Papua New Guinea's most thuggish paramilitary police unit - allegedly responsible for rapes, murders and other serious human rights abuses - is being discreetly funded by the Australian Immigration Department to secure the Manus Island asylum seeker detention centre.

The ''Mobile Squad'' officers, who just last month beat a local man to death on the island, are receiving a special living-away allowance of about $100 a day from funding provided by the department.

The Australian funding is a handsome bounty for the squad when the average local wage for security staff is about $1.50 an hour, and represents a previously secret aspect to Australia's ''PNG solution'' of directing asylum seekers to PNG.

James Sipuan, 65, said his son Raymond, 21, had only been drunk and swore at the officers when he was beaten in front of hundreds of horrified islanders in the main market on the island in July.
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He said Raymond left the police station later that day and was in the market when the officers saw him there and started brutally bashing him again, fatally injuring him.

''They picked him up like a rugby league tackle and speared him into the ground twice, according to witnesses,'' Mr Sipuan said.

The squad has also been provided with three rented Toyota Landcruisers at a cost of about $200,000, an amount paid for by Australian Immigration Department funds, according to the rental agent.

The cars can be distinguished from other rentals by the 28-man squad's practice of hanging their makeshift crowd-controlling whips made out of rubber fan belts from the side mirrors of the vehicles to intimidate the local population.

On Friday the Australian Immigration Department did not deny the payments were occurring and said $558,821 had been allocated last year to cover costs associated with the temporary centre, including costs for PNG immigration staff and police deployment to Manus Island.

He said the police operations raised by Fairfax were ''a matter for the PNG government and its law enforcement authorities''.

The presence of the paramilitary unit on the island suggests PNG and Australian officials fear a major clash with landowners who have already threatened a protest if they do not get a cut out of the asylum seeker detention centre projects.

The squad's name is a byword for police brutality in Papua New Guinea and many of its operations have been condemned by human rights organisations such as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch for incidents of killings, rapes, bashings and evictions.

Last year Australian anthropologist Dr Andrew Lattas, who had done extensive field research in PNG, warned of the mobile squads being used as private armies by logging companies and said they had been beating up villagers, locking them in shipping containers and whipping them with sticks and fan belts to ensure logging projects went ahead, with police expenses paid by the companies.

The mobile squad has been stationed on the island since December.

Mr Sipuan said he believed his son had been killed at the market.

''I believe he was killed at that time. They took him to the police station and left him in the cells. They didn't try to take him to the hospital.''

Hearing about the bashing MrSipuan rang the police station and was told his son was asleep.

''I drove down there and I couldn't wake him up. We took him to hospital, but they couldn't revive him,'' he said.

''Such behaviour, the murder of my son is barbaric.''

''The mobile squad is for dealing with tribal fights or rioting people. They should not be on the island. If something goes wrong then they can call them in.''

Mr Sipuan said the Australian funding of the squad was wrong.

The day after the killing PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill promised an investigation and that the particular mobile squad involved would be removed from the island after Manus Island local MP Ron Knight raised the issue in Parliament.

Three of the squad have been arrested and charged but are not being kept in the cell where Raymond died.

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/australia-funds-lethal-brute-squad-20130803-2r6g1.html#ixzz2b4vh4nLu

THE head of Australia's leading alcohol research body has called for marijuana to be legalised to reduce the harm of drinking.

Robin Room, director of the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research, says marijuana should be legalised under strict controls because the social harm associated with it was significantly less than from drinking.

"It makes sense to legalise marijuana in a controlled market," he told the Herald Sun yesterday. "We are in a situation where we need to look ahead. I think we need to have the discussion and it makes a lot of sense in terms of, among others, cutting down government costs to have a fairly highly controlled legal (cannabis) market and, while we are at it, tighten up the legal market of alcohol in the same way we tightened up the market of tobacco."

Prof Room, a leading academic at Melbourne University, is funded by the Department of Human Services.

In an ideal world, Prof Room said teens would not smoke marijuana or drink alcohol to excess.

But if an 18-year-old was going to use substances, he said they would likely land themselves in less trouble after using cannabis rather than bingeing on alcohol.

