e-tax 2012 on Mac and Linux FOI Part 2

I have received a reply to my freedom of information request for the source code of the etax client. The letter is dated the 9th of August 2012, but I have been too busy to blog about it because I am a candidate in the upcoming Parramatta council election. I also have not had time to reply to it.

In short it was refused.

It was a two page letter (I will scan it later) but the key paragraph is:
"I consider there is an increased likelihood of hacking if the source code is released and the serious ramifications of this outweigh the public factors in favour of release. I have therefore exempted the source code from release under Section 47E of the FOI Act."

In my appeal I will point out that various open-source software is developed with the source code publicly available and is just as secure as closed source equivalents - for example Apache and Linux. I will point out that Apache is used by the majority of webservers and Linux is widely deployed without any greater number of security issues.

Another key paragraph is:
"Section 11C of the FOI Act requires the office to publish details of information released under the Act on our website and make the information availble to the public unless it would result in the unreasonable release of personal or business information or it would be unreasonable to publish the information. If we were to release the code to you, we would be obliged to release it to the general public also."

While this is true that section 11C subsection 3 does require the release of the material, no mention is made of section 11C subsection 1c and subsection 2 which states that the Information Commissioner may make a determination that the information should not be published to the general public.

So my avenues of approach will be:

• Appeal on the basis that numerous open-source projects are as secure as closed-source projects
• During appeal clarify that request is only for etax client
• I was also referred to a press release stating that a Mac OSX client is planned for 2013 but a cross-platform version was promised in 2007 - how can we be sure a Mac OSX version will be completed
• Consult with the Office of the Information Commisioner to get a publication exception, so there is no chance of source code falling into the hands of "hackers"
• If this FOI request fails, then launch a new FOI which requests a list of Windows function calls which are used during the pre-fill and lodgement processes

I have 30 days in which to appeal for a review by the ATO - so the 8th of September 2012. I have 60 days in which to appeal for a review by the OIC - so the 8th of October.

Why We Don't Need a Gold Standard

The Reserve Bank of Australia prints money in Australia. In the days of the gold standard you would be promised a certain amount of gold for each note - that is no longer the case. Now that the Australian economy is bootstrapped, the value of the Australian dollar is in the transfer of goods and services. i.e. that you can walk into a shop, get in a taxi and the Australian dollar would be accepted.

Think about a barter system. I have apples and want bananas. Ok I find a banana farmer and swap. But what if the banana farmer doesn't want apples, but wants a taxi ride? Well then I need to find a taxi driver that wants apples that will give the banana farmer a ride, so I can get my bananas.

Or we could just use money. Then I give money to the banana farmer, sell my apples to the taxi driver and the taxi driver charges the banana farmer. No requirement for a "gold standard" - the value of the dollar is what you can buy with it.

Using ISO 8601 Date on Ubuntu

Ubuntu ships with GNU's date version 8.13, which has an option --iso-8601. This is a great format for appending to logs. It is internationally unambiguous and english sorting order is the same as chronological order.

Unfortunately this option is not documented in Ubuntu's man page or info page for date.

The example output of "date --iso-8601=seconds" is
 
2012-08-14T20:40:55+1000


Alternatively with GNU date you can use "date +%FT%R:%S%z". 

Of course there is always the POSIX standard "date +%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z"