This was my line of thinking when everyone was deathly silent during the data retention "debate". Only one article by a local newspaper junior emerged discussing the pro's and con's, which framed it in a really silly way (such as the only con being "well...hackers might get to it"). Also, that junior got promoted to a Senior Tech Editor role in a big national paper, and did strange things like posting their own local file share directory within their articles which involved a few pictures here and there, (I mean no personal offense to the individual, I just remember following it closely at the time with a slight feeling of horror).
The general mood in the media at the time the ball got rolling for these sorts of laws was that they were some sort of protected species who shouldn't be subject to them...just the general population. Some looked as though they were advertising their perceived sense of self importance and potential value to the governments of the time.
Sorry if this sounded a bit snarky, I didn't mean it to be, it's just that we should have been talking about this much much earlier than today, yet no-one wanted to until now.
From what I have seen where I live, printed passwords on things like home routers and VDSL/Fiber modems provided by major ISP's are for 802.11 stuff (WiFi passwords) and not for the devices management interface. This may have changed since I last looked into it a few years ago though. There was also the whole Netgear router "backdoor" port thingy (a device shipped by a major ISP) which I actually had to exploit to recover my password after forgetting it once, which was kind of amusing.
My first impression was that they had no intention of going to court with the data they were after, but then again I've not read up on any legal case studies involving digital forensic evidence handling which are publicly available in Australia (how would a magistrate even deal with that sort of evidence if it can legally be modified? I'm not sure any of these new laws have been tested in court before).
It's nuts that something that used to be seen as solid evidence in court could now be seen as totally unreliable, and just because someone may present it saying "trust me because I'm a cop" means absolutely nothing when someone has a duty to factor the human element into the equation. The guidelines regarding the handling of digital forensic evidence (and all types of evidence for that matter) were designed to deal with this. So yeah, I think what I'm trying to say here is that among the new laws, that one in particular could do much more harm than good due to being so vague in its wording and scope. From what I've read about the US court system, this type of evidence would no longer be permitted in 99.9% of cases, It wouldn't matter if you're the damn pope presenting it, everyone's human. I actually wish I knew a magistrate in real life to ask them how they would handle a case involving this law and a drive handed to them by some prosecution team involving the AFP.
When I first read this I interpreted it as possibly having something to do with enabling offensive cyber operations (maybe?), it just sounded too weird to be anything else.
One thing I did notice during the ABC raid was how the police ignored general digital forensic practices and simply created an archive on the target drive (overwriting any data previously there), dragged and dropped what they wanted into it, then zipped it up and left (this was according to one ABC employees twitter feed while they were in the office as it was happening).
Another question on my mind (again, just my random thoughts, not representing others) is: How could this be used to undermine countries economies who are possibly earmarked for regime change by a company with strong ties to the US State Department affect the current geopolitical landscape...especially when some "developing nations" populations literally see Facebook as the Internet?
My immediate gut reaction to this entire thing (and again, this is only a personal viewpoint not held by others) is along the lines of: What could go wrong with giving one of the most shady corporations on the planet the permission to print its own currency?
I still feel bad for choosing to pay nothing for In Rainbows while paying a few bucks for the NIN Ghosts album released around the same time. You can probably guess which one grew on me the most (that isn't even taking into account the musical conspiracy theory of the whole 1 by 1 thing/remixing their own really big album released years before)
After reading this I couldn't help but remember an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono (on the BBC world service in 1980) where John was talking about Phil Spector calling him up after a recording session saying:
whispering over the phone "John....I've got the tapes...I've got the tapes, but there are helicopters flying around my house"
It took them a while to get them back from the guy.
For dramatic effect...during the experiment I actually did make a windows text-to-voice recording saying something along the lines of "you are listening to <my street name> pirate radio" between the stoner metal songs I had lined up (I was listening to lots of QOTSA at the time to be honest).
EDIT: That link was definitely part of what I was researching at the time (as it is linked in the project article I posted and I remember reading about the limitations regarding stereo output, as well as the line "Most radio receivers want a signal to be an odd multiple of 0.1 MHz to work properly").
There was an old RPi project released a while ago (PiRadio I think?) which simply involved attaching a jump lead to GPIO pin 4 which allowed the transmission of FM radio signals.
It worked on the principal that the Pi had a stupidly powerful clock and thus could be used as a transmitter.
I did a little experiment where I hooked it up to a yagi antenna and asked my dad to set his cars radio to the frequency I set the software to transmit on and drive around the block to test the distance.
Not only did it work well but I think I heard someone listening to the radio in their home near mine open their front door and yell out "who ever is doing that could you please stop it!" as it was interfering/jamming what they were listening to.
I'm definitely checking this project out though, thanks for posting.
I'm quite sure there was a bill passed by parliament allowing federal police and/or security services to "to add, copy, delete or alter other data" when carrying out investigations (and I think this was before the Assisted Access bill was passed to my knowledge, please correct me if I'm wrong though).
This struck me as strange since this goes against the very fundamentals of how people are trained to carry out digital forensics on an individuals devices. I remember studying forensics a little and remember lecturers stating how damn careful they must be, as the data they collect must not be contaminated in any way for it to be admissible in court.
I do have an interesting story about going through the beginning of the recuitment process for a multi-letter agency within the 5 eye sphere (Australia), but I'm not sure I want to post it. It involved asking me point blank at the beginning of a face to face interview at their HQ saying to me "soo...what have you hacked?" along with other weirdness.
The year before I completed an aptitude test which predominantly focused on abstract reasoning. It was a strange experience and part of me wants to discuss it in a responsible/de-identified sort of way, but on the other hand, the take-away I got from the experience itself is kind of holding me back from following through with that desire to discuss it....I'm not sure if what I just wrote makes any sense to me now that I just typed it out.
It was still an interesting experience though which did have a positive impact on my life.
The general mood in the media at the time the ball got rolling for these sorts of laws was that they were some sort of protected species who shouldn't be subject to them...just the general population. Some looked as though they were advertising their perceived sense of self importance and potential value to the governments of the time.
Sorry if this sounded a bit snarky, I didn't mean it to be, it's just that we should have been talking about this much much earlier than today, yet no-one wanted to until now.