/status/182316823738449920
perhaps our expectations should be pegged pretty low. 

The government thinks like a gatekeeper; that's what they are,
that's what they'll always do.

Gatekeepers could never have built the internet.  The entire
point of the internet was to bypass the gatekeepers (who, 
in the 1960's, were telcos who sold expensive circuit-switched
services and refused to believe that packet switching could 
ever fly).

That's how the internet continues to work today, as rights
holders, bricks and mortar retailers, and various national
censorship bodies continue to discover, but never actually
learn lessons from.  The Internet is a gatekeeper emasculation
machine.

Until government agencies stop thinking like gatekeepers,
they'll continue to fail to "get it."

  - mark