Yet another attempt to mandate broken encryption has been disrupted. The Australian government has long held the belief that broken encryption would be a net win for citizens. Or, at the very least, it’s pretty sure it will be a huge win for law enforcement, which won’t have to deal with encrypted communications or devices.
But, despite declaring only criminals need encryption, proposals to expand the government’s power to include direct regulation of encryption have met with significant pushback. Its efforts began more than a half-decade ago but — after folding in horrible proposals by the UK government and the EU Commission — got a bit worse in recent years.
The new idea was called “client-side scanning.” The aim was to give the government access to illegal content passed around via encrypted services. Since the government wasn’t willing to simply declare encryption illegal, it passed the buck. New regulations would require service providers to undermine the encryption they offered their users, stripping one of the end-to-end encryption so communications can be monitored.
In November, the eSafety commissioner announced draft standards that would require the operators of cloud and messaging services to detect and remove known child abuse and pro-terror material “where technically feasible”, as well as disrupt and deter new material of the same nature.
[…]
But in the finalised online safety standards lodged in parliament on Friday, the documents specifically state that companies will not be required to break encryption and will not be required to undertake measures not technically feasible or reasonably practical.
That includes instances where it would require the provider to “implement or build a systemic weakness or systemic vulnerability in to the service” and “in relation to an end-to-end encrypted service – implement or build a new decryption capability into the service, or render methods of encryption used in the service less effective”.
This is great news, as long as the “final” proposal remains “final.” It will, of course, be temporary. The calls for breaking encryption aren’t going away. They’re omnipresent but have yet to take a solid foothold because governments can’t actually explain how any proposal like this is possible, much less feasible. They also can’t logically declare that any security flaw introduced by legislation won’t be exploited by the very people it aims to stop: criminals.
Those advocating the hardest for broken encryption are the most disturbed by this rollback. Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, was given space in The Australian to vent her feelings about the success of those pushing back against anti-encryption mandates:
Grant hit back at the criticism of the proposals, saying tech companies had claimed the standards “represented a step too far, potentially unleashing a dystopian future of widespread government surveillance”.
The real dystopian future, she said, would be one where “adults fail to protect children from vile forms of torture and sexual abuse, then allow their trauma to be freely shared with predators on a global scale”.
Right. That’s a pretty hot take on what’s actually happened here. Tech companies can’t undo the laws of mathematics. Governments can’t guarantee their security holes won’t be exploited by criminals. And most rational people recognize there’s a trade-off being made here — one that gives millions of non-criminals additional security and privacy while only inconveniencing the government in rare cases. If that’s the equation, the government has no business demanding companies deliberately undermine the security of all users just so it can go after a very small percentage of them.
A suggestion for Elon: next time you take over a company and decide to immediately fire three-quarters of the staff, maybe hold onto a few of the payroll staff before you do.
It might help you avoid some mistakes.
You may recall that early on Musk laid off well over half of the staff at Twitter and then demanded the remaining folks pledge to be “extremely hardcore.” This led to basically the entire payroll team leaving the company. Since then, there have been all sorts of disputes about how much severance the company owed former employees, with a few ongoing lawsuits.
But, down in Australia, it appears that Team Elon is demanding a bunch of laid off ExTwitter employees pay back the severance they received because Twitter accidentally flubbed the conversion between the US dollar and the Australian dollar. I mean, this is pretty embarrassing for the guy who pretends to be a rocket scientist supergenius:
Elon Musk’s social media platform X is threatening to take some former Australian employees to court, demanding they return entitlements it claims were overpaid to them after it bungled the currency conversion from US to Australian dollars on the payments.
Acknowledging its “conversion error”, the platform formerly known as Twitter is asking former employees, some sacked more than 18 months ago, to repay amounts of up to $70,000 in some cases.
But, this comes across as even dumber because it’s happening at the exact same time that Musk is asking Tesla shareholders to re-approve his ~$56 billion compensation package, which a judge threw out earlier this year. Dude, suck it up and pay the $70k.
And yes, it does seem clear that Twitter made a mistake here, though it’s entirely on the company and whatever employees were still around for not double-checking how to convert things properly.
