This article is more than 7 years old

This article is more than 7 years old

The Greens have called for a major overhaul of laws governing the private information the government is allowed to collect and share with other countries in the wake of the Edward Snowden case.

It is expected to be the only online privacy policy of the 2013 election campaign.

The policy includes laws that would force security agencies to obtain warrants to access telecommunications information and would ensure individuals were notified of data breaches, where personal information was passed on to third parties.

Senator Scott Ludlam said the Snowden case showed how important online privacy protections were for Australians.

He said that during 2012-13 Australian security agencies had requested information on Australian citizens from telephone and online communications records 293,501 times, according to government annual reports.

Ludlam said while the major parties “pretend nothing is happening”, the world was in uproar about the documents Snowden had leaked to the Guardian revealing that the US National Security Agency was using the PRISM program to conduct surveillance through servers including Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and more.

The Greens’ policy seeks to :

• Include security agencies under the Telecommunications Interception and Access Act reporting requirements to improve their accountability.

• Require mandatory data breach notifications by industry and government to allow consumers to know when their data had been released.

• Require IT providers to inform customers of agreements to provide information to governments.

• Improve the Five Eyes agreement - where information is shared between the governments of Australia, the US, Canada, the UK and New Zealand. It should only keep an individual’s information within their home country.

• Close loopholes to bring security agencies within the ambit of the FOI Act.

Ludlam said while there was little chance of getting legislation through parliament without the support of Labor or the Coalition, it was important to raise the issue so Australians were aware of how much of their private information was being collected.

He said people were slowly becoming more aware of the dangers, through the Snowden case and the Sony Playstation Network case, where Australians were among 77 million individuals who had their credit card details stolen by hackers.

“Our data breach notification laws would probably be the easiest step to enforce because it would simply require companies and governments to notify consumers of data breaches like the Sony one,” he said.

Ludlam said both parties had refused to be critical of the power of government agencies and companies to collect private information.

“There is a view that in the Facebook age, privacy is dead but that attitude is scary as there are a number of techniques ranged against citizens,” he said.

“Australians have an idea of ourselves as distrustful of authority and having this streak of disobedience but people are largely complacent.”

Ludlam said the recent detention of Glenn Greenwald‘s partner David Miranda proved that the boundary was being blurred between journalism, whistleblowing and terrorism.