Public sector tech veteran Mark Sawade will take over as Chief Information Officer and Chief Security Officer of the Australian Taxation Office.
Australian Taxation Office appoints new tech chief, as it looks to use AI for fraud detection
Promoters of R&D tax incentive rort whacked with $13.6m fine
Good piece about brutalism today (NYT)
On November 13, a researcher in the Parliamentary Library, Geoff Wade, lodged defamation proceedings against MWM and the author of this story.
On January 30, we attended a case management hearing before Justice Nicholas Owens of the Federal Court of Australia.
We had already made a number of efforts to address Geoff Wade’s concerns with his lawyers Alisa Taylor and Courtney Noble of Canberra law firm MV Law. These were ignored. We were instructed by Justice Owens to prepare a defence.
It was filed yesterday evening (and published below).
We believe the action is vexatious and without merit. Whether the Applicant has been defamed or not is for the Court to decide.
In order to fund the case, we undertook a crowdfunding campaign and surpassed the target of $40k in 24 hours then closed the offer at $48,666. We are deeply appreciative of the community support!
It is important that we are transparent. We pledged to make public the Wade claim (it is published here) and legal correspondence in the matter, including our Defence.
The Defence has just been filed by Sharangan Maheswaran, Mark Davis and Jack Vaughan of XD Law and Advocacy. We publish it below so that supporters and the public can judge for themselves as to the merits of the claim and the defence.
MWM defamation case update – defence filed, Senate row
David Shoebridge grills Parliament Services on China tweeter
It’s Time for Europe to Do the Unthinkable Foreign Policy
For the March 3, 2025, cover, Barry Blitt depicts Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and James Madison ejected from their offices—a startling representation of the chaos and mass layoffs of federal workers that have engulfed America since Donald J. Trump took office for the second time. “We should all be thankful the Founding Fathers never had to deal with the likes of Elon Musk and his doge ilk,” Blitt remarked, “or else there would be no country to be taken away from us now.”
Is Protest Dead? Foreign Policy
Kash Patel overrules Elon Musk as new FBI boss throws down gauntlet to DOGE Daily Mail
Musk Is Lying About Waste and Fraud in Social Security to Have an Excuse to Kill It
Musk wants to cut your Social Security benefits and then have Congress use the savings to give himself a gigantic tax cut.
Your boss is watching: MIT Technology Review [unpaywalled]: “…A New York Times investigation in 2022 found that eight of the 10 largest private companies in the US track individual worker productivity metrics, many in real time. Specialized software can now measure and log workers’ online activities, physical location, and even behaviors like which keys they tap and what tone they use in their written communications—and many workers aren’t even aware that this is happening. What’s more, required work apps on personal devices may have access to more than just work—and as we may know from our private lives, most technology can become surveillance technology if the wrong people have access to the data. While there are some laws in this area, those that protect privacy for workers are fewer and patchier than those applying to consumers.
Meanwhile, it’s predicted that the global market for employee monitoring software will reach $4.5 billion by 2026, with North America claiming the dominant share. AI advances are rapidly speeding up the process of training robots, and helping them do new tasks almost instantly. Working today—whether in an office, a warehouse, or your car—can mean constant electronic surveillance with little transparency, and potentially with livelihood-ending consequences if your productivity flags. What matters even more than the effects of this ubiquitous monitoring on privacy may be how all that data is shifting the relationships between workers and managers, companies and their workforce.
Managers and management consultants are using worker data, individually and in the aggregate, to create black-box algorithms that determine hiring and firing, promotion and “deactivation.” And this is laying the groundwork for the automation of tasks and even whole categories of labor on an endless escalator to optimized productivity. Some human workers are already struggling to keep up with robotic ideals. We are in the midst of a shift in work and workplace relationships as significant as the Second Industrial Revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And new policies and protections may be necessary to correct the balance of power…In 2024, a report from a Senate committee led by Bernie Sanders, based on an 18-month investigation of Amazon’s warehouse practices, found that the company had been setting the pace of work in those facilities with black-box algorithms, presumably calibrated with data collected by monitoring employees.
(In California, because of a 2021 bill, Amazon is required to at least reveal the quotas and standards workers are expected to comply with; elsewhere the bar can remain a mystery to the very people struggling to meet it.) The report also found that in each of the previous seven years, Amazon workers had been almost twice as likely to be injured as other warehouse workers, with injuries ranging from concussions to torn rotator cuffs to long-term back pain…”