Still, the company is threatening legal action if people don’t pay back the money:
The currency conversion errors made by X when employees were paid their entitlements once they were made redundant had led to overpayments of between $1500 and $70,000. According to one account, X paid out the share entitlements at a conversion rate 2.5 times the value of the shares.
Separate correspondence seen by this masthead from representatives for X told former staff members if they failed to comply with the demand set out, Twitter Australia Holdings Pty Ltd reserved the right to commence proceedings for the recovery of the overpayment “together with interest”.
The Sydney Morning Herald reports that, so far, no one has agreed to send the money back. I don’t know how the laws in Australia work concerning overpayment and repayment, but, honestly, good for those employees.
Elon Musk, the self-proclaimed ‘free speech absolutist,’ rarely gets it right when it comes to actual free speech. But he deserves a rare round of applause in his fight against Australia’s global speech injunction.
We’ve had many posts detailing Elon Musk’s somewhat hypocritical understanding of free speech. This included his willingness to fold and give into censorial demands from governments in countries like Turkey and India. In that case, he gave in to demands from the Indian government to block content globally and not just in India.
While this was consistent with Musk’s blinkered view of “free speech” being “that which matches the law,” that’s not how free speech actually works.
If it’s “that which matches the law,” that means the government can censor whoever it wants, simply by passing a law. That’s not free speech by any definition.
So it is always interesting when Musk is actually willing to stand up to government demands, which seems both pretty rare… and slightly arbitrary. He was willing to push back on a Brazilian judge’s attempt to censor content, but only in a case where it supported Brazilian supporters of the authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro, with whom Musk is friendly. As we noted at the time, it was good that he did that, but it kinda put an exclamation point on all the cases where he refused to do so.
That takes us to Australia. A similar scenario has been playing out there over the last month or so. At the end of April, a federal court granted an injunction to the Australian eSafety Commissioner, saying that ExTwitter had to “take all reasonable steps” to remove video of a stabbing attack in a church in Wakeley, a suburb of Sydney.
ExTwitter responded by geoblocking the video, so it was not available to users appearing to come from Australia. Of course, geoblocking has its limitations, and the Australian eSafety Commissioner declared that such an approach was not good enough. She said that ExTwitter had to treat the injunction as a global injunction, given that users in Australia might otherwise come across the content via a VPN.
But now the eSafety commissioner has taken the matter to court, arguing X has failed to comply with the law because its interim action was to “geoblock” the content, not delete it.
Geoblocking means the content cannot be viewed in Australia, but this can be circumvented by anyone using a virtual private network (VPN), which obscures a user’s location.
Lawyers for the eSafety Commission told the federal court geoblocking was not enough to comply with the Online Safety Act.
Musk and ExTwitter rightly pushed back on this, though their framing of it being some sort of heroic fight against Australian censorship was a bit overblown. The company was fine blocking the content in Australia. Its only protest was about the global nature of the block. Also, the company had given in to similar global block demands in India.
But still, that’s an important legal fight. In the past, we’ve talked about this issue in the context of a Canadian court that ordered a global injunction against certain Google search results in the Equustek case. That case ended sort of oddly, in that an American court said that Google couldn’t be forced into a global injunction, while a Canadian court said “yes they can.” And… then basically everyone gave up. Some have reasonably argued that the USMCA trade agreement between the US, Canada, and Mexico may have effectively made the Canadian Equustek decision obsolete, due to its effective intermediary liability protections, but I don’t think anyone has tested that yet.
So, now, the fight moved to Australia. The EFF itself weighed in, arguing on behalf of ExTwitter that a global takedown is bullshit.
The Australian takedown order also ignores international human rights standards, restricting global access to information without considering less speech-intrusive alternatives. In other words: the Commissioner used a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Thankfully, a couple weeks back, the Australian federal court correctly sided with ExTwitter and against the eSafety Commissioner, in saying that it was improper to order a global injunction.
And that’s where things currently stand, though it feels like this discussion is far from over. I appreciate that, in this case, Musk was willing to stand up for some level of free speech and fight back against the global injunction. And, also, shame on the Australian eSafety Commissioner who should know better.
Of course, now don’t be surprised to see more attempts to pressure ExTwitter in Australia. Just last week, the company lost a motion in a different case, meaning that it is subject to the jurisdiction of a Queensland court over claims of discrimination due to alleged “hate speech” on the platform.
