'You have to assume everything is being collected'

 

WASHINGTON: In the months and early years after 9/11, FBI agents began showing up at Microsoft more frequently than before, armed with court orders demanding information on customers.

(George W. Bush secretly authorised the NSA to monitor fibre optic cables. Photo: Reuters)

Around the world, government spies and eavesdroppers were tracking the email and internet addresses used by suspected terrorists. Often, those trails led to the world's largest software company and, at the time, largest email provider.

You have to assume everything is being collected.
Bruce Schneier

The agents wanted email archives, account information, practically everything, and quickly. Engineers compiled the data, sometimes by hand, and delivered it to the government.

Often there was no easy way to tell if the information belonged to foreigners or Americans. So much data was changing hands that one former Microsoft employee recalls that the engineers were anxious about whether the company should cooperate.

Inside Microsoft, some called it "Hoovering" — not after the vacuum cleaner, but after J. Edgar Hoover, the first FBI director, who gathered dirt on countless Americans.

This frenetic, manual process was the forerunner to Prism, the recently revealed highly classified National Security Agency program that seizes records from internet companies. As laws changed and technology improved, the government and industry moved toward a streamlined, electronic process, which required less time from the companies and provided the government data in a more standard format.

The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

(Barack Obama allowed for fibre optic cable monitoring to continue with more oversight. Photo: Reuters)


But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fibre optic cables that make up the internet's backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

The fact that it is productive is not surprising; documents show it is one of the major sources for what ends up in the US president's daily briefing. Prism makes sense of the cacophony of the internet's raw feed. It provides the government with names, addresses, conversation histories and entire archives of email inboxes.

Many of the people interviewed for this report insisted on anonymity because they were not authorised to publicly discuss a classified, continuing effort. But those interviews, along with public statements and the few public documents available, show there are two vital components to Prism's success.

The first is how the government works closely with the companies that keep people perpetually connected to each other and the world. That story line has attracted the most attention so far.
The second and far murkier one is how Prism fits into a larger US wiretapping program in place for years.

Spying deep in the oceans
Deep in the oceans, hundreds of cables carry much of the world's phone and internet traffic. Since at least the early 1970s, the NSA has been tapping foreign cables. It doesn't need permission. That's its job.

But internet data doesn't care about borders. Send an email from Pakistan to Afghanistan and it might pass through a mail server in the United States, the same computer that handles messages to and from Americans. The NSA is prohibited from spying on Americans or anyone inside the United States. That's the FBI's job and it requires a warrant.

Despite that prohibition, shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorised the NSA to plug into the fibre optic cables that enter and leave the United States, knowing it would give the government unprecedented, warrantless access to Americans' private conversations.

Tapping into those cables allows the NSA access to monitor emails, telephone calls, video chats, websites, bank transactions and more. It takes powerful computers to decrypt, store and analyse all this information, but the information is all there, zipping by at the speed of light.

"You have to assume everything is being collected," said Bruce Schneier, who has been studying and writing about cryptography and computer security for two decades.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of this effort in 2005. In 2006, former AT&T technician Mark Klein revealed that the company had allowed the NSA to install a computer at its San Francisco switching centre, a key hub for fibre optic cables.

What followed was the most significant debate over domestic surveillance since the 1975 Church Committee, a special Senate committee led by Senator Frank Church, D-Idaho, reined in the CIA and FBI for spying on Americans.

Unlike the recent debate over Prism, however, there were no visual aids, no easy-to-follow charts explaining that the government was sweeping up millions of emails and listening to phone calls of people accused of no wrongdoing.

The Bush administration called it the "Terrorist Surveillance Program" and said it was keeping the United States safe.

"This program has produced intelligence for us that has been very valuable in the global war on terror, both in terms of saving lives and breaking up plots directed at the United States," Vice President Dick Cheney said at the time.

The government has said it minimises all conversations and emails involving Americans. Exactly what that means remains classified. But former US officials familiar with the process say it allows the government to keep the information as long as it is labeled as belonging to an American and stored in a special, restricted part of a computer.

That means Americans' personal emails can live in government computers, but analysts can't access, read or listen to them unless the emails become relevant to a national security investigation.

The government doesn't automatically delete the data, officials said, because an email or phone conversation that seems innocuous today might be significant a year from now.

