CONROY SLAMS 'CREEPY' GOOGLE

By Timothy McDonald and staff
Updated Tue May 25, 2010 9:42am AEST

Caught out: a Google Street View camera takes photos of buildings in Amsterdam (AFP: Toussaint Kluiters)
Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has lashed out at Google, accusing the internet giant of the single biggest breach of privacy in history.

In recent weeks Google has been criticised after revelations that its Street View photo cars were also collecting information about people's wireless internet connections.

Google has also been a critic of the Government's proposed internet filtering plan, but Senator Conroy insists his comments are not payback.

He says Google considers itself accountable to no-one and he has singled out the internet giant's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, for special criticism.

"I think that the approach taken by Mr Schmidt is a bit creepy, frankly," Senator Conroy said.

"When it comes to their attitude to their own censorship, their response is simply, 'trust us'. That is what they actually state on their website: 'Trust us'."

Several national privacy commissioners have raised concerns over Google's collection of wi-fi data, a practice which has ceased since it was made public.

Senator Conroy says Google considers itself to be above government.

"They consider that they are the appropriate people to make the decisions about people's privacy data and that they are perfectly entitled to drive the streets and collect as much private information by photographing over fences and collecting data information," he said.

"This is probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy."

'Deliberate' breach

In a post on Google's official blog, Alan Eustace, a senior vice-president at the company, said the information on wi-fi connections was collected by mistake.

"In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental wi-fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi data," the blog reads.

"A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic wi-fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software - although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

"As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible."

Following questions from Liberal Senator Mary Jo Fisher at a budget estimates hearing yesterday, Senator Conroy disputed Google's claim that the privacy breach was inadvertent.

"Google have admitted to doing this and claim it was a mistake in the software code," he said.

"It was actually quite deliberate ... the code that the computer program uses was designed to collect this information ... they wrote a piece of code designed to do it."

Google has been a critic of the minister's proposed internet filtering plan, saying it could affect user speeds and accidentally filter legitimate material.

The company also says it would give parents a false sense of security, because it would be quite easy to circumvent.

The internet censorship debate has been a heated one, and others in the estimates hearing suggested that there might be some personal motivation in the minister's comments.

The attack did not go unnoticed by Greens Senator Scott Ludlam.

"Minister, you just went on a 10-minute tirade of corporate character assassination," Senator Ludlam said.

Google was yet to return calls from AM for a response.

AUSTRALIAN POLICE TO PROBE GOOGLE OVER PRIVACY

Australian police to probe Google over privacy
AFP June 7, 2010, 12:43 am
The Australian government has ordered a police investigation into Internet giant Google over alleged privacy breaches, Attorney General Robert McClelland said Sunday.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy last month accused the company of committing the "single greatest breach in the history of privacy" by collecting private wireless data while taking pictures for its 'Street View' mapping service.

McClelland said the government had asked the Australian Federal Police to investigate after receiving numerous complaints.

"Obviously I won't pre-empt the outcome of that investigation but they relate in substantial part to possible breaches of the Telecommunications Interception Act, which prevents people accessing electronic information other than for authorised purposes," McClelland said.

Whether any charges are laid is up to the police, but the government felt "there were issues of substance that required police investigations", McClelland said.

Google said it collected the data in error.

"This was a mistake. We are talking to the appropriate authorities to answer any questions they have," a spokeswoman said in a statement.

The development comes after the Internet giant reportedly said its Street View cars taking photos in more than 30 countries had inadvertently gathered fragments of personal data sent over unsecured WiFi systems, and would hand information over to European data protection authorities.

Google has led criticism of Australia's planned Internet filter, warning it could damage the nation's reputation as a liberal democracy and set a dangerous global precedent.

Citizen Electoral Council Calls For Population Rise-5o MILLION BY 2049

Populate or Perish: Australia needs 50 million people plus!

Treasury’s recent upward revision of Australia’s projected population estimate for 2049 of 35 million, due to a rising birthrate and rapid growth in migration, still falls well short of what Australia needs, and what infrastructure visionaries such as Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, or more recently Prof. Lance Endersbee, have demonstrated is possible.

Dr J.J.C. Bradfield, architect of Sydney’s underground railway, Sydney Harbour Bridge and the shamefully still shelved Bradfield Scheme, was calling for a 1991 population target of 40 million back in 1941. Emeritus Prof. Lance Endersbee, former Dean of Engineering at Monash University and a veteran of the Snowy Mountains Scheme and Tasmanian hydro scheme, stated in 2006 that “The top end of Australia could carry 50 million people alone.”

Standing in the way is the Government’s economic rationalist monetary policies, reaffirmed by Treasurer Wayne Swan at the recent launch of a new institute for population ageing research when he committed the government to “spending restraint”: “New policies will have to be funded by reprioritising within existing resources, rather than expanding the total quantum of government spending—doing more with less,” he said.

“Such comments reveal the true impotence of our current political leadership in this country,” CEC leader Craig Isherwood said today. “Dr Bradfield would be turning in his grave, as he himself said, ‘To populate and develop Australia we must spend money to make money.’

“The major infrastructure projects and expanded immigration policies that occurred in Australia during the fifties is the only answer to achieve real economic health for future generations. What’s needed is the political will and courage, as demonstrated by Ben Chifley and his approval of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme. Such vision saw Australia’s population increase 25% in that decade and there is no reason it can’t happen again.

“The courage though is to defy the current short sighted economic monetarist dogma and implement our own credit-based system to finance the projects,” Mr Isherwood continued. “We need greater regulatory control of our banking system along with a government controlled national bank, able to issue credit at long term low interest to fund such infrastructure projects. Such a bank could be in the form of government agencies, like the Reconstruction Finance Corporation along with the Tennessee Valley Authority which Franklin D. Roosevelt established in the U.S., which lifted that country out of the Great Depression to become the industrial powerhouse of the world.” (To read more about the measures employed by FDR click here to purchase the LaRouche Special Report, Economics: The End of A Delusion)

“Such growth in the real physical economy, rather than the current speculative ‘growth’ observed in the paper economy, will see real investment returns flowing back into our ailing health and social welfare sectors, which this country desperately needs.

“People need jobs, and major water projects provide a much needed boost to our machine tool industries through their construction, as well as the longer term benefits of opening up more of Australia for more expansive and intensive agricultural development and general rural sector growth.”

Mr Isherwood concluded, “Lyndon LaRouche has forecast the imminent collapse of the U.S. economy and the global monetarist system, unless there is a major policy shift within the Obama administration. If the Rudd government truly wants to take the lead in global economic reform on the world stage, it must invest in some real nation building infrastructure and establish the institutions to generate the credit required to do so.”