Teens were "better off" on a mixture of booze and marijuana rather than just pure alcohol in social settings, he added. Alcohol was more dangerous than cannabis because it had a closer association with aggression and violence, loss of co-ordination and impacts on work and family life, he said.

"Cannabis is not without harm but it's substantially less than alcohol and tobacco in terms of social harm," he said.

"If you are adding the cannabis to an equal amount of alcohol, then in some ways you'd be probably less likely to be aggressive but it's a bad idea to add it on if you want to drive a car."

Prof Room said if marijuana were legalised, among the measures to control the use should be "state sellers" and "state stores" where sales were regulated. It should not be sold in supermarkets nor advertised on TV or at sporting matches.

While Prof Room acknowledged many people would be "surprised" and even "bothered" by his stance, the statistics backed him up.

The controversial proposal comes as Melbourne continues to battle booze-fuelled violence, and alcohol-related hospital admissions soar for men and women.

I say, Marijuana should be controlled in a similar way that alcohol is controlled in some US states.

Source: http://www.heraldsun.com.au/lifestyle/health-fitness/expert-calls-for-marijuana-to-be-legalised-to-reduce-harm-of-binge-drinking-in-teens/story-fni0diac-1226676714223

Kevin Rudd has prevailed in a dramatic Labor leadership ballot, defeating Julia Gillard and paving the way for him to return to the prime ministership.

Labor caucus returning officer Chris Hayes says that Mr Rudd won the leadership ballot 57-45.

Deputy PM Wayne Swan and Senate leader Stephen Conroy, along with Joe Ludwig and Craig Emerson have all quit Cabinet following the vote.

The ballot was the third time the Labor leadership has come to a head this Parliament, after Ms Gillard overthrew Mr Rudd in 2010.

Earlier today, Ms Gillard called a leadership ballot, declaring "this is it".

She said that she would not contest the upcoming election if she lost the ballot.

More to come.

Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-06-26/rudd-prevails-over-gillard-in-leadership-ballot/4783422

American intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden may expose top secret Australian intelligence gathering operations and embarrass Australia's relations with neighbouring Asian countries, Australian intelligence officials fear.

Former Labor Defence Minister John Faulkner has confirmed that the heads of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australia's signals intelligence agency, the Defence Signals Directorate, David Irvine and Ian McKenzie, have briefed the federal parliament's intelligence committee on the US PRISM internet surveillance program. 

The Australian government would not comment yesterday on whether Mr Snowden's exposés of top secret US and British intelligence and surveillance programs have been the subject of diplomatic exchanges between Canberra and Washington. Foreign Minister Bob Carr's office would not say whether he has had any exchanges with US Secretary of State John Kerry on the subject.

However Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s office has confirmed that a high level interagency taskforce is monitoring events and coordinating the government’s response.

"Agencies have been meeting formally on this important issue and have been coordinated in their consideration of the matter and their briefing of Ministers," a spokesperson for Mr Dreyfus said.

Defence intelligence officials speaking on condition of anonymity have acknowledged there had been "intense exchanges" on Mr Snowden's disclosures through liaison channels between the US National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency and Australia’s intelligence agencies. 

Australian officials said it was still unclear precisely what information Mr Snowden may have taken from the National Security Agency and his former employer, defence and intelligence consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.

Despite this officials said there was little doubt that the intelligence contractor had "very wide access, including access to much detail of communications intelligence cooperation between the US and Australia."

"Disclosure of highly sensitive collection operations and methodology will damage Australia's intelligence capabilities. It already has done so. But there’s also risk of serious complications in our relations with our neighbours," one official said. 

"The US may be able to brush aside some of the diplomatic fallout from the Snowden leak, but that may not be the case for Australia. China, Malaysia, other countries may respond to us in ways that they would not to Washington."

Officials said that the Australian government’s response to any new disclosures was being developed through the National Security Adviser in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet Dr Margot McCarthy, the Attorney-General’s Department, the Defence Signals Directorate and ASIO.

The Prime Minister's department previously convened a whole of government task force to deal with the consequences of WikiLeaks' release in late 2010 of thousands of US diplomatic cables leaked by US Army private Bradley Manning.   

Defence intelligence officials said that Mr Snowden’s disclosures of US and allied signals intelligence programs "will have a much greater and more lasting impact than the Manning leaks."