What's unclear to the public is how long the government keeps the data. That is significant because the US someday will have a new enemy. Two decades from now, the government could have a trove of American emails and phone records it can tap to investigative whatever Congress declares a threat to national security.

The Bush administration shut down its warrantless wiretapping program in 2007 but endorsed a new law, the Protect America Act, which allowed the wiretapping to continue with changes: The NSA generally would have to explain its techniques and targets to a secret court in Washington, but individual warrants would not be required.

Congress approved it, with Senator Barack Obama, D-Ill., in the midst of a campaign for president, voting against it.

"This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide," Obama said in a speech two days before that vote. "I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom."

NSA's top-secret 'US-98XN' program
When the Protect America Act made warrantless wiretapping legal, lawyers and executives at major technology companies knew what was about to happen.

One expert in national security law, who is directly familiar with how internet companies dealt with the government during that period, recalls conversations in which technology officials worried aloud that the government would trample on Americans' constitutional right against unlawful searches, and that the companies would be called on to help.

The logistics were about to get daunting, too.

For years, the companies had been handling requests from the FBI. Now Congress had given the NSA the authority to take information without warrants. Though the companies didn't know it, the passage of the Protect America Act gave birth to a top-secret NSA program, officially called US-98XN.

It was known as Prism. Though many details are still unknown, it worked like this:
Every year, the attorney general and the director of national intelligence spell out in a classified document how the government plans to gather intelligence on foreigners overseas.
By law, the certification can be broad. The government isn't required to identify specific targets or places.

A federal judge, in a secret order, approves the plan.

With that, the government can issue "directives" to internet companies to turn over information.
While the court provides the government with broad authority to seize records, the directives themselves typically are specific, said one former associate general counsel at a major internet company. They identify a specific target or groups of targets. Other company officials recall similar experiences.

All adamantly denied turning over the kind of broad swaths of data that many people believed when the Prism documents were first released.

"We only ever comply with orders for requests about specific accounts or identifiers," Microsoft said in a statement.

Facebook said it received between 9000 and 10,000 requests for data from all government agencies in the second half of last year. The social media company said fewer than 19,000 users were targeted.

How many of those were related to national security is unclear, and likely classified. The numbers suggest each request typically related to one or two people, not a vast range of users.

Tech company officials were unaware there was a program named Prism. Even former law enforcement and counterterrorism officials who were on the job when the program went live and were aware of its capabilities said this past week that they didn't know what it was called.

What the NSA called Prism, the companies knew as a streamlined system that automated and simplified the "Hoovering" from years earlier, the former assistant general counsel said. The companies, he said, wanted to reduce their workload. The government wanted the data in a structured, consistent format that was easy to search.

Any company in the communications business can expect a visit, said Mike Janke, CEO of Silent Circle, a company that advertises software for secure, encrypted conversations. The government is eager to find easy ways around security.

"They do this every two to three years," said Janke, who said government agents have approached his company but left empty-handed because his computer servers store little information. "They ask for the moon."

That often creates tension between the government and a technology industry with a reputation for having a civil libertarian bent. Companies occasionally argue to limit what the government takes.

Yahoo even went to court and lost in a classified ruling in 2008, The New York Times reported Friday.
"The notion that Yahoo gives any federal agency vast or unfettered access to our users' records is categorically false," Ron Bell, the company's general counsel, said recently.

Under Prism, the delivery process varied by company.

Google, for instance, says it makes secure file transfers. Others use contractors or have set up stand-alone systems. Some have set up user interfaces making it easier for the government, according to a security expert familiar with the process.

Every company involved denied the most sensational assertion in the Prism documents: that the NSA pulled data "directly from the servers" of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL and more.

Technology experts and a former government official say that phrasing, taken from a PowerPoint slide describing the program, was likely meant to differentiate Prism's neatly organised, company-provided data from the unstructured information snatched out of the internet's major pipelines.

In a slide made public by the newspapers, NSA analysts were encouraged to use data coming from both Prism and from the fiber-optic cables.

Prism, as its name suggests, helps narrow and focus the stream. If eavesdroppers spot a suspicious email among the torrent of data pouring into the United States, analysts can use information from internet companies to pinpoint the user.

