Tag: australia

Sydney man becomes first jailed under Nazi salute laws

A Sydney man has been jailed for performing a Nazi salute and publishing offensive online posts under new mandatory minimum sentencing laws.

Nathan Ballesty was arrested in December after the Australian Federal Police (AFP) launched an investigation into a post in which he called for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to be kidnapped.

After searching his home on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, authorities found Nazi paraphernalia, including a uniform and a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and seized his electronic devices.

Among the content found on his devices were violent messages aimed at Mr Albanese and Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke, and a recording of a video call in which he performed a Nazi salute.

Ballesty pleaded guilty to performing a Nazi salute, as well as six counts of using a carriage service to menace, harass or offend and one count of contravening a police order after he refused to provide investigators with his device passwords for weeks.

On Friday, he was sentenced to three years’ imprisonment — including a non-parole period of 18 months — backdated to January, when he was first remanded into custody.

The sentence includes a mandatory minimum of 12 months’ imprisonment for performing a Nazi salute, making Ballesty the first person to be sentenced under the laws introduced in February 2025.

He will be eligible for parole in May 2027.

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OpenAI Claims Rogue AI Agent Hacked Australian Government Site, Prime Minister Warns of ‘Legal Consequences’

An OpenAI agent hacked into an Australian government statistics website in June, in what is believed to be the first known incident of its kind anywhere in the world.

BBC News reports that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the agent “infiltrated” the Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal, a site holding “non-sensitive” data and statistics from Medicare, Australia’s universal healthcare scheme. He raised the matter directly with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during a “very frank discussion” in New York, telling reporters the company had taken “too long” to disclose the breach and warning there would be “legal consequences”.

OpenAI said it only discovered the incident in August, while reviewing “misaligned model activity” internally. On September 10, the company emailed a general inbox belonging to an Australian government agency. Five days later, Services Australia escalated the email to Australia’s cybersecurity center. A government minister was notified, and the prime minister was alerted soon after.

Speaking in New York, Albanese said he had conveyed “Australia’s extreme concern about this incident” to Altman. He described his “disappointment” over “the nature of the way” OpenAI disclosed the breach and the months it took to come forward. According to Albanese, Altman acknowledged there were “issues with protocols” within the company.

A forensic investigation led by Australia’s cybersecurity agency is now under way to determine whether other government systems were compromised, and whether police need to get involved. Albanese said there “will obviously be legal consequences” depending on what the probe finds. The breach itself involved “public and non-public files” on the Medicare portal. Three other government bodies may also have been affected: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, and the Victorian Department of Health.

“No personal information is believed to have been accessed at this stage, but investigations are ongoing,” Albanese said. He added: “Nonetheless this situation is obviously unacceptable.”

OpenAI, in its own statement, said it had “identified activity involving several Australian government websites and services as our models attempted to look up answers, and available statistics for questions about Australia during an internal evaluation.” The company said, “In the course of that, our models took actions we did not intend.”

Dr Hammond Pearce, a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales’ Institute for Cyber Security, told the BBC the incident was significant precisely because it was the first of its kind. “I expect that these kinds of attacks will keep occurring,” he said.

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US Shipment Of F-35s Goes MIA In Shocking Detour To Hong Kong

Lawmakers and the Trump administration are investigating the odd disappearance of a U.S.-bound shipment of F-35 fighter jet components from Australia, which were originally meant to be repaired on U.S. soil, according to new reporting by Politico.

The report, published Friday and citing three anonymous sources, noted that an intermediary was transporting the equipment on behalf of American defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin through the Pacific Ocean before it was diverted to Hong Kong.

The three unnamed sources suggested that neither the Pentagon nor Lockheed Martin knows why the shipment ended up in Hong Kong.

The current whereabouts of the components remain unknown, triggering concerns over whether China may have gotten its hands on them.

China, which has tightened its control of Hong Kong in recent years, has long sought to gather intelligence on the F-35 program.

The missing components were part of the F-35 Lightning II, which Lockheed Martin describes on its website as the “most lethal, survivable, and connected fighter aircraft” for America and its allies.

Specifically, among the missing items is an F-35 canopy, a major part of the fighter jet that contains sensitive technology, according to Politico.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has called the F-35 the “most costly weapon system” in the U.S. military, and the Pentagon has already spent between $200 billion and $250 billion on the program, according to estimates.

The State Department and the Pentagon reportedly briefed lawmakers on the matter in June, the report added.

In a statement, the Pentagon office responsible for the F-35 jets said it was “aware of a shipment issue of unserviceable F-35 Lightning II components.”

