Deep Dive: Australian Surveillance
How Australia is losing its citizen's freedom...
Key Observations
Democracies around the world are struggling to adapt to new information security conditions, but healthy tension between democratic freedoms and security requirements continue.
Australia’s obfuscation of its own processes and priorities regarding surveillance is not placing it in good stead with its peers, particularly when placed in contrast with the United Kingdom’s more transparent approach.
As new surveillance vectors emerge, democratic surveillance organisations are starting to rely on control rather than democratic cornerstones such as education and sharing of information.
One of the foundational principles of democracy is that the rights of the individual are respected: their privacy, their right to vote, their freedoms. And while many democracies around the world are grappling with expanded surveillance laws, in Australia they’ve mostly gone by unopposed. The wider public’s trust in the government’s good intent seems strong, even as government actively works to obfuscate the democratic and legislative process.
In Australia, all these things we assume to be constants are not.