On Sunday the Chair of the US Senate intelligence committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein accused Mr Snowden of treason and said that his disclosures through The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers had caused "irreversible and significant damage to our country and to our allies."

In the company of a WikiLeaks staffer Mr Snowden flew from Hong Kong to Moscow in Sunday. The US government has charged him with espionage and has revoked his passport.  He has sought political asylum from the government of Ecuador. 

WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange said yesterday "We are aware of where Snowden is, he is safe and his spirits are high. We cannot reveal what country he is in at this time." 

Senator Faulkner told the Australian Senate on Monday that Mr Snowden’s revelations "will heighten anxiety in this country about data retention." 

Speaking on the tabling of the parliament’s intelligence committee's report on telecommunications and internet data retention, the former Defence Minister said it was essential that "any legislation to establish a mandatory data retention scheme in Australia contains the strongest safeguards to protect the privacy of our citizens."

"Our challenge will be to achieve the right balance between the safety and security of our citizens, and their personal rights and freedoms, including the right to privacy, if a proposal for a mandatory data retention scheme goes forward."

Tablet computers for asylum seekers on Manus Island have had their camera functions removed days after Fairfax Media published photographs of life in the island's camp.

The photographs, which were sent from the camp to the mainland without the knowledge of the Department of Immigration, showed conditions there are very basic.

Despite the prevalence of malaria on the island, they appeared to show little protection offered for children from disease-carrying mosquitoes, with flywire hanging loose over doorways.

There were no doors on the dongas pictured to offer privacy and protection from mosquitoes, and no air-conditioning to offer respite from the island's intense heat.

The Department of Immigration says conditions are comparable to those in which Papua New Guinea locals live.

The department has previously released stock photographs of the island's processing camp, but since asylum seekers began to arrive on the island in November, the media have been unable to access the camp to verify conditions.

On Sunday, an asylum seeker on Manus reported that the tablet computers provided for asylum seekers' use had been collected by camp staff and returned with the camera functions disabled.

The department's communications manager Sandi Logan suggested on Twitter that the controversy was a ''beat-up''. Besides, he said, cameras were banned in all detention centres.

''If disabling's occurred, it's our duty of care around client privacy.''

A spokesman for the department said: ''Cameras and recording devices have never been allowed in detention facilities, ever, and we have a duty of care around the privacy of all people in our care and we must ensure we protect the operational integrity of all of our facilities.''

Pamela Curr, campaign co-ordinator for the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said: ''These people have come from Iran where they are censored to Australia where they are experiencing the same censorship.''

Source: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/cameras-disabled-after-manus-island-photos-revealed-20130107-2ccu3.html#ixzz2VlF554HW

Julia Gillard has had another sandwich thrown at her during a school visit.

A salami sandwich was lobbed at the prime minister as she greeted school children at Lyneham High School in Canberra today.

Gillard was using the visit to announce the ACT had signed up to the federal government's national schools funding reforms.

Asked if she was disappointed it had happened again, Gillard joked the thrower "must have thought I was hungry".

In May, a Vegemite sandwich was thrown at Gillard while she was visiting Marsden State High School, south of Brisbane.

Kyle Thomson, 16, was among a group of teenagers who jeered at Gillard on the visit and was accused of throwing the sandwich.

He was suspended from school for 15 days despite denying he was responsible.

While the initial reveal of the Xbox One had many people bemoaning all the TV functionality, with core gamers lamenting the lack of real games on showcase, the real issues eventually began cropping up when Microsoft executives began speaking freely about some of the more controversial aspects of the console. 

One of those controversial aspects is the Kinect's required use in order for the Xbox One console to operate at all. Even more than that, the Kinect is always-listening and always-on. While this issue may not be much of a problem for some, it's important to keep in mind that there are very strict privacy laws in various countries that really do take consumer rights into deep consideration and Australia's Civil Liberty Director wants Microsoft to be a lot more forthcoming about Kinect 2.0. 

Australia's Nine MSN gaming division spotted quotes from the Civil Liberty Director, Tim Vines, who stated that...

Whoa, we got a Hold The Wallet member here in the Civil Liberty Director! Maybe he should join Reclaim Your Game and fight for what's right? 