The military office said an investigation is underway to retrieve the missing components and determine what happened.

Headline USA reached out to the office for further clarification but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Lockheed Martin, for its part, declined to provide information on the matter, citing security reasons, Politico noted.

“Our teams handle every shipment with the utmost diligence and safeguards to ensure the integrity of the F-35 program and the security of our allied partners,” the company said.

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Australia Wants to Remake the Internet in the Name of “Safety”

The Australian government has published its proposed Digital Duty of Care legislation, a plan that it says will give people more control over their social media feeds, but which opponents fear is a way to introduce more online censorship.

The exposure draft of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026 was published on September 8 for consultation, and it is not yet law. The deadline for submissions is noon on September 22, and Communications Minister Anika Wells said the plan is to formally introduce the bill to Parliament in October.

We obtained a copy of the draft for you here.

In the words of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “This is not about giving government control, it is about giving people control.”

And while the proposal is often referred to as My Feed, My Way, it is not about banning algorithms, but giving new and existing users a choice between feeds based on recommendations, and one that shows posts from accounts they follow.

But beneath this choice, there is a broader change to the Online Safety Act 2021 that would be introduced by the Digital Duty of Care bill, and that is to impose a duty on those behind online services to ensure a safe online environment as far as reasonably practicable.

This duty would apply to a wide range of services, including social media, messaging, games, hosting, search, app stores, internet providers, AI services enabling generated material to be shared through covered services, as well as certain equipment providers.

The minister in charge would be able to exempt services that are low-risk or minimally used. The proposal is designed to protect adults from what is described as seriously harmful material and conduct, while under-18s would have additional protection against harmful content and design features.

The list of harmful content and conduct that the draft seeks to protect adults from includes child sexual abuse, threats of violence, encouragement of self-harm, and support for listed terrorist organizations.

For children, the list includes pornography, encouragement of disordered eating, hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality, glorification of crime, dangerous stunts, abuse and bullying.

However, the minister would have the power to add more categories of harmful material or conduct by issuing a legislative instrument.

Wells must first seek and consider advice from eSafety, and the instrument can be disallowed by Parliament.

The draft bill also targets features that the government considers to have negative behavioral impacts, such as recommendation systems, endless feeds, and engagement-feedback tools, as well as time-limited content. Social media services would be required to stop these features for children under 16.

The proposal also includes a system of risk assessment that online services would have to conduct at least once a year, and keep for six years. These assessments would have to be provided to the eSafety commissioner on request.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who has a history of censorship demands, would be in charge of enforcing the scheme, which would bring maximum company penalties of A$109.2 million.

The draft bill does contain some safeguards, such as the definition of reasonably practicable, which takes into account the risk, available measures, cost, and the potential for a measure to have a disproportionate effect on privacy.

The duty of care does not extend to lawful communications occurring in private solely between consenting adults, the draft bill states.

Opposition leader Angus Taylor on September 6 said he feared the proposal was “an attempt by the government to censor social media,” while One Nation leader Pauline Hanson said that Australia should be moving away from government censorship, not “building the Orwellian machinery for it.”

The Greens, on the other hand, have supported the idea of making sure users have a choice when it comes to feeds, but they want to make sure that users have to opt in to have their feeds curated by algorithms.

White House spokesman Kush Desai reacted by saying that President Trump “has unequivocally warned trading partners against imposing digital services taxes, fines, and other forms of extortion on America’s leading technology sector.”

Desai added that “the administration remains committed to raising these issues with our trading partners.”

Communications Minister Anika Wells sought to downplay the significance of the White House statement, telling News24 that the US was responding to broader questions that also included Australia’s tax arrangements, and not only the Digital Duty of Care proposal.

“We’re a sovereign nation, we have the right to defend Australian parents and kids and we’ll do that,” Wells said.

The government’s proposal has been portrayed as giving users a choice between personalized recommendation feeds and those that show posts from accounts they follow.

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Australia: Officials Ask Parliament to Restrict Social Media Clips of Public Hearing Evidence

Just when you thought Australia’s steamrolling toward censorship couldn’t get any worse, the heads of Australian government departments want new limits on how members of parliament share recordings of officials testifying at public parliamentary hearings.

A new attempt to this end was made last week by the Secretaries Board, made up of the heads of Australia’s government departments. The board is currently chaired by Steven Kennedy, secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, which advises the prime minister and coordinates policy across the government.

The proposal was contained in a submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards.

