UPDATE 12.49pm: Attorney General, Mark Dreyfus QC has today spoken for the first time about the NSA's secret spy program and its effect on Australian privacy.

He has ordered an inquiry into the protection of privacy in the digital era.

"As I noted in March this year, further work needs to be done on whether to create a right to sue for breach of privacy," Mr Dreyfus said in a statement.

"I am asking the Australian Law Reform Commission to consider this issue in light of changing conceptions of community privacy and rapid growth in information technology capabilities.

"The Government strongly believes in protecting the privacy of individuals, but this must be balanced against the Australian public's right to freedom of communication and expression."

The Greens are trying to force the Federal Government to get a warrant before accessing Australian's phone and internet data.

Greens senator Scott Ludlam will next week introduce the Telecommunications Interception and Access Act bill, which has been dubbed the "get a warrant bill" to force the government to impose stricter conditions on surveillance, The Guardian reported.

The news comes as the AFP revealed that it accessed phone and internet records 300,000 times between June 2011 and 2012. Last Friday, leaked documents revealed the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been spying on emails, social network activity, listening in on Skype calls and more for the last six years.

While Australian law enforcement are required to get a warrant before they get listen in on telephone calls or read the content of people's emails and other online communications, amendments to the Telecommunications Interception Act (TIA) 2007 allowed law enforcement to access the metadata of communications by simply filling out a form.

Metadata means data about data, and relates to things like email addresses, phone numbers, the time an email was sent or a call was made, billing records (etc.).

Police are required to be reasonably satisfied that the person in question has broken the law before being able to access users' metadata.

Metadata was accessed 293,501 times according to the annual report on the TIA Act 2007.

Government departments such as the ACCC, state and federal police, the RSPCA, the ATO, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence, Health and Ageing, Immigration and Environment among many others all were granted access to metadata over the last year.

Shadow Attorney General, George Brandis said he would "examine carefully" legislation that allowed law enforcement to keep up with the changing nature of communications.

"The public would accept a level of mandatory data retention in relation to telecommunications," he said. "They would accept the logic of a regime being technology-neutral and reaching the internet, but my political judgment is that there is no way the public wouldn't react very strongly against a proposal unless they were absolutely guaranteed that their internet browsing history or use would not be subject of the mandatory retention regime."

Both Senator Ludlam and opposition communications spokesman, Malcolm Turnbull have expressed concern over the revelation that the NSA had been spying on internet users.

"Australians will be very troubled by the allegation in the Guardian and other publications that the US National Security Agency is engaged in large-scale, covert surveillance of private data belonging to non-US citizens held by American companies such as Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Youtube," Mr Turnbull said last week.

After first denying providing the NSA with direct access to its servers, tech giant Google sent a letter to the FBI and US Attorney General asking permission to publish government requests for data.

In a letter published on its official blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said Google had worked "tremendously hard" to earn users trust over the last 15 years.

"We have consistently pushed back on overly broad government requests for our users' data," he wrote.

"We have always made clear that we comply with valid legal requests. And last week, the Director of National Intelligence acknowledged that service providers have received Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) requests."

However he said that reports that Google had given the US government "unfettered access" to users' data are "simply untrue".

"However, government nondisclosure obligations regarding the number of FISA national security requests that Google receives, as well as the number of accounts covered by those requests, fuel that speculation," he wrote.

"We therefore ask you to help make it possible for Google to publish in our Transparency Report aggregate numbers of national security requests, including FISA disclosures - in terms of both the number we receive and their scope. Google's numbers would clearly show that our compliance with these requests falls far short of the claims being made. Google has nothing to hide."

Facebook CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg issued a second denial of the company's alleged involvement in the NSA's secret spy program, "PRISM".

At an annual shareholder meeting, Zuckerberg re-emphasised that "we don't work directly with the NSA or any other program".

"Nor do we proactively give user information to anyone, nor has anyone approached us to do that," he said.

However the language used by both tech giants has been called "doublespeak" deliberately designed to hide the truth.

Tech Crunch journalist Josh Constine wrote that "'direct access' didn't mean no access. Back door didn't mean no door."

He said that tech giants used deliberately misleading language "that disguised what was going on".

Privacy researcher Ashkan Soltani told Mashable that Zuckerberg was using "clever wording".

"I think Zuckerberg is saying 'we're not doing this proactively for our own health, we're under order to do so'," he said.

The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee has slammed the NSA spy program as an "intrusion on basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of a democratic society".

"Over the last two decades, the web has become an integral part of our lives," he told the Financial Times. "A trace of our use of it can reveal very intimate personal things. A store of this information about each person is a huge liability: Whom would you trust to decide when to access it, or even to keep it secure?"

If only Americans were as outraged about the privacy intrusions as security professionals.

About 56 per cent of Americans think that it is "acceptable" for the NSA to track phone call records in terrorism investigations, according to the latest survey to be conducted by the Pew Research Centre and the Washington Post.

Only 41 per cent of Americans though the NSA's actions were unacceptable.

When it comes to reading emails and other online communications, 45 per cent of Americans think that it is acceptable for the government to surveil emails to prevent terrorist attacks, but 52 per cent don't think they should be doing it.

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