Sneaky old Donald. At a time when colonisation is truly out of fashion, he says he's going to swoop on devastated Gaza and turn it into Florida or some such.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
or signup to continue reading
Kick all the Palestinians out. Forcibly move them into Egypt and Jordan. Build it and everybody but Gazans will be able to inhabit a place with 40 kilometres of glorious coastline.
Cue lots of accurate chat about ethnic cleansing. About Benjamin Netanyahu's victory over Palestine. Make America A Target Again. On and on.
That lark went on for, deadset, 24 hours before shockingly, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to clear it up. No US money would be spent on the Mar-a- Lago-of-the-Middle-East. No boots on the ground, at least not yet. And also Palestinians would only be temporarily moved out.
This utterly insane idea probably wasn't one, an idea that is. Instead it was a distraction from the dismantling of US democracy. As the New York Times put it, Donald Trump is once again flooding the zone. That's a phrase one of Trump's reprehensible nazi henchmen used to describe the tactic of making so many announcements all at once that no one sensible can take stock, let alone take action. And my goodness, do Americans need to take action.
But while Trump was announcing his plan to annex Gaza (maybe to expand his real estate business), this was happening. Ersatz Vice-President Elon Musk had instructed his minions to seize access to a Treasury Department system that handles federal payments and has sensitive information, such as social security numbers. The disclosure of those is meant to be limited by the US's Privacy Act.
You get some folks saying that what happens in the US has no impact here. To steal an Americanism, sure, buddy.
Vanessa Teague, one of the Melbourne University researchers who uncovered the 2017 Medicare leak/breach/embarrassment, can attest to the release of private and confidential material. That one happened "by accident". The data was de-identified in a totally hopeless way so that anyone with even half a brain could link up the records to the actual person. So, breaches when it's not even done on purpose. Imagine what can happen when the data thieves have a purpose.
Teague, now a cryptographer at ANU, says that the Musk-style infringements on the privacy of US citizens will not just be limited to US citizens. And it's not just the official information you would think about, the tax returns, the health information.
She says the threat also comes from intelligence-related records emanating from internet activity and phone activity, in cooperation with the private companies that have that data.
"Goodness knows what's actually in those databases but approximately everything about everybody ... and that's not just Americans by the way but a lot of the rest of us as well."
At which point, I entirely freak out. Will the rest of the world know exactly what my addictions are?
"The opportunity for political manipulation at scale is probably the most frightening aspect," she says.
We are used to thinking of foreign political manipulation as coming through social media by authoritarian regimes.
Teague asks us to imagine what happens when that foreign political manipulation is informed by information gathered from decades of US-Australian security and intelligence co-operation.
"The political positions of Musk and Trump are extremist in the context of Australia's political landscape, but they're now in a better position to influence the outcome of our elections and the direction of our democracy than anyone has ever been."
And trust me they are. Did you see Peter Dutton saying how much he loves and admires Trump?
Now that Dutton is trying to clamber aboard the Trump tumbril, just a gentle reminder that he and his colleagues have experience in breaching the privacy of the young and the vulnerable.
In 2017, a young single mother wrote a piece for what was then Fairfax about what we now know as robodebt.
I think she might have been the first person to reveal the crushing impact it had on individuals. And what happened to her then? The Department of (in)Human Services gave her personal and financial information to a journalist who then wrote a story based on what he was told. Absolutely terrifying. What made it worse was that the Office of the Privacy Commissioner backed the decision to leak the details.
The Musketeers are doing a terrifying thing. They are having a fossick in all our top drawers at the direction of their lord and master. And I love that some of those employees tried to stop this shocking breach of privacy.
READ MORE:
Who's to stop the marauders from monetising what they find? Selling the data. Blackmail. Cutting essential services based on what they find and then charging for those essential services. Maybe I'm catastrophising but I doubt it.
Teague reminds me that it's about the power a tiny number of people can have over a very large number of the rest of us: detailed information about finances, health, communications, and all the other activities of the modern world (even driving) can be used to control and manipulate on a massive scale: to discredit a political opponent (by doxxing her), to silence a whistleblower (by identifying who they communicate with),) to manipulate us politically (by learning what we care about and targeting the lie precisely to the individual's vulnerabilities).
Our communications are under constant surveillance - and that can make it even harder for whistleblowers trying to do their best to protect us.
- Jenna Price is a regular columnist.