Either way, kudos to Elon for standing up for what’s actually right in this one case. I wish he’d do it in most other similar situations, but so far the record on that has been pretty spotty.
I wonder if Gina Rinehart, an Australian mining magnate, is a fan of Barbra Streisand?
It’s been a bit since we had a straight-up classic Streisand Effect story like the good old days, where someone powerful saw something they didn’t like and insisted that it must be disappeared because they didn’t like it.
Meet Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest woman.
Apparently, she didn’t like a portrait of her done by the artist Vincent Namatjira that was hanging at the National Gallery of Australia. Namatjira is an interesting artist, who is known for works that “both skewer and honour their subjects” according to a Guardian profile of him from last year.
And, yeah, you could say that’s the case with his portrait of Rinehart.
I wouldn’t exactly call it flattering, but who knows. My tastes in art may differ from yours.
But, of course, the ability to skewer the powerful and mock them is an important part of a free society. The rich and powerful already can get away with so much nonsense, one of the only tools left to keep them slightly in check is public mockery and criticism.
And the thing is, most people would have looked at it and moved on without much of a thought (maybe with a chuckle), and that would have been that.
But, no, Rinehart is rich and if someone who is rich sees something they dislike, “something must be done.” In this case, that something was to demand the removal of the painting.
The mining billionaire Gina Rinehart has demanded the National Gallery of Australia remove her portrait from an exhibition by the award-winning artist Vincent Namatjira.
The image, arguably an unflattering picture of Australia’s richest woman, is one of many portraits unveiled at the Canberra gallery as part of the Archibald prize-winning artist’s first major survey exhibition.
The National Gallery has rebuffed efforts to have the picture taken down and said in a statement that it welcomed public dialogue on its collection and displays.
Take a wild guess what happened next?
Yup. You got it. This portrait that few people would have known about became national news.
If Gina Rinehart was trying to make sure no one saw a portrait of her, recent moves have had the opposite effect.
Last week, media – including Guardian Australia – reported that Australia’s richest woman had demanded the National Gallery of Australia remove a portrait of her. The painting by the artist Vincent Namatjira is one of numerous portraits on display at the Canberra gallery in Namatjira’s first major survey exhibition.
The Guardian even rightly tagged it as the latest example of the Streisand Effect in action:
Rinehart appears to have fallen victim to the “Streisand effect”, a term coined after Barbra Streisand launched a lawsuit in 2003 to try to remove an aerial photo of her California beach house from an online collection. Streisand’s attempt to suppress the image led to almost half a million people visiting the Pictopia site to view the photo within a month.
A similar thing seems to have happened with Rinehart. The NGA told Guardian Australia in a statement that there had been a “noticeable increase” in visitors to the national gallery as well as its digital channels over the past week.
Google trends has also given us a sweeping indicator of the worldwide gain in traction of the search term “Gina Rinehart”.
Before 15 May – the day the first stories about Rinehart’s portrait demand was published – interest in Rinehart on Google was at roughly 0, meaning there was not enough search data on the term.
But after the news broke, search interest picked up, with “Gina Rinehart” hitting peak popularity two days later.
A week later, interest lingered.
Who would have predicted that… other than just about everyone familiar with how these things go.
Look, being rich comes with all sorts of privileges. But one thing it should not come with is the ability to go through life without having to deal with an occasional bit of mockery pointed in your direction. But, when that happens, there are a variety of ways to deal with it, and Rinehart appears to have chosen the absolute worst.
This episode is brought to you with financial support from the Future of Online Trust & Safety Fund, and by our sponsor TaskUs, a leading company in the trust and safety field providing a range of platform integrity and digital safety solutions. In our Bonus Chat at the end of the episode, TaskUs SVP of Global Offerings Phil Tomlinson tells us about his time at the Trust and Safety Professional Association summit in Dublin, his key takeaways from the event, and the trust and safety lessons learned from well-designed conference lanyards.
It’s almost laughable that these two stories happened so close to one another. The Australian government has just announced a pilot program to test an online age verification system:
And then, just hours later, it was reported that law enforcement is investigating an apparent breach of club and bar patrons’ personal data, which the venues are required to collect by law for people entering such establishments.
