New Leaks Threaten Human Smuggling Talks and Lead To Hack Attacks On Australia 304
cold fjord writes "Indonesia is threatening to cease cooperation with Australia on human smuggling as a result of further Snowden leaks published by the Guardian and other papers over the weekend. The leaks involve reported use of Australian embassies across Asia for signals intelligence as well as reports of intelligence operations by Australia and the U.S. in 2007 at the U.N. climate change conference in Bali. (In 2002 a terrorist attack at the Sari club in Bali killed 240 people, including 88 Australians.) As a result of the revelations, various groups are reportedly taking revenge, including claimed or alleged involvement of the Java Cyber Army, members of Anonymous in Indonesia, and possibly other hacker groups. They are attacking hundreds of Australian websites. Among the reported victims are Queensland hospital, a children's cancer association an anti-slavery charity, and many more."
Re:Not the leaks (Score:3, Interesting)
You're both wrong. The people to blame for human trafficking are the human traffickers.
The human traffickers are just providing a service for a fee. The real blame should go to legislatures that criminalize the free movement of people.
Indonesia (Score:2, Interesting)
The leaks have created diplomatic problems that are likely to prevent effective intervention against the smuggling.
Dear Mr. Cold Fjord,
This is INDONESIA that we are talking about.
For years (actually, decades) Indonesia never took the issue human trafficking/smuggling seriously. Whether it be human trafficking/smuggling to Australia, to Singapore, to Malaysia, or to any other place in the world.
Indonesia is a nation which has too many people living on too many island, and the corrupt regime (whether or not it was under Suhartoe or the current one) never place that issue as a top priority.
Furthermore, Indonesia, as the world's MOST POPULOUS Muslim country, has the obligation to spread Islam to kafir countries such as Australia.
In other words, EVEN WITHOUT the leaks from Edward Snowden, the human trafficking/smuggling business would still go on, as usual.
All the so-called "cooperation" from the Indonesian side is utterly absurd from the beginning.
Re:Headline fail. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not slavery, it's basically illegal migration by claiming to be a refugee. Rather than engage in the orderly process of getting a visa by getting approval of refugee status from the UN, they decide to go to Indonesia, pay a "people smuggler" who will organise things to get them into Australian waters, then ring some government department to send the navy to go pick them up because their little dingy is probably going to sink soon. Before getting picked up, they discard all their identification papers. Once being processed, they claim they're refugees, escaping persecution, ignoring the fact that they would have passed through four or five different countries who aren't persecuting them.
If they were neighbouring countries, it would be a different matter, but because they're travelling to Australia, I don't think a lot of them are genuine refugees, after all, they're not being persecuted in Indonesia. It's quite a terrible joke what the people smugglers do. If you look on a map to see where 'Christmas Island" is, in relation to Indonesia, you will see why they do it; because it's not ridiculously far from Indonesia and once in Australian waters, our government is compelled to do something. Unlike the US-Mexican border, where many people try to get into the USA and evade detection, in our case, there is absolutely no compulsion to avoid detection, they actually want to be picked up and processed, that way they can get legal entitlements (read: welfare).
Australia is a well-to-do country, and, while some of the immigrants will be escaping some form of persecution worthy of resettlement, a lot of them are economic migrants who are arriving by boat to avoid having to go through the proper, overly bureaucratic procedures. This is unfair to the people who haven't got the money to pay a smuggler. Apparently it's in the vicinity of ~$AU10,000 that people smugglers charge. It's not an insignificant sum of money.
With that brief background, my opinion is that the bribing, and general expenses around people smuggling, means that a lot of that cost is parked in the Indonesian economy. A few thousand Australian dollars is a huge amount in Indonesia, considering their largest currency denomination is worth about $AU10. I just get the feeling that the diplomatic problem is that they know it's happening, they know it's wrong, but they're on the beneficiary side to it, so they don't want it to change.
The NSA has very little to do with this. It's a broader issue with two countries playing politics and politicians trying to win elections. There's that underlying sentiment of the public, and politicians will generally play to nationalistic tendencies, to appear strong. It happened here, and the Indonesians, with an impending election, are doing same.