Australian Spy Agency Goes 'Orwellian' with Nation's Privacy Laws

Australia’s spy agency offered to share the collected private data of its citizens with the so-called members of the “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance which, in addition to itself, includes the U.S., U.K., New Zealand, and Canada.

“Obtaining details of personal medical history counts as an invasion of privacy under every human rights treaty… These minutes are further evidence we are slipping into an Orwellian world.” –Geoffrey Robertson, human rights attorney

Though all of these countries have now been implicated in far-reaching surveillance programs that use bulk-collection methods to spy on the telephone and online networks within their borders, Australia’s exposed willingness to share the “medical, legal or religious information” of its citizens with the other nations, especially in the form of “bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata” is the basis of shocking new revelations published in the Australian Guardian on Monday.

Based on “notes from an intelligence conference” that took place in 2008 and leaked by Edward Snowden, the paper reports that the “Australian intelligence agency, then known as the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), indicated it could share bulk material without some of the privacy restraints imposed by other countries, such as Canada.”

From the Guardian:

Geoffrey Robertson, a human rights lawyer with both British and Australian citizenship, said the revelations should be a warning to all of Australians, and citizens worldwide, that the loose legal interpretations shown to exist at the highest levels of these powerful intelligence agencies shows how fragile and open to abuse privacy protections have become in the modern age.

After reviewing the leaked documents, he writes:

If the surveillance agencies have acquired such powers and the ability of lawmakers to oversee the programs is continually hampered by the reverence toward secrecy, he asks, “Who is guarding the guardians?”

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