When we talk about the privacy and data risks of age verification, this is exactly the kind of thing we’re talking about. When you’re collecting that much sensitive private data, you become a target.
As the article linked above notes:
It is a legal requirement in NSW for licensed clubs to collect personal information from patrons on entry, under the state’s registered clubs legislation.
The information is required to be stored securely under federal privacy laws.
Sounds kinda like the age verification requirements for websites. You have to collect the info and then pinky promise to keep it secure. And it works until this happens:
An unauthorised website claims personal information of more than 1 million customer records from at least 16 licensed NSW clubs have been released online in a potential data breach.
Cybercrime detectives are investigating the reported breach with the website claiming to have records and personal information of senior government figures, including Premier Chris Minns, Deputy Premier Prue Car and Police Minister Yasmin Catley.
IT provider Outabox said in a statement it had become aware of the potential data breach of a sign-in system used by its clients by an “unauthorised” third party.
Hilariously, government officials are trying to play this down because it was just a breach rather than a hack. As if that makes a difference?
Gaming Minister David Harris said the government and police first became aware of the potential breach on Tuesday.
“We know that this is an alleged data breach of a third-party vendor, so it wasn’t a hack,” he said.
But this is exactly the concern regarding online age verification. Someone has to collect that information and then whoever is collecting the sensitive info becomes an immediate target, no matter how the data is accessed.
Incredibly, you might recall that just a few months ago we were giving the Australian government kudos for recognizing that age verification was a privacy and security nightmare. So, they knew that just last summer.
And yet, here we are with the latest announcement:
Despite those concerns from late last year, the government is now pushing ahead with a pilot to try and test some of those ideas.
Look, maybe head down to the nearest club in NSW to see how it’s working out before moving forward “despite these concerns”?
Meanwhile, if you think this breach isn’t that serious, well, for the million or so folks who visited one of those bars and clubs, things don’t look great:
Creator of the data breach tracking website haveibeenpwned.com, Troy Hunt, said the creators of the website had not released all of the information they had collected.
“Inevitably they do have the entire thing.”
He said the Outabox technology used by clubs scans patrons’ faces and matches them with their licence details.
Mr Hunt said people whose data has appeared on the site may need to replace their drivers licences.
“There are physical addresses, there are date of birth, there are names. That’s not good,” he said.
The Devil, as they say, is in the details. It’s a lesson that Warner Bros. apparently just recently had to learn after it poked the Australian Football League over its latest addition to the league, from the isle of Tasmania. You have probably already guessed where this is going.
The AFL announced recently that the newest team entering the league would be the Tasmanian Devils. The response to the announcement was immediately positive, gobbling up forty thousand memberships in the hours after the announcement was made. There actually used to be a basketball club going by the “Devils” that existed previously, which is where Warner Bros. comes in after that team folded.
The National Basketball League (NBL) featured the Hobart Devils from 1983-1986 and the Hobart Tassie Devils from 1987–1995, with the Hobart Devils name returning for the franchise’s final season in 1996.
When the club folded, Warner Brothers quickly trademarked the character and registered the name Tasmanian Devil in 1997. When the NBL announced that Tasmania would be returning to the league in the 2021/22 season, the name was unavailable because a request for the name ‘Tassie Devils’ to be trademarked had been filed by the AFL with the Federal Government.
That application has been sitting in limbo since 2019 with a final determination to be made by July 17 this year.
And Hobart eventually gave up and decided to become the “Jackjumpers.” And with WB scooping up the trademark for all kinds of market segments, including apparel and the like, the company began poking at the AFL over its chosen name. The branding looks nothing like the famous Warner Bros. character. Neither do the color schemes call back to that character. This all comes down to the name of the club and the trademark Warner holds for the character.
And much of this fight apparently centered on the fact that the Warner side of things didn’t realize that a Tasmanian Devil is an actual, real-life animal that existed on the island.
Devils chairman Grant O’Brien said it became clear during negotiations that executives from the company did not realise the character was based on the Apple Isle’s famous carnivorous marsupial.
‘I think there was, for a period of time, a lack of understanding that there was actually an animal called the Tasmanian devil. Once that was understood, things got a little easier,’ O’Brien said. ‘But anything to do with copyrights, trademarks, those sorts of things … is tricky. But we got great co-operation from Warner Bros, and it’s a name we wanted to fight for, because it’s ours, it’s the sort of animal character that we want our club to stand for.’