The board is unhappy that politicians are using excerpts of the footage from these hearings, often to criticize the officials, and sometimes to ridicule them, by editing the clips and adding captions to highlight certain parts of the testimony.

Comments left on social media under these posts are also a major concern for the board, as they can be “highly offensive” – and sometimes even defamatory.

As examples, the board cites personal attacks on officials’ physical appearance (especially if they are women), their integrity, as well as comparisons to “Nazis, pedophiles, and other criminal offenders.”

Some of the “highlights” of the comments mentioned in the submission include “despicable,” “filth,” “political puppet,” “bigot,” “pig,” “KKK member,” “parasite,” “shill,” “criminal,” “fraud,” “clown,” and “lying corrupt grub.”

The board wants parliament to come up with “guidance” on how to use these recordings on social media, and lists several ways to do it, such as preventing “potentially harmful” use of committee evidence, and requiring that a link to the full hearing or transcript is provided whenever an extract of an official’s testimony is posted.

Another idea is to have MPs disable comments on social media when they post these clips, and make sure that the full, unedited version of the hearing, or the transcript, is made available instead of extracts.

Reporting on the submission described full hearings and transcripts as the preferred approach, with fallback restrictions on editing, captions and posts targeting individual officials.

The submission said that officials appearing at these public hearings “have not consented to a subsequent use of their image, or its use by parliamentarians and their political parties for party-political purposes.”

And the board also complained of “the increasing use of excerpts from committee proceedings on social media, particularly where material is presented without context and exposes officials to ridicule, hostility or abuse.”

The proposal was rejected by Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May, who said that bureaucrats should not be allowed to decide how parliamentarians do their job, and that the proposed restrictions would be an attempt to “take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny.”

“Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised,” Hodgins-May said. “Restricting what parliamentarians can post from public proceedings is not the answer. This looks like an attempt to take the teeth out of parliamentary scrutiny. Frankly, if this scrutiny wasn’t having an impact, they wouldn’t be so worried about it.”

But the board’s proposal is not the first of its kind. In fact, the previous week, Celia Perkins, deputy secretary of Australia’s Department of Defence, made a similar request to a parliamentary hearing, asking that the committee prevent MPs from sharing video and audio of officials appearing at public hearings on social media.

Perkins said that public servants giving evidence “do not consent to the reposting of our evidence to social media sites or the reproduction of our likenesses for the purposes outside the framework of the parliament and the transparent public proceedings of this committee.”

However, the Senate committee rejected the request on the advice of the Senate clerk.

Professor Luke Beck from the Monash University Law School, who specializes in constitutional law, believes that the latest proposal may be unconstitutional because it would likely violate the implied freedom of political communication in the Australian Constitution by “directly and expressly” burdening political communication.

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49ers’ Dre Greenlaw Asks if Antarctica is a ‘Lie’ During Team’s Australia Trip

Trips to far-away lands can expand one’s horizons – literally and figuratively. The 49ers’ trip to Australia seems to have expanded linebacker Dre Greenlaw’s mind in an unexpected way.

On Tuesday morning, reporters asked Greenlaw whether he had any questions for Australians. His answer did not disappoint.

“Do you have any questions you’d want to ask Australians?” asked ESPN’s Nick Wagoner.

“I mean, how far are we from Antarctica? That’s what I got. We’re right on top of it, huh? Does it snow probably pretty bad here? So, Antarctica, is it a lie?”

Reporters confirmed the continent’s existence, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Greenlaw.

“Y’all been there before?” he asked.

After receiving this challenge, the reporter said he had never been to Antarctica, which sent Greenlaw right into his well-prepared trap.

“Never been there. So how do you know if it’s cold or not?”

Of course, the reporters could have asked Greenlaw why a player with such curiosities and a high bar for proof had not invested any of the $7.5 million he signed for this year in making the trip to the mysterious continent to see it for himself.

After Tuesday’s exchange, perhaps he will.

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Australian Social Media Ban Flops Badly, as Teens Are Returning to TikTok ‘En Masse’

Albanese’s tricks have misfired.

There’s perhaps no more pristine example of a Globalist leader than Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese: the guy checks all the boxes.

He is obsessed with Net-zero and Paris-aligned climate targets, of course.

During the COVID crisis, we saw him angling to cede health-policy control to an unelected international body – and in fact, he seems to want to give up sovereignty altogether in favor of a ‘UN-centric multilateralism’.

Albanese has maintained a sustained high level of migration, and is big on ‘identity politics’.

And then, we come to his online-control ideas, which, of course, center around the nefarious ‘Digital-ID’, and have, as a first experiment, his ‘groundbreaking’ under-16 social-media ban.