With Prism, the government gets a user's entire email inbox. Every email, including contacts with American citizens, becomes government property.

Once the NSA has an inbox, it can search its huge archives for information about everyone with whom the target communicated. All those people can be investigated, too.

That's one example of how emails belonging to Americans can become swept up in the hunt.

In that way, Prism helps justify specific, potentially personal searches. But it's the broader operation on the internet fibre optics cables that actually captures the data, experts agree.

"I'm much more frightened and concerned about real-time monitoring on the internet backbone," said Wolf Ruzicka, CEO of EastBanc Technologies, a Washington software company. "I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to."

One unanswered question, according to a former technology executive at one of the companies involved, is whether the government can use the data from Prism to work backward.

For example, not every company archives instant message conversations, chat room exchanges or videoconferences. But if Prism provided general details, known as metadata, about when a user began chatting, could the government "rewind" its copy of the global Internet stream, find the conversation and replay it in full?

That would take enormous computing, storage and code-breaking power. It's possible the NSA could use supercomputers to decrypt some transmissions, but it's unlikely it would have the ability to do that in volume. In other words, it would help to know what messages to zero in on.
Whether the government has that power and whether it uses Prism this way remains a closely guarded secret.

NSA crosses the line
A few months after Obama took office in 2009, the surveillance debate reignited in Congress because the NSA had crossed the line. Eavesdroppers, it turned out, had been using their warrantless wiretap authority to intercept far more emails and phone calls of Americans than they were supposed to.

Obama, no longer opposed to the wiretapping, made unspecified changes to the process. The government said the problems were fixed.

"I came in with a healthy skepticism about these programs," Obama explained recently. "My team evaluated them. We scrubbed them thoroughly. We actually expanded some of the oversight, increased some of the safeguards."

Years after decrying Bush for it, Obama said Americans did have to make tough choices in the name of safety.

"You can't have 100 per cent security and also then have 100 per cent privacy and zero inconvenience," the president said.

Obama's administration, echoing his predecessor's, credited the surveillance with disrupting several terrorist attacks. Leading figures from the Bush administration who endured criticism during Obama's candidacy have applauded the president for keeping the surveillance intact.

Jason Weinstein, who recently left the Justice Department as head of its cybercrime and intellectual property section, said it's no surprise Obama continued the eavesdropping.

"You can't expect a president to not use a legal tool that Congress has given him to protect the country," he said. "So, Congress has given him the tool. The president's using it. And the courts are saying 'The way you're using it is OK'. That's checks and balances at work."

Schneier, the author and security expert, said it doesn't really matter how Prism works, technically. Just assume the government collects everything, he said.

He said it doesn't matter what the government and the companies say, either. It's spycraft, after all.
"Everyone is playing word games," he said. "No one is telling the truth."

theage.com.au 17 June 2013

It is actions like this that indicate that governments see every single citizen an enemy of the state, and the onus is on you to prove otherwise.

A similar policy was put in place when people were accused of being communists, even though both systems have the financial support of the international bankers.

Not since the Nazi times of Word War II, have people being catalogued with such tenaciousness.

This is another way of enslaving the populous.

UK phone hacking 'goes further than media'

A BRITISH newspaper says it has seen evidence that the phone-hacking scandal rocking the UK media establishment extends well beyond journalists to include other industries. 


The hacking scandal has rocked Britain with revelations that journalists routinely intercepted voicemails, bribed public officials, and hacked into computers in their search for scoops.

(Photo: Rebekah Brooks was charged in connection with phone hacking. However, The Independent claims the practice has been widespread in other industries. Source: AP)

The Independent says that a leaked report from Britain's Serious and Organized Crime Agency - often described as the UK's version of the FBI - shows that authorities were aware of a much wider circle of organizations employing many of the same methods.

The paper said law firms, debt collectors and others also made use of hacking to get an edge over rivals.

SOCA did not immediately return Associated Press messages seeking comment Saturday.

 adelaidenow.com.au 23 June 2013

Part of the global order of the new world is to collect as much data as possible on everyone.

This is done via many different methods, and if the people involved are uncomfortable to the establishment, they then are the scapegoats.

Facebook bug exposes the personal details of six million users

Facebook took to their security page to apologise again today, after the site admitted a bug had “inadvertently” exposed the personal information of six million users.

The site said they were “upset and embarrassed” in a blog post when their White Hat security program detected the bug after it had already affected millions of user accounts.

Although “describing what caused the bug can get pretty technical”, the company said they wanted to explain exactly what happened, to stress that “the practical impact of this bug is likely to be minimal”.

Facebook explained that anyone attempting to download archive profile information using the Download Your Information (DYI) tool may have been provided with the email or telephone numbers of people who they shared connections with on the site. The email addresses and telephone numbers of an estimated six million people affected were given out to other users “once or twice”.

“This contact information was provided by other people on Facebook and was not necessarily accurate, but was inadvertently included with the contacts of the person using the DYI tool," they said.

“After review and confirmation of the bug by our security team, we immediately disabled the DYI tool to fix the problem and were able to turn the tool back on the next day once we were satisfied that the problem had been fixed.”

Facebook reassured users that in “almost all cases”, each email address or telephone number was only exposed to one person. “Additionally, no other types of personal or financial information were included and only people on Facebook – not developers or advertisers – have access to the DYI tool.”

They added that they had received no information to suggest the bug was malicious or that any complaints had been made from users who had noticed “anomalous behaviour” or “wrongdoing”.
The problem has since been rectified and Facebook have made regulators in the US, Canada and Europe aware. They are now in the process of notifying those affected.

independent.co.uk 22 June 2013

More breaches of privacy by corporation, irrespective of whether they are intentional or not.

Privacy laws are made by corporations to punish the plebs if any information is made public, and they (the laws) do not work in reverse.

Companies and corporations are allowed to do whatever they choose to do with your private details.

There are literally no penalties that  apply to corporations that breach privacy laws, especially that are instigated by the general populous.

Leaker Edward Snowden charged with espionage by US

THE US Justice Department has charged former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden with espionage and theft of government property in the NSA surveillance case. 


Snowden, believed to be holed up in Hong Kong, has admitted providing information to the news media about two highly classified NSA surveillance programs.

A one-page criminal complaint unsealed today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, says Snowden engaged in unauthorised communication of national defence information and wilful communication of classified communications intelligence information. Both are charges under the Espionage Act.

Snowden also is charged with theft of government property. All three crimes carry a maximum 10-year prison penalty.

It was unclear whether the US had made an extradition request and Hong Kong officials remained tight-lipped today as to whether Snowden had been approached by the law enforcement authorities or was still a free man.

Police commissioner Andy Tsang told reporters it was "inconvenient'' to disclose details of the case.
Tsang insisted any extradition request "has to go through... relevant institutions and also the courts for it to be handled'' in the former British colony.

The federal court in the Eastern District of Virginia where the complaint was filed is headquarters for Snowden's former employer, government contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

The complaint is dated June 14, five days after Snowden's name first surfaced as the leaker of information about the two programs in which the NSA gathered telephone and internet records to ferret out terror plots.

The complaint could become an integral part of a US government effort to have Snowden extradited from Hong Kong, a process that could turn into a prolonged legal battle.

Snowden could contest extradition on grounds of political persecution. In general, the extradition agreement between the US and Hong Kong excepts political offences from the obligation to turn over a person.

The Espionage Act arguably is a political offence. The Obama administration has now used the act in eight criminal cases in an unprecedented effort to stem leaks.

In one of them, Corporal Bradley Manning acknowledged he sent more than 700,000 battlefield reports, diplomatic cables and other materials to the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks. His military trial is under way.

Democratic senator Bill Nelson, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, welcomed the charges against Snowden.

"I've always thought this was a treasonous act," he said in a statement. "I hope Hong Kong's government will take him into custody and extradite him to the US."

Michael di Pretoro, a retired 30-year veteran with the FBI who served from 1990 to 1994 as the legal liaison officer at the American consulate in Hong Kong, said "relations between US and Hong Kong law enforcement personnel are historically quite good".

"In my time, I felt the degree of cooperation was outstanding to the extent that I almost felt I was in an FBI field office," said di Pretoro.

The US and Hong Kong cooperate on law enforcement matters and have a standing agreement on the surrender of fugitives.

However, Snowden's appeal rights could drag out any extradition proceeding.

The success or failure of any extradition proceeding depends on what the suspect is charged with under US law and how it corresponds to Hong Kong law under the treaty.