So… yeah. I can’t quite determine if this is completely settled, but it sure sounds like everyone thinks the team is going to keep its name once it was explained to WB that its character was based on a piece of important cultural and natural history on the island. The fact that this had to be explained, however, is a source of both amusement and aggravation.
Because at the end of the day, any calories spent as a result of an American company unknowingly appropriating and then attempting to control a piece of someone else’s culture where there was zero chance of any confusion over source or affiliation is plainly annoying.
It appears that Meta is serious about no longer bribing news orgs to keep corrupt politicians from forcing them to engage in sketchy wealth transfer schemes to news orgs. While it caved in the past in Australia and paid off news orgs there, the company is informing news orgs that they won’t be renewing the deal.
Around the globe, there remain ongoing attempts to force Google and Meta (mainly) to hand money over to news organizations. Supporters have no fundamental principle behind this other than “Google and Meta are making money, and some news companies are struggling, therefore, they should pay us.” As we’ve discussed at great length, these laws are dangerous on multiple levels. They’re an extreme form of crony corruption, forcing one industry to pay off another. They’re also an attack on the open web, because they are based on the principle of “if your users link to news too much, you have to pay for sending them traffic.”
None of this makes sense. If the news companies don’t want the traffic, they can block it. But they want the free traffic and they want to be paid for it. It’s extraordinarily corrupt.
There have been variations on the link tax model over the past decade or so. Various failed experiments in the EU were followed by Australia’s infamous news bargaining code. Mainstream news orgs continue to insist Australia’s experiment has been a huge success, but that’s because the only ones talking about it are the big media orgs that are getting millions of dollars from Meta and Google. This might cloud their reporting on the law, not that they admit that. About the only Australian news orgs I’ve seen call out the inherent corruption in these plans are the satirical Juice Media and the irreverent Crikey.
Crikey’s summary is dead on:
The logic of the news media bargaining code isn’t that of ending a rip-off perpetrated by foreign tech giants. Instead, it’s similar to Coles and Woolworths successfully demanding, on the basis of all the great work they’ve done for the community, that the government forcibly transfer profit from an international competitor that had successfully disrupted their business model.
The fact is, these link taxes have been a disaster wherever they’ve been implemented, including Australia. The Public Interest Journalism Initiative in Australia tracks changes in the journalism space across the country with laser-like precision. And its data certainly does not suggest a huge grand success for journalism in the country. Rather, it shows a lot of consolidation, and plenty of smaller journalism outlets still struggling, while there’s an increase in areas with little to no journalism coverage. However, contractions in the news business greatly outweigh expansions:
Apparently the money flowing in is — as plenty of people predicted — going to the tippy top of the market, making folks like Rupert Murdoch even wealthier. But not doing much to help journalism.
Google has been much more willing to give in and pay the demanded extortion. A decade ago, Google was willing to take a stand in places like Spain, shutting down Google News in that country. But these days, Google has been willing to cave, quickly, in both Australia and, more recently, Canada.
On the other hand, Meta has been much more willing to push back on these laws. It would be nice to think Meta is doing this to protect the open web, but no one’s going to fall for that. Meta has spent years trying to wall off the open internet, so it’s not like the company magically got a conscience on these issues. But, whether for good reasons or bad, Meta has been way more willing to push back on these laws. In Canada, the company has blocked news links, where it was quickly discovered that news orgs needed traffic from Meta way, way more than Meta needed links from news orgs. Meta has also threatened to take similar steps in the US if various state or federal laws come into effect.
In Australia, you may recall, Meta initially blocked news there, before cutting a few deals with news orgs there. Those deals (and the ones Google did as well) were not technically under the News Bargaining Code. Rather, they were blatant payoffs to avoid the invoking of the code, which would then force the companies into binding arbitration.
But, apparently, Meta has decided enough is enough. It informed the news orgs it paid off a few years ago that it will not be renewing those deals when they finish, and that it’s removing its dedicated news tab.
Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, Meta, has set itself on a collision course with the Albanese government after announcing it will stop paying Australian publishers for news, and plans to shut down its news tab in Australia and the United States.
Meta informed publishers on Friday that it would not enter new deals when the current contracts expire this year.