We all understand Albanese’s online plans to be nothing but attempts at back-door surveillance, and a revival of the rejected and dropped ‘misinformation laws’.

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200,000 Fake AI ‘Victims’ Deployed To Scam-Bait Online Fraudsters

Australian tech firm Apate deploys a vast array of AI-bot characters worldwide that play the role of gullible scam victims to waste millions of hours of con artists’ time each month.

Hilariously, one of the company’s monthly performance metrics is how many times frustrated scammers swear at the idiot ‘victims’ who are playing dumb and stringing them along.

“I think we’re the only company in the world that is actually keeping as part of their KPIs the number of F-words that scammers are dropping at them,” Apate founder Dali Kaafar tells Magazine with a chuckle. 

The company has a stable of almost 200,000 AI characters that are able to hold convincing phone conversations and to chat on social media and messaging platforms.

”I can tell you that we’re basically servicing, as we call them, hundreds of thousands of calls a day, and pretty much hundreds of thousands of conversations on the other channels,” he says. 

Every hour of a con artist’s time they waste is another hour they’re not scamming a member of the public. In the six weeks up to the end of 2025, Apate’s bots engaged in 600,000 scam calls for a single telco called TPG in Australia. 

“Essentially, we wasted more than five hundred days of scammers’ time,” he explains. “That roughly equates to somewhere around thirteen million dollars being saved.”

The bots’ other goal is to elicit actionable intelligence for banks and telcos to combat scam rings across Australia, Asia, Africa and the UK and Europe.

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X Wins Australian Case Over Private Message Scanning Rule

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wrote a rule requiring online services to scan what their users send each other. Not to act on reports, but to run detection systems across private messages before anyone has complained, hunting child sexual abuse and pro-terror material. Top censor, Julie Inman Grant, wrote it herself, under powers the Online Safety Act hands her, and breaching it carries penalties of up to $49.5 million.

Then she took the view that it covered social media platforms as well, because they let users send each other messages.

On August 12, the Federal Court told her it does not. The Relevant Electronic Services Standard “does not apply” to X, Justice Elizabeth Raper held, ruling for the platform in a case it brought in May 2025. It “would be rather perverse for a social media service…not to enable messaging or chat between end users,” X’s barrister had argued — on eSafety’s reading, having a DM function was enough to pull a platform into a rulebook written for something else.

The distinction is important because of who writes what. Social media services in Australia are covered by a code developed with the industry, X included. The RES Standard is not a negotiated code. It is an instrument the Commissioner drafts and enforces herself. The standard says it applies “to the exclusion of any industry code” — so reading it to cover social media would have let the instrument she controls displace the one she negotiated.

Raper said so directly. “I accept X Corp’s characterisation of the facts that the RES Standard has been made by the commissioner…as a standard applicable to participants in a different section of the online industry, that are specified…as ‘providers of relevant electronic services’,” she wrote.

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X Warns Australia’s Censor Wants Reach Beyond Australia

X has told the Australian Senate committee that a proposal expanding the powers of the nation’s top censor would let the regulator demand documents from people outside of Australia. The only connection that would be required for X to have to hand over documents to Australia’s eSafety Commissioner is that the person is “affiliated” with a platform.

The submission, published Tuesday, targets the Online Safety Amendment (Strengthening Enforcement for the Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2026. The bill cleared the House of Representatives on July 1 and hit the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee on the same day. That committee will report on August 25.

The changes would “compel any person outside Australia…to provide information and documents merely because they are ‘affiliated’ with a company,” X said in a filing.

X described that as being “in clear conflict” with international legal principles, warning that the amendment “raises potential for a severe impact on international comity.”

X said the plans gave no “due regard to procedural fairness, privacy, the broader impacts on online services, and Australia’s digital economy.”

A company that fails to take “reasonable” steps to keep under-16s off its platform currently faces a penalty of up to A$49.5 million or 30,000 penalty units. The bill doubles that to A$99 million, around US$69 million, for systematic breaches.

Under the bill, eSafety could also compel the records from the third-party digital ID vendors that platforms hire, as well as from app store operators.

Those vendors hold face scans, ID document images, and inference data drawn from Australians who handed over sensitive data in order to stay on the platform after Australia banned social media for under 16s.

The bill would give the government regulator a legal route into all of that data that it recently mandated to be collected.

eSafety complained to the panel that its current authority to compel documents lags behind that of other regulators and that it’s left to depend on “representations from providers about their own compliance.”

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