In order for Hong Kong officials to honour the extradition request, they have to have some applicable statute under their law that corresponds with a violation of US law.

In Iceland, a business executive said a private plane was on standby to transport Snowden from Hong Kong to Iceland, although Iceland's government says it has not received an asylum request from Snowden.

Businessman Olafur Vignir Sigurvinsson said he hds been in contact with someone representing Snowden and has not spoken to the American himself. Private donations are being collected to pay for the flight, he said.

"There are a number of people that are interested in freedom of speech and recognise the importance of knowing who is spying on us," Sigurvinsson said. "We are people that care about privacy."

Disclosure of the criminal complaint came as President Barack Obama held his first meeting with a privacy and civil liberties board as his intelligence chief sought ways to help Americans understand more about sweeping government surveillance efforts exposed by Snowden.

The five members of the little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board met with Obama for an hour in the White House Situation Room, questioning the president on the two NSA programs that have stoked controversy.
 
One program collects billions of US phone records.

The second gathers audio, video, email, photographic and internet search usage of foreign nationals overseas, and probably some Americans in the process, who use major providers such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Yahoo.

theaustralian.com.au 22 June 2013

Another person exposing government fraud, corruption and the REAL extent of cataloging EVERY person on the planet, under the guise of 'terrorism'.

The U.S. government has already 'charged' Snowden with espionage.

In order for one to be charged, on has to be present before a jury (military or civil), which did not occur in this case.

Another example of the oppression of governments, against anyone who dare to expose their fraudulent acivities.

Police power to stop cars under threat

 

A Melbourne magistrate has ruled that police cannot pull over vehicles without a reason in a case that has reignited questions of racial profiling by law enforcement.

Police have long relied on section 59 of the Road Safety Act to stop motorists at random to check licences, registration and for outstanding warrants.

Section 59 states that a driver is required to stop their car, produce their licence for inspection and state their name and address ''if requested or signalled to do so by a member of the police force''.


But the magistrate, Duncan Reynolds, ruled on Thursday that the law did not give police ''an unfettered right to stop or detain a person and seek identification details''.

Magnus Kaba, 21, (pictured) from the Ivory Coast, was a passenger in a car stopped by police in Ascot Vale in April 2012 as part of a random routine intercept. Mr Kaba has been charged with a number of offences including assault after an altercation when one of the police officers asked to search the car.

Mr Reynolds ruled that the evidence of the police officers was inadmissible because it had been unlawful to stop the car without cause. ''Their conduct, in my opinion, unjustifiably breached the right to freedom of movement for Kaba and the driver,'' he said.

Police had also arbitrarily detained the men contrary to the Victorian Charter of Human Rights, he said. The case has been adjourned until July 24.


Mr Kaba's solicitor, Tamar Hopkins, of the Flemington & Kensington Community Legal Centre, said: ''Many people from African backgrounds, for example, have reported to us that they have been subject to routine intercepts by police where there is no underlying basis for the stop.

''As well as interfering with rights, routine intercepts are a practice that is open to abuse.''

Liberty Victoria president Jane Dixon, SC, said the magistrate had interpreted section 59 ''in a new light within the framework of the Charter of Human Rights. It will be interesting to see whether the prosecution appeal this decision.''

If police appeal the ruling in the Supreme Court, the case may set a precedent under Victorian law. A police spokeswoman said: ''This matter is still currently before the courts and Victoria Police will consider its options.''

Mr Reynolds' ruling does not affect the ability of police to conduct random breath tests, which has its own statutory power.

Mr Kaba is one of six young African men who claimed in a separate case that they were subjected to racial profiling by police in Flemington and North Melbourne between 2005 and 2009. Police settled the case for a confidential sum in February this year.

theage.com.au 21 June 2013

There are many laws that the masses are not ware of that give rights and freedoms that the governments and corporations have taken away under a false business oriented legal system.

The laws that the masses are being deprived of are the fundamental law that being common law and Australia's Constitution, which in actual fact is not 'legal' but this information is being kept away from the herd population.

In the election of 2103, the authorities are fully aware of this and are therefore trying to sneak in, certain businesses known as city councils to be recognised as being legal, which currently they are not.

