[LINK] How Egypt Shut down the net

[Tom Worthington]

Richard Chirgwin wrote:
> ... there are fear-mongers out there pitching the line that the Australian government already has the power 
> to order a shut-down ...

Any police officer at the rank of Assistant Commissioner, or higher, can
order "Suspension of supply of carriage service in an emergency", under 
section 315 of the TELECOMMUNICATIONS ACT 1997:
<http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/sinodisp/au/legis/cth/consol_act/ta1997214/s315.html?stem=0&synonyms=0&query=emergency>.

By the way, for the paranoid, I noticed that the FOI Act has a provision
to allow the release of personal information in an emergency. Most
recently this was invoked for the Queensland floods:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/02/privacy-act-declaration-of-emergency.html>.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra