13 COMMENTS

  1. Politicians today haven’t been voted in; they’re a consequence of voting against. Australians punish politicians at the polls.

    The populists win, everyone else loses. This bill never had a chance, but then I tend to believe this was more to make a point, than to legislate change.

    MSM are only interested in intrigue and conflict; everything else is ignored.

  2. “Requiring a warrant to conduct initial investigations to identify suspects, or to exclude innocent persons, through the use of telecommunications data would be much more onerous and more time consuming, delaying agencies from obtaining warrants to access telecommunications content for an investigation. Under the Bill a warrant would be needed to identify telecommunications data that would then be used to obtain a warrant to access the content of the communications.”

    If I am reading that right, what they’re saying is they want to be able to access all the data without a warrant to prove that a criminal activity has occurred, and then use that information to get a warrant to make it admissible in court? Sound about right?

    • Yep.

      Effectively, they want to data mine to find criminal behaviour, not gather “evidence” to prove a criminal offence was committed…

      Welcome to the world of Minority Report.

  3. What it needs is to be rejected in court. I could be wrong but I’m pretty sure it’s well established that you can’t have your private stuff examined without a warrant no matter what some politician says.

    • IANAL, but I think it’d have to be in the constitution to be able to beat legislation.

  4. Why is it our Opposition only opposes the good stuff, and backs crap like this to the hilt :/

    Until 51% of Australians learn to vote outside what “mum and dad” did, we’ll be consigned to this two party BS…

    • Don’t blame Mum and Dad, they were the ones who marhed in the streets. Except for a select minority the current younger generation wouldn’t know a political policy from their arse, and would be too busy sexting that to their equally gnat like attention span possessing friends…

  5. Told you it would be voted down.

    Despite publicly being concerned about citizens privacy, we see typical, “protect the establishment” type of behavior from both sides of Government.

    Can we have a revolution or something?

  6. Boo hoo. It would make things take longer? It will be more onerous? It will take more effort? F*#@ing GOOD! There should be some effort involved in obtaining private communications data. There should be oversight and only court granted authorisation. To do anything else is to thumb your nose at the very idea of privacy. What’s the point in having a privacy act if you then fundamentally undermine it by providing full access to all your private communications to anyone in law enforcement who is even casually interested? It makes a mockery of the very concept of privacy.

    The problem is government and law enforcement are coming at this from the position they have today, where all this information is at their fingertips with no checks or balances. What needs to be done is to redesign the law from the ground up with reasonable protections for citizens. Protecting the privacy of conversations, telephone calls, emails and other forms of private communication taking place between individuals in a private setting is such an obviously fundamental right in a democracy it is simply insane that we find ourselves in this situation. Globally.

    Government would have us believe we need these laws to protect us from terrorists and other criminals. Personally I see far more ‘threat’ and danger to our society from government and law enforcement as long as this system of casual and endemic abuse of our privacy is in place.

    • +1. I too find the argument flawed. Just because it gets the job done quickly doesn’t mean it is good and just. If they continue their logic that due process isn’t important and only the speed at which results are achieved with no regard for the consequences, why not just remove trials? But innocent people might get put in prison from time to time you say? These are matters of national security and we can trust our law enforcement and intellegence agencies to not fuck it up, they are impervious to making mistakes or being corrupt. Criminals would be put in jail at records speeds with maxium efficency and we can all sleep safe at night.

  7. Whose to say the USA isn’t also trawling the data for corporate data, trade secrets, quotes on large infrastructure projects etc?

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