The news tab – a dedicated tab for news in the bookmarks section of Facebook – will also shut down in April, after a similar shut down in the UK, Germany and France last year.
Again, it’s nearly impossible to get good reporting on this stuff because all the major media sites are biased in that they are recipients of these payoffs. The Guardian report quotes a ton of politicians and news orgs decrying this, and only presents Meta’s PR quotes in response — not bothering to speak to any civil society or academics who are willing to speak out as to why these regulatory schemes are so corrupt and problematic.
But, Meta makes a fairly clear point that highlights the absurdity of these laws: what if Meta just doesn’t want to be in the news business? The company has made it pretty damn clear over the last few years that focusing on “news” as it did for a few years was nothing but a headache. It would rather people just use social media to connect with friends, not argue about the news.
Should it be allowed to do that?
“We know that people don’t come to Facebook for news and political content – they come to connect with people and discover new opportunities, passions and interests. As we previously shared in 2023, news makes up less than 3% of what people around the world see in their Facebook feed, and is a small part of the Facebook experience for the vast majority of people.”
Again, the reaction from people who are mad at this move just puts the exclamation point on just how corrupt the whole scheme is. They don’t care about the reasons or the problems of having to pay to allow users to link to public news sites. No, they just want cash and are mad that they don’t get cash.
The prime minister, Anthony Albanese, told reporters on Friday the decision was “not the Australian way”.
“We know that it’s absolutely critical that media is able to function properly and be properly funded. Journalism is important and the idea that research and work done by others can be taken free is simply untenable,” he said.
But nothing is being “taken free.” It is just that users on Facebook decide they want to point people to news stories, thereby sending free traffic to that news organization by posting the link. A little bit of text and an image shows up on Facebook, but that is entirely controllable by the news org since they can set the details for the cards that show up when linked.
So, Prime Minister, what the fuck is “taken” and what was “taken free”? Because the answer is nothing.
The communications minister, Michelle Rowland, and assistant treasurer, Stephen Jones, called news media companies on Friday following the announcement, advising them the government would be taking all of the steps available under the news media bargaining code.
“We’re not talking about some plucky little startup, we’re talking about one of the world’s largest and most profitable companies,” Jones said. “It has a responsibility to ensure that it pays for the content that … has been used on its platform, and frankly, that it’s making millions and millions of dollars out of it and so the government is adamant it will be backing the code we’ll be taking all of the actions that are available to us under the code.”
No, it’s not a plucky little startup, but it’s also not “using” the content on their platform. It’s allowing its users to link to that content, which is a fundamental part of the open web. And by doing so, they are sending free traffic to that website.
If Albanese and the Australian government are so concerned about things happening without payment, why aren’t they making news orgs pay Facebook for the traffic they’re getting?
It’s like they live in this upside down world.
Either way, it sounds like the end result of this is that the Australian government is likely to try to force Meta to (1) host news it has no interest in hosting, and (2) paying for that news it does not value and which it would prefer not to host.
The FBI has done some heinous things in its pursuit of its counter-terrorism objectives. While it’s true the FBI has occasionally nabbed actual terrorists, it seems to prefer creating terrorists to going after those that are already avowed terrorists.
The FBI utilizes informants and undercover agents to perform this highly questionable work. Investigations border on entrapment. Internet loudmouths, petty criminals, or people with mental health issues are pushed and prodded to make their words a reality. In most cases, the targets of these investigations can’t. They don’t have the money, the expertise, or even the will to follow through with violent acts. Informants provide the tools, weapons, plans, and constant pressure needed to turn often otherwise harmless people into so-called terrorists the FBI can swoop in and arrest them the moment they start turning the plans the informants concocted into reality.
Apparently, the FBI is not alone in its willingness to radicalize people just so it can arrest them and hit them with charges that could result in decades of imprisonment. The counter-terrorist wing of Australian law enforcement does the same thing. This truly horrific story at least has a (partially) happy ending. But the events leading up to this conclusion are cruel and inhumane.
Thomas Carrick (the pseudonym given to him by the court) is a 13-year-old with autism. Thomas has an IQ of 71 and is a recipient of national disability insurance. He became fixated on the Islamic State, spending a lot of time watching ISIS videos and, apparently, asking his parents to purchase bomb-making ingredients for him. His parents, who are not native English speakers, asked the local police for help deterring his fascination with Islamic extremism.
