Australian Home Affairs Minister Says Government Still Considering Spying On Its Own Citizens

from the be-part-of-the-open-book-experience dept

Nothing's too much to sacrifice for the greater good of Australia. Not even Australians.

A series of police raids on journalists has raised questions about how far the government will go to control what Australian citizens know about their government's activities. Three separate raids targeted leaks that revealed, among other things, possible war crimes committed by Australian soldiers and the government's plans to place its own citizens under surveillance by expanding the power allotted to the Australian Signals Directorate.

The unintentional side effect of government raids designed to discourage further reporting on government secrets is the government is now confirming one of the leaks it targeted.

Peter Dutton has confirmed that a plan to create new powers to spy on Australians – which sparked police raids at the centre of the press freedom row – is still on the table. On Sunday the home affairs minister claimed it was “complete nonsense” that the government supported spying on Australians but, in the next breath, called for a “sensible discussion” about whether the Australian Signals Directorate should gain such powers, which he argued could help disrupt paedophile networks and stop cyber-attacks.

Ah, the old "we're not going to spy on you, unless..." National security takes a backseat to child porn purveyors in Dutton's directly contradictory statements, but it's still the same tired argument. Domestic surveillance makes it easier for the government to catch bad guys and efficiency should always take precedence over rights and liberties.

This followed other statements from Dutton, most of which followed the same pattern: deny the government wants to spy on Australians, followed by reasons why the government should be allowed to spy on Australians.

“We don’t support spying on Australians,” he said. “That was a complete nonsense." “But where you’ve got a paedophile network that operates out of Manila that live-streams children being abused, there might be an ability for an Australian agency to try and shut that server down. “If that same server was operating in Fitzroy, here in Melbourne, then there would be very limited capacity in certain circumstances where it was masked or it was rerouted and … we weren’t able to shut that paedophile network down."

Well, I guess if the ends justify the means… Like others angling for greater surveillance capabilities at the expense of the public's freedoms, Dutton claims Australians are only a "sensible discussion" away from accepting additional government intrusion.

That this "discussion" remains on the table despite Australians' opposition to it just shows how essential it is that Australian journalists remain free to publish leaked documents without fear of government reprisal. Dutton has tipped his hand, though, suggesting neither Australians nor the country's journalists will be as free in the future. He has refused to condemn the raids on journalists and is openly pitching a surveillance program whose unauthorized publication was greeted with a show of force.

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Filed Under: australia, peter dutton, privacy, spying, surveillance