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One of my current personal favourite kids stories is a library book one of the kids borrowed recently: “Yellow Bird Black Spider”

It’s only a 5 minute read, and might be a bit young, but it’s a nice story with a very satisfying conclusion.

The synopsis:

Yellow bird is a quirky and idiosyncratic individual. Yellow bird enjoys strumming guitar on the beach (with an amplifier that goes up to eleven), sailing, and having baths with his stripy socks on. Black spider suggests a way for yellow bird to act more like a bird on every second page .

Anyway, I don’t think I’m giving anything away if I say they all live happily ever after.

Except for spider.

Hail Eris. Hail Jamms. Hail KLF. Hail almighty C’thulhu and Bruce Schneier’s thing about squid.

Oops. This is supposed to be a post written in homage to Password Safe (home). I’m probably the last person on earth to find out about password Safe, and that was quite some time ago.

Password Safe is an essential part of every computer user’s arsenal of utilities. Password Safe is a utility for securing all of your passwords in a database file encrypted with the Twofish algorithm. This means you can generate crazy and hard to guess passwords for every site, and have a chance of remembering them. You can store all of your different login information in one place instead of using the same password for every one and hoping no unethical site thinks to try your userid and password out on other sites. In fact, any private information you want to keep secret can be entrusted to Password Safe. The difficulty with non userid/password information is figuring out what to name it so you can find it again easily.

You can install Password Safe everywhere you go, or run it from a USB flash dive. If you run multiple instances of Password Safe with multiple databases get a Gmail, Amazon S3 or similar account and mail/transfer yourself your password safe database occasionally even if you have a USB drive. I use Password Safe to merge changes from my emailed databases to my other Password Safe-running computers.

The risk to carefully consider is that your password database is protected by a single “safe combination” (password). Don’t forget it. To practically protect your other passwords you need to remember a single strong password like, say, some hash of Sissy Spacek and/or Steve Martin’s character names in The Man With Two Brains and never forget it. If you’re writing a will, you might want to include a treasure map to the place you buried your Password Safe combination or drop a cryptic email to Dan Brown. Or you could advise your heirs to wait until cracking Twofish is trivial with contemporary computer technology.

Some time ago I had a bush-lawyer level discussion with a barrister I’m related to. Among other horror stories, this barrister was helping me come to terms with how any Australian Federal government could choose to use terrorism-related legislation to round up their political enemies through listing them as a terrorist organization. The discussion was not entirely serious, but it appealed to my inner-conspiracy-theorist and I’ve thought about it often. Sure, I understand that Australia is run by good people, and we have a long history of democracy, and there is nothing to be worried about. The moment we began to routinely bypass our legal institutions to mete out politically expedient ministerial justice there would be an uproar! An uproar I say!

Recent events have caused me wonder how close we are to abandoning old-fashioned notions like presumption of innocence, territorial jurisdiction, and habeas corpus. I wonder out loud when the up might be heard roaring.

This is part of a summary of how Australia lists “terrorist organisations”:

Under the law, there are two ways for an organisation to be identified as a ‘terrorist organisation’. Either an organisation may be found to be such an organisation by a court as part of the prosecution for a terrorist offence, or it may be specified in Regulations, known as ‘listing’. For a listing to be effective, the processes set out in the legislation must be followed.

Before an organisation can be listed, the Attorney-General must be satisfied on reasonable grounds that the organisation is directly or indirectly engaged in, preparing, planning, assisting in or fostering the doing of a terrorist act.

The Attorney-General of Australia can list a group as a terrorist organization if he is satisfied on reasonable grounds that they are indirectly assisting in a terrorist act. I wonder whether the framers of this legislation thought terribly much about how flexible the concept of “reasonable” can be when an opportunity to grandstand and/or wedge your political opponents presents itself? The lack of checks on this power is pretty staggering. The rationale is that the attorney might need to act in haste to head off a terrorist plot, or whatever. How often will a terrorist organization just spring from nowhere and require the Attorney-General’s lightning listing reflexes to defend the Commonwealth? I don’t think the terrorist organization who’s main weapons are fear, surprise, and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope are currently active.

So, completely theoretically, let’s imagine you’re a member of the Greens, or even the (old school!) Liberal Party, and you have billeted someone who has a cousin who’s a ship’s captain with Sea Shepherd. Unbeknown to you, they are (hypothetically) secretly plotting to join up with their cousin to jam shipboard GPS signals and force a whaling ship onto a reef. While staying with you they show a keen interest in borrowing a dusty tome from your library — “Readers Digest Satellite Navigation Jamming 2nd Edition 1992.”