On a more serious note, Vines also echoes measures of legal concerns that Germany's own Federal Data Commissioner, Peter Schaar, recently mentioned regarding the invasion of privacy from Kinect, saying...

Some gamers don't mind having a camera on them at all times and perhaps they would like to re-live moments from the movie Metropia, where big corps liked to spy on and control people. 

Other gamers are hoping that there is some sort of implementation added to completely disable Kinect altogether from the Xbox One, especially given that you can't have one working without the other, as claimed by Microsoft.. Hopefully we'll get another re-confirmation on just how invasive Kinect 2.0 is when Microsoft takes the stage at E3 this June. 


And maybe we'll find out if the SEGA spectrum  is our only hope or just another arcade system

Source: http://www.cinemablend.com/games/-Xbox-One-Kinect-Surveillance-Device-Says-Australia-Civil-Liberty-Director-56126.html

Australia's government is under fire after it appears to have introduced web censorship without warning and expanded already controversial powers to block access to child pornography into a wider web filtering system.

The reluctance of the government to release information about who has requested sites be blocked, and lists of those sites, has also alarmed many Australians. Two convenors from Melbourne Free University (MFU), whose site was blocked without warning or explanation on 4 April, have described it as a "glimpse [of] the everyday reality of living under a totalitarian government."

For a country that perhaps has a reputation for taking it easy, Australia's governments have been particularly keen on web censorship. In 2008 a web filter was proposed that would have potentially blocked as many as 10,000 sites by placing them on a blacklist. Years of criticism from industry, political and public groups—including Anonymous "declaring war" on it, and Wikileaks publishing the confidential blacklist to show it included some sites that were only, contrary to government assurances, subjectively offensive—led to the idea being dropped in November 2012.

That might have been the end of it, but instead of going through legislative channels, it looks like web censorship is back and taking advantage of a legal loophole. On April 4 more than 1,200 sites were suddenly unavailable to Australian web users

One of those sites that was blocked was that for the MFU, which is a nonprofit organisation that runs talks and workshops about "radical equality" and other activist topics. Jasmine-Kim Westendorf and Jem Atahan, convenors at MFU, wrote a blog post about their Kafkaesque experience of finding their site blocked for nine days and struggling to find any kind of answer why:

"After persistent questioning, our local internet supplier reluctantly told us that the internet address of our website had been blocked by the 'Australian Government.' Even more alarmingly, they said they were legally unable to 'provide the details regarding who has blocked the IP or why.' Our first thought was, what have we done to draw the eye of the authorities? Who have we had speak at the MFU that might be on a blacklist? In that instant, we glimpsed the everyday reality of living under a totalitarian government."

The fact that someone, somewhere in the Australian government has been blocking websites didn't go unnoticed because journalists and advocacy bodies like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and even politicians began demanding answers. Eventually Aussie tech website Delimiter broke the story that the sites had been blocked at the request of Australia's financial regulator, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

The issue relates to the Telecommunications Act 1997, clause 313 of which describes the "obligations" of service providers "to prevent telecommunications networks and facilities from being used in, or in relation to, the commission of offences against the laws of the Commonwealth or of the States and Territories."

When the more draconian web filter was dropped last November its main proponent, communications minister Stephen Conroy, instead switched attention to the Telecommunications Act. He described a "voluntary" filtering system that he would like ISPs and other service providers (like Vodafone) to sign up for, and the system would only seek to block sites which had been blacklisted by Interpol—the vast majority of which host child pornography.

However, it appears that using clause 313 of the Telecommunications Act in this way has set a worrying precedent (something that had been foreseen by some experts at the time). ASIC has been submitting lists of sites to the filter blacklist to try and crack down on financial scams. One of those sites was hosted on an IP address shared by those 1,200 other sites that were blocked in early April, alerting Australian web users to the silent creep of internet filtering proceeding on without their knowledge.

Government ministries being able to ask ISPs to take down sites without any kind of legal or regulatory oversight has, unsurprisingly, angered a lot of opposition politicians. Australian Greens senator Scott Ludlam told the Australian Financial Review: "It's extraordinarily difficult to find who has issued these notices and on behalf of whom, for what categories of content, or what you do if you find yourself on a block list. We've got a very serious problem and it's not at all clear whether the government knows what it's actually doing."

