It just keeps getting worse.

Australian customs officers have been given new powers to search incoming travellers’ laptops and mobile phones for pornography, a spokeswoman for the Australian sex industry says.

On this post I could…

  • make a a ton of low brow jokes
  • tell you how appauled I am people can legally search laptops without a warrant or due process as stipulated in the Australian constitution and the United Nations Charter of Human Rights
  • point out the technical challenges ranging from legal drive encryption products like TrueCrypt to different operating systems such as Linux and FreeBSD that customs officials might not even know how to use
  • despair that we already have some of the most obnixious, arrogant and rude customs officials in the world and this will only make it worse while the rest of the country watches on a terrible but highly rated television programme
  • lament that come election time we have a choice between the the [supposed] centre-left party that’s been bought off by the Christian lobby as seen in this story, or the conservatives headed by Tony Abbott that tacidly support all Labor’s measures and would probably extend them.


This internet filter, our delapidated IT and communications infrastructure, refusal to classify mature games… all this from a supposed free Western society. I have offically lost what little respect I had for my birth country.

As Jim Kloss said on my post on the subject before:

Educated people, when treated badly, will simply leave.

When I'm treated with more respect by foreign officials than people in the country of my citizenship, I know there's something wrong. :/