The error message received by Glenn when he tried to complete the census on his phone.
Digital civil liberties advocate Electronic Frontiers Australia said that respondents to the census should be able to opt in to having personally identifiable data retained, as had been the case with previous censuses.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who apparently managed to access the census site while it was still working, expressed regret for the inconvenience, but said the site had temporarily had to come down “out of an abundance of caution”.
Adrian Wood who runs an global internet security business in northern NSW has questioned whether there were actual “attacks” on the system or whether the ABS servers were just not able to cope with the volume of people trying to log on all at once.
“People concerned with having their names linked to all of the private data collected by the census should request paper forms and leave the name fields blank to protest and register their disgust”.
The Bureau didn’t do itself any favours last night by leaving millions of Australians hanging. “It is not just you”.
“At 7:45pm the ABS made the decision to shut down the online form to protect the system from further incidents”, McCormack said.
That leaves 3,000,000 to complete it on Census night.
Did the Census website leave you hanging last night?
He also says the ABS does not have the authority to collect peoples’ names in the 2016 census on a compulsory basis, despite what it has been telling the public.
“So I can’t really see what the big deal is; I think sometimes it’s much ado about nothing, really”.
Ms Johnston, who now works as a privacy consultant, argued that the use of the linkage keys would allow the government to collate information on individuals they would likely refuse to provide if they were asked to do so.
Trucking advocate Rod Hannifey is calling for transport workers to say if they are in a rest stop on the night.
The official Census Twitter account is alternating between telling everyone that everything is fine, and pointing out the website is down. “That was the aspect in the protection system that didn’t operate fully”, he said.
“We know that there are babies born approximately every one minute and 45 seconds so they’re certainly babies born around midnight”, 2016 census program head Duncan Young said.
“The system is operating smoothly and as expected”.
Most of the traffic was coming from the United States but that was not unusual for denial of service attacks, he said.
The Census Inquiry Service was deluged with calls on Tuesday evening, with Census advising anyone with issues to try calling back after August 10.
The statistics bureau shut down the site out of an “abundance of caution” to ensure the data already submitted by some 2 million Australians couldn’t be compromised, Treasurer Scott Morrison said Wednesday at a news conference with Turnbull.
The Australian census website was shut down by what authorities said was a series of deliberate attacks from overseas hackers.
