Why do we vote these people in?

[Luke Potter <Luke.Potter () ipex com au>]

This may be a bit off topic, but here goes,

The passing of this Bill has been likened to a knee jerk reaction on the
governments part, and will greatly influence how security engineers in
Australia go about their business.

http://australianit.news.com.au/common/storyPage/0,3811,2944524%5E442,00.htm
l

Sorry about the size of the quote, but this is an extract from the
explanatory memoranda for the new bill...

This offence is designed to cover persons who possess programs or technology
designed to hack into other peoples computer systems or impair data or
electronic communication. For example, a person will commit the offence if
the person possesses a program which will enable him or her to launch a
denial of service attack against a Commonwealth Departments computer system
and intends to use the program for that purpose. It would also be an offence
for a person to possess a disk containing a computer virus that the person
intends to release over the Internet in order to impair data in infected
computers. In both instances, the person would also commit the offence if he
or she intends to provide the program to another person for the purpose of
enabling the other person to impair electronic communication or computer
data. There will be many occasions where that intention will be evident from
the content of the data. 

There is no requirements or set conditions which must be met in order for a
prosecuting body to determine how 'intent' is to be determined which means
that it could be extremely hard to defend yourself if there is a motive
(regardless of whether or not you would actually carry it out).


Regards

Luke

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