Australians will now have to petition their government to get this situation under control.

RIP Freedom of Speech, Australia, 2013. A little known policy slips quietly under the radar in January 2012 as our friends at Twitter announce they will censor tweets, if a country’s government requests them to do so. A year later, Australia becomes the first modern democracy to identify, filter and ban free speech whilst not in a state of War.

In recent weeks, the censoring of tweets by Australian conservatives, or, indeed anyone who dares to either engage in political debate or offer opinion on the ruling Labor-Green alliance, has become so pervasive many have thought it was a bug with Twitter. You can read Twitter’s well hidden censorship policy here.

But now I can reveal that Twitter is actively censoring Australian tweets at the direct request of the government.

The evidence is in Twitter’s own censorship policy. Released to the press on 26 January, 2012, the company says:

This was followed up, extensively, in on-line marketing specialist site MarketingLand (read the article) and tech guru site Gizmodo (read the article), but received very little main stream media play. Most probably because the limited imagination of journalists would not allow them to envision such a thing happening in industrialized democracies.

Australia, it turns out, has turned its back on the rest of the first world, deciding to embrace the culture of its banana republic regional neighbours, such as Fiji and Mobutu of the Congo.

Since I originally suffered suspension and the threat of being terminated by Twitter for asking a simple, open, non-abusive question of the Greens political party (read the story), literally dozens of others have come forward to tell of how they too have been suspended.

More common, now, is active “filtering” of content: where certain terms or certain tweets sent to certain people are banned from the Australian public.

And herein lies the definitive proof that the Australian Labor-Greens Government has requested this censorship.

The content is only blocked from Australian sites, and can be seen when viewing Twitter from the US or anywhere else in the world. This is exactly in line with Twitter’s publicized policy.

The self-proclaimed leader of international hacking group Lulz Security has been arrested in Sydney by Australian Federal Police.

The AFP says the 24-year-old man from the Gosford suburb of Point Clare, who claims to be in charge of Lulz Security, or LulzSec, was arrested yesterday.

The man, known online as Aush0k, is a senior Australian IT professional who works for the local arm of an international IT company.

Police say he was in a "position of trust" within the company and had access to information on government clients.

The AFP says its investigation began less than two weeks ago when investigators found a government website had been compromised.

The man has been charged with two counts of unauthorised modification of data to cause impairment and one count of unauthorised access to a restricted computer system.

He faces a maximum of 12 years in jail.




LulzSec has previously claimed responsibility for high-profile hacking attacks, including one which took the CIA website offline.

The 24-year-old man is the first alleged member of the group to be charged by the AFP.

AFP Commander Glen McEwen says the man worked for an IT company.

"This man is known to international law enforcement and police will allege he was in a position of trust within the company with access to information from clients including government agencies," he said.

Commander McEwen says the man posted in online forums frequented by other members of LulzSec that he was the group's leader.

"There was no denials of his claims of being the leader," Commander McEwen said.

He says the man also discussed the claims with the AFP.

The LulzSec group allegedly broke into Australian Government departments, universities and schools in 2011.

Some of the targets included AusAid, Victorian Government departments and local councils in Victoria and New South Wales.

Passwords for email accounts within eight Australian universities were leaked, along with the logins for two high schools in Queensland and Melbourne.

Commander McEwen says the AFP acted swiftly on information about the alleged hacker.

"Yesterday's arrest comes less than two weeks after the AFP first discovered the offender's alleged hacking activity," he said.

"The AFP will not tolerate the attempts of hackers to damage or destroy the online property of Australian individuals, companies or national infrastructure resources."

The man was charged and appeared in court yesterday. He will face Woy Woy Local Court again on May 15.

Commander McEwen says the seriousness of the crime is not about the magnitude of damage done, but the breach of security.

"The potential for such access has huge ramifications for society," he said.

"There was a decision made that the early intervention was something that needed to be activated on because the potential for damage is immeasurable.

"I just need to really make that extremely clear to everybody out there, that this is not harmless fun."



Source: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-04-24/lulz-security-hacking-leader-arrested-in-nsw/4648134