surveillance

surveillance - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

  • Abbott contradicts industry on data retention

    Prime Minister Tony Abbott this morning contradicted representatives of the telecommunications and Internet service provider industries, saying that metadata related to individuals' Internet usage is already collected by ISPs.

  • EFA hits out at government's data retention plans

    Civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) has voiced fears that the government is playing up concerns about terrorism to justify increases to its surveillance powers through a mandatory date retention scheme.

  • Great privacy essay: Fourth Amendment Doctrine in the Era of Total Surveillance

    When you signed up with your ISP, or with a wireless carrier for mobile devices, if you gave it any thought at all when you signed your name on the contract, you likely didn't expect your activities to be a secret, or to be anonymous, but how about at least some degree of private? Is that reasonable? No, as the law currently suggests that as a subscriber, you "volunteer" your personal information to be shared with third-parties. Perhaps not the content of your communications, but the transactional information that tells things like times, places, phone numbers, or addresses; transactional data that paints a very clear picture of your life and for which no warrant is required.

  • Data retention: Industry reiterates warning on costs

    "You're going to the shops to get a litre of milk anyway, so it's no big deal to bring me the whole supermarket" — that's how iiNet's chief regulatory officer, Steve Dalby, today described government suggestions a mandatory data retention scheme would not impose significant burdens on telecommunications carriers.

  • ASIO head says government is no Big Brother

    ASIO is not carrying out mass surveillance of average citizens and the agency is subject to an appropriate level of oversight, according to the organisation's head David Taylor Irvine, director-general of security.

  • Data retention 'under active consideration': Brandis

    Attorney-General George Brandis has confirmed that the government is still mulling introducing mandatory data retention for telcos, but it will not be included in the first tranche of national security-related legislation being introduced in parliament today.

  • EFA takes wait-and-see approach to ASIO changes

    Online civil liberties group Electronic Frontiers Australia will wait until Senator George Brandis unveils his raft of changes to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Act 1979 before passing judgement on them, but EFA executive officer Jon Lawrence says he is hopeful that the Attorney-General's proposals will not be "too extreme".

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