They provided officers with access to Thomas, his home, his phone, his mother’s phone, his room, and to personal information gathered by his school and psychologist. At the start, the police actually did what they said they’d do: they sought help for Thomas. He was assigned to a case manager and met regularly with a psychologist. An officer who accessed the contents of Thomas’ phone noted he had downloaded a lot of stuff related to China and the Communist Party, but very little related to the Islamic State. They also set him up with an imam to discuss the religion of Islam in a more peaceful context.
Had things stayed this way, there would be nothing to report. But three months after this helpful path was opened up for Thomas, the country’s War on Terror wing decided to insert itself into the mix. The Joint Counter-Terrorism Team [JCTT] (a mix of Australian federal officers, Victoria police, and Asio members) opened up a parallel investigation that actively worked to undo and undermine all the help Thomas was receiving from other law enforcement officers.
An online covert operative was tasked with communicating to Thomas using two personae: a 24-year-old Muslim man from NSW, and a more extreme person located overseas.
[…]
The operative chatted with Thomas on 55 of the next 71 days, including during breaks at school and late at night.
[…]
The first persona introduced Thomas to the second, more extreme, persona, who encouraged him to make a bomb or kill an AFP member.
But the operative gave evidence that Thomas was naive, and living a “fantasy life online”, including by asking questions like whether he could join the kids’ section of Islamic State.
On 8 August 2021, Thomas sent a photo to the operative which showed him wearing his school uniform, a hoodie and a face mask and holding a knife with “ISIS” written on it in marker.
His house was searched within days, and he was charged less than two months later.
The JCTT was well-aware the therapeutic efforts authorized by police were still underway when it decided to turn this 13-year-old into a terrorist. When seeking authorization to arrest Thomas, the detective superintendent (apparently deliberately) failed to inform his supervisors that he had evidence the JCTT’s undercover work was having a negative impact on the rehabilitation of Thomas. And, of course, that’s the point: the JCTT only wins when it arrests terrorists. If it has to do all the dirty work itself, it apparently will.
And that’s not the worst of it. There’s also this:
[Magistrate Lesley] Fleming found the JCTT also deliberately delayed charging Thomas with offences until after he turned 14, as it made it harder for him to use the defence of doli incapax, which refers to the concept that a child is not criminally responsible for their actions.
The JCTT also performed another search of Thomas’ room for criminal evidence while maintaining the pretense they were part of the parallel police effort to dissuade Thomas from fixating on the Islamic State.
Fortunately, Thomas has been freed and is no longer facing charges. Magistrate Fleming’s order rips the JCTT to shreds for its abominable actions.
“The community would not expect law enforcement officers to encourage a 13-14 year old child towards racial hatred, distrust of police and violent extremism, encouraging the child’s fixation on ISIS,” magistrate Lesley Fleming said in the decision.
“The community would not expect law enforcement to use the guise of a rehabilitation service to entice the parents of a troubled child to engage in a process that results in potential harm to the child.
“The conduct engaged in by the JCTT and the AFP falls so profoundly short of the minimum standards expected of law enforcement offices [sic] that to refuse this [stay] application would be to condone and encourage further instances of such conduct.”
Thomas had a chance to be rehabilitated. But the JCTT deliberately harmed a minor to serve its own ends.
“The rehabilitation of TC was doomed once the [operator] connected online…befriended TC and fed his fixation, providing him with a new terminology, new boundaries and an outlet for him to express, what was in part, his fantasy world.”
This is truly disgusting. One wonders how the operatives involved with the deliberate destruction of a child (and their childhood) live with themselves. What possibly justifiable ends could they have been serving with this effort? Thomas was already being closely observed by law enforcement, but in the hopes that such close supervision would encourage him to find more healthy outlets for expression.
What happened here was evil. There’s no other word for it. And the added cruelty of waiting a few months to deprive the minor of a courtroom defense is symptomatic of the sickness that seems to pervade counter-terrorist agencies. The need to win subsumes the need to serve the public’s interests. And no one’s interests were served here other than the pitiable counter-terrorists cops who can’t get through the day without the brief ego boost of an unearned “win.”
