Following the meeting of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott and US President Barack Obama, we’re told the two countries are going to increasingly co-operate on cyber issues. That doesn’t sound like great news for data sovereignty (or privacy in general).
Picture: Getty Images
The detail in the statement from the White House is extremely vague:
The United States and Australia are also working to strengthen cooperation on space and cyber issues, including cyber defense and cyber security incident response.
Firstly: in Australia, it’s cyber defence. Secondly, working together on cyber-defence could easily lead to a slippery slope where NSA-style spying activities become the norm. Again, we’d need to see more detail, but I doubt this is going to make people already worried about data sovereignty any happier.
Comments
9 responses to “Australia-US ‘Cyber Cooperation’ Sounds Ominous For Data Sovereignty”
I prefer the picture with our Prime Moron winking at the camera and Mr. Obama looking away from Tones, rolling his eyes.
But let’s be frank here. Labor or Liberal, both of the major parties are just a much in bed with the Americans on the level of spies and defense. Anzus and Five Eyes are just too important to them. Important enough to sell our sovereign soul for.
That’s it. I’m moving to Canadia.
But seriously though, the White House statement is as vague as the new agreement will be. The NSA / FBI is already cheesed off that it can’t waltz into a data centre overseas and take data on the grounds that the company has a US headquarters (e.g. Microsoft), so they’re looking to send out their tendrils and get government cooperation for such matters. A ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ type of thing.
Shouldn’t be hard for the US to reach our government’s back, given the kneeling position our gov’s already got in front of the US re: TPP and pursuing pirates of American content, etc.
All of this is now under an umbrella program called the TAGRAP – The Australian Governmental Reach Around Program.
Save me a seat on the flight, already got my blackberry Z10.
I really just want to see Obama back hand Abbott across the chops.
You mean Candaidia 😉
Well, the deal can be expected to fetch out something worthwhile – at least for now. Cyber safety is not something to take that lightly, especially when we’ve all seen cyber-spying activities become a daily-life phenomenon for past some time!