Google maps 13k malicious Australian websites

Approximately 13,000 websites hosted within Australia and scanned by search giant Google in the past year were found to contain malicious software, or malware, that has the potential to infect the computers of visitors to those websites.

 

The figure is contained in an expanded "Transparency Report" released by Google, which now includes a maps of spots around the world where hackers are laying traps or baiting internet users.
In Australia, 7 per cent of the 189,890 local websites Google scanned (13,292 websites) were found to be compromised in the past year.

The Australian web hosting company which had the most compromised customer websites was Aust Domains International, with 2109 websites found to be infected in the past year. NetRegsitry came second, with 1771 compromised sites, and Uberglobal third, with 1212 compromised websites.

"Two of the biggest threats online are malicious software that can take control of your computer, and phishing scams that try to trick you into sharing passwords or other private information," Google engineer Lucas Ballard said in a blog post on Tuesday.

"So today we're launching a new section on our Transparency Report that will shed more light on the sources of malware and phishing attacks."

Information for the new section comes from a Safe Browsing program Google launched in 2006 to warn internet travelers when they were heading for trouble such as bogus bank websites or pages booby-trapped with computer viruses.

"We're currently flagging up to 10,000 sites a day, and because we share this technology with other browsers there are about one billion users we can help keep safe," Ballard said.

The new section added at google.com/transparencyreport/safebrowsing/ included a map that showed that "malware" hotspots include India and Central Europe.

Google's Transparency Report also provides information about government requests around the world for information from the California-based internet giant and demands for removal of content from online properties.

Last week, Google said that it asked a special US court handling national security investigations for permission to publish more open with the public about numbers of requests.

The court filing in Washington came amid a firestorm of protests over revelations that the National Security Agency had accessed vast amounts of data in a surveillance program under the supervision of the secret court.

theage.com.au 26 June 2013

Victoria Police has frequently failed rape victims, report finds

POLICE refused to take statements from four victims of a serial rapist who was later jailed for 10 years after abusing 20 women, a report into Victoria Police's handling of sexual assault claims has found. 
 
The report also found that detectives often blame victims, are poorly trained and are drawn from a "fatally flawed" recruitment process.

The five-year, $1.3 million study, led by Prof Caroline Taylor and 11 Edith Cowan University researchers, was conducted in partnership with Victoria Police and released earlier this year.

Read the complete findings here

The failure in the serial rapist's case came to light in a review of more than a hundred case files. Researchers also interviewed detectives and prosecutors, and surveyed more than 300 victims.

The Policing Just Outcomes report, funded by the Australian Research Council and Victoria Police, found officers did not keep all reports of sexual assaults and frequently dissuaded victims from making formal complaints.

It recommended sweeping changes to sexual assault police training and an overhaul of the recruitment of officers to the Sexual Offences and Child Abuse Investigation teams, which were created in 2009.

Jennifer Philippiadis said she had to fight with police to get them to take seriously accusations against convicted rapist Peter Charles Brennan.

Ms Philippiadis, who owned a massage therapy clinic where Brennan worked but was not one of his victims, said she was disillusioned with police.

"I don't think they realise how hard it is for a woman to actually step up and step forward," she said.
Investigators told researchers they sometimes turned away sex assault victims because they were too overworked to deal with their complaints, and lacked resources. Police also said adult victims reporting sex abuse from their childhood were often treated as "time wasters".

The report found victims often felt angry and powerless after speaking to police. One said she would tell other victims not to report crimes. "The humiliation, trauma and pain of the assault was exacerbated by my dealings with the initial police," she said.

The report recommended "serious and urgent consideration" be given to the resources Victoria Police provide to sexual assault investigators, a review to remove "inept" investigators and an overhaul of training and recruitment.

Detective Supt Rod Journing said there had been an increase in the number of sexual assault and child abuse reports in recent years. "There are indications that more victims are gaining the confidence to come forward to police."

heraldsun.com.au 24 Jun 2013

What the general populous are not aware of is that the police are a CORPORATION and  therefore function as a BUSINESS.

What the police must do is to log 'jobs' that bring in revenue, i.e. easy money for the government, this includes speeding infringement notices, and court cases that 'fine' people.

There is no policy to 'protect' the public, as the police are subservient to government or authorities (including corporations) and NOT the masses.