The Austrian parliament will vote next month on whether to create 10 new surveillance agencies with wide-ranging powers to spy on Austrian citizens, EDRi reports. As well as the Federal Agency for State Protection and Counter Terrorism, which is currently a police department but would be upgraded to a surveillance agency under the proposed State Protection Act, additional agencies will be created for each of Austria's nine provinces, with the same powers, giving local politicians their own personal intelligence service.

A petition against the new law spells out some of the powers the 10 agencies would be granted. For example, they will be allowed to spy on any Austrian citizen without needing a warrant from a judge. They can carry out surveillance purely to assess whether there is a risk of an "attack on the constitution": only a "justified suspicion" of danger is required. Around 100 crimes are defined as an "attack endangering the constitution," 40 of them if they are committed with "religious or ideological motives."

The new spy agencies will have the power to access data from all authorities and all companies, again without needing a warrant signed by a judge. There is almost no oversight: the only control will be a special officer located in the Austrian Interior Ministry, but there are grounds for denying even this person access to files. Although the new intelligence agencies will be allowed to store data on individuals for five years, records of who accesses that information will be kept for only three years.

The new agencies can apply their powers very widely. The petition site claims that whistleblowers and even those protesting against things like animal cruelty could be targeted using the new powers. Also troubling is that the proposed law would allow the use of paid informers, a controversial technique for gathering information.

The legislation bringing in this huge extension of domestic surveillance was drafted in the wake of terrorist attacks in Paris and Copenhagen earlier this year. EDRi says that during the consultation period, 18 major institutions "including associations of judges, lawyers, doctors, Internet providers, the evangelic and catholic church, the federal association or worker unions, the federal economic chamber, the constitutional service of the Federal Chancellor, the federal ombudsman, Amnesty International and the Austrian Working Group on Data Retention," all heavily criticised the draft law.

The vote on the law is scheduled to take place between the 13 and 15 October. If passed, it will come into force 1 July 2016. At the time of writing, the petition against the law has around 11,500 signatures. It calls for the current proposals to be dropped completely, and a new law "drafted in an open dialogue with stakeholders and evaluated very closely in terms of effectiveness and with respect for fundamental rights." It's possible that public outrage could push the Austrian government to make some changes to the incoming law, but it's also highly likely that the law will eventually pass in some form or another.