After a terrible shipping incident a hypothetical future Labor government might agree with Japan that Sea Shepherd are a terrorist organization and list them. Suddenly you’re a suspect for assisting a member of a terrorist organization and your whole political party is about to be listed just for having you, an aider and abettor of Sea Shepherd, as a member:

When a court has determined, or by regulation it is determined, that an organisation is a ‘terrorist organisation’, it is an offence to:

• direct the activities of the organisation;
• recruit persons to the organisation;
• receive training from or provide training to the organisation;
• receive funds from or make available funds to the organisation;
• provide support or resources to the organisation.

Thankfully you can trivially demonstrate a lack of mens rea, and be given bail to work up a decent defence…

So much for that bail idea:

“The matter that I will be looking at very seriously is this question of the presumption against bail, there was an expectation as to how it would operate and if appeals suggest that we’ve got it wrong, well it’s a matter that the Parliament might well be asked to put right,” he said.

Mr Ruddock says changes to the law may be necessary.

“If we find in relation to these measures that the law that we passed that we expected would ensure that people charged with terrorism offences would have a presumption against bail is not being met we may have to look at that matter further.”

In any case, bail doesn’t count for people on visas. Kevin Andrews decision to put him in immigration detention for having “an association or link” with a criminal or terrorist is a jarring reminder that all immigrants are here at the pleasure of the Minister for Immigration. He can have you locked up or deported the moment he has reason to doubt your character. The Minister for Immigration is Judge Dredd for non-citizens.

I have no insight about the guilt or innocence of Dr Haneef. Haneef’s treatment by Federal Ministers with mumbled support from Labor makes me wonder how close we are to two-party-preferred elected despotism. At the rate we are trashing legal principles and developing a taste for barely checked ministerial powers, we’re getting pretty close.

I watched the show and the follow-up with Tony Jones and a panel of experts. John Quiggin has an excellent summary of the cut and thrust of the follow-up debate.

The strange panel-in-focus camera work, and random 10 second “serious music and camera panning” transitions detracted from the interviews and panel discussion afterwards, but the response to the documentary was great TV.

After a few questions from the audience I wondered if the real swindle was that the studio audience had been secretly replaced or hand-picked by The Chaser. The majority of questions sounded like The Chaser’s Andrew Hansen character who asks 10 random incomprehensible questions in rapid succession at celebrity press conferences and public meetings. Maybe they forgot to invite an audience and just rounded up a bunch of people from the Agincourt Hotel up the road who were there for the annual Larouche vs Creationism debate series.

If video of the audience question segment turns up online, I’ll post a link to it. I figure we’ll know if my conspiracy theory is true or not if the video turns up here or here.

* Update: Yay, Larvatus Prodeo has video!

Australian media outlets routinely convert from US dollars, British pounds and Euro euros into local Australian equivalent currency to make unqualified statements about the amount of money involved in a story. “Hilton to sell itself to Blackstone for $30b” is one example where the headline uses a figure expressed in local currency to help people who don’t track global exchange rates on a daily basis. This news story goes on to disclose the US and Australian dollar figures, but Australian radio stories and newspapers with tighter space constraints often drop any mention of the native currency value anywhere.

My beef is about time conversions. Surely the average Australian would be able to relate to foreign news stories and historic events better if dates and times were converted to local equivalents. July 4th would become July 5th. 9/11 would become 11/9 in local parlance with a footnote about how half of the attack did not occur until early morning 12/9. Anzac day would remain April 25th, but Christmas might have to be moved back a day.

Happy 5th of July.

Today is one of the first of the likely days on which Australia’s PM might flick through his Filofax to remind himself who the Governor General is and then drive out and ask for him to schedule an election. After unfavourable recent polling for the Federal Coalition Government today isn’t as likely to be the day an election is called as it looked a few weeks ago, but it is a good reminder to get our Australian friends and family to check they’re correctly enrolled.

Recent changes to Electoral Enrolment laws mean that if you intend to vote in Australia’s upcoming Federal Election today would be a good time to enrol to vote or update your electoral details (if you aren’t correctly enrolled already) because there is no longer a grace period after the calling of an election to allow stragglers to be enrolled to vote in it.