Australia Spying Law Meets Grassroots Resistance
With invasive surveillance bills looming in the Australian Senate, and Prime Minister Tony Abbott having recently described a proposed bill to legalize spying on Australian citizens as necessary to “make it easier to keep potential terrorists off the streets,” civil rights groups on Monday launched campaigns aimed at protecting privacy rights in the country.
The spying proposal, which will be voted on in Parliament at the end of October, would require telecommunications companies to store personal information about all Australians for up to two years and allow law-enforcement agencies to access it at will.
“Regrettably for some time to come, the delicate balance between freedom and security may have to shift,” Abbott said during a speech in Parliament last month, adding that the “inconvenience” of heightened spying laws were a “small price to pay for saving lives and for maintaining the social fabric of an open, free and multicultural nation.”
Abbott used recent alleged terrorist threats in Australia to frame his warning that “Australians will have to endure more security than we’re used to.”
But many civil rights and privacy watchdogs have spoken out against the risks of expanded surveillance laws such as the one Abbott supports. On Monday, a grassroots campaign called Stop the Spies was launched against the proposal, which the organizers say will “treat every single citizen as a suspect worthy of constant intrusive surveillance.”
“These plans are made on the pretext of fighting terrorism, but they really belong in a police state,” Stop the Spies explains. “Even if this information were only being collected to fight terrorism—and this is far from clear—there remains a frightening risk that it will be misused or fall into the wrong hands.”
Also at issue is the cost of the data retention program, which would fall on the Australian taxpayers; Stop the Spies notes that the country’s second-largest ISP “has estimated the cost of the mandatory data retention proposal at an extra $130 per customer, per year.”
As civil liberties watchdog group Electronic Frontier Foundation notes, the metadata that would be legally collected under the “Orwellian law” includes:
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