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How Australia is spying on its own

By Murray Hunter - posted Tuesday, 19 November 2013


Faceless bureaucrats are the ones defining who were the enemies of the state. There appears to be a general inability to discriminate between healthy dissent in a political democracy and subversion.

Where no tangible threats existed to national security, lesser ones were perceived to be grave threats or even invented - remember "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

The rise of surveillance should not be understood as purely a technological development. It should be seen as a broader economic, social, and political paradigm shift within society where the balance of power has shifted away from the people and towards the state. There also appears to be a shift of power away from executive government towards an unelected bureaucracy. What makes this even more perplexing is that we don't even know who these people really are.

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The Sydney Morning Herald just ran a story that intelligence data was passed on to assist the mining giant BHP. Moreover, the human rights website WEBMOBILIZE alleges in a recent article that the Australian security apparatus is being used to steal intellectual property from companies and passing it over illegally to competitors. Some of the organizations that have been alleged to receive unlawfully gained IP include the University of Melbourne, Ageis Media, Telstra, Sensis, Deakin University, Belgravia Health and Business Group, Channel Nine, Nine Entertainment, Nine MSN, Corporate health management, Fairfax media, the Herald Sun, The Guardian, Nintendo, and the Australian Labor Party (ALP)and Liberal National Party (LNP).

There has been little in the way of public debate, nor much concern shown by the major political parties.

The powers to detain anyone under section 34D of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Act 1979 for up to seven days without the right to reveal their detention, resembles the mechanisms of a police state.

With an annual growth rate of more than 20% and budget of over $4 Billion p.a., ASIO has a new $500 Million building in Canberra and a secret data storage facility is being built at the HMAS Harman Naval Base, near Canberra, where details are exempt from public account committees. When other government programs are being cut, the deep philosophical question is why we should increase funding for surveillance of the nation's citizens.

Mass surveillance doesn't seem to have much to do with terrorism as it has to do with keeping check on what people are doing. It seems to be more of an intimidating compliance mechanism, aimed at protecting public revenue, preventing and detecting crime, tax evasion, and fraud.

The rapid increase in staff within ASIO from 618 in 2000 to 1860 in 2010 has meant that the organization now primarily relies upon young and inexperienced analysts in their 20s and 30s. This means that Australia is at the mercy of a "Gen Y" culture that has grown up connected to the cyber world where a sense of privacy is very different to generation before them. Newly uncovered evidence suggests that ASIO has gone to great lengths to spy on people who have broken no laws.

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Through Australia's history Australian Security Agencies have blundered in the assessments they have made on many issues. The 2004 Flood report commenting on the "failure of intelligence" on Iraq stated that these weaknesses included "a failure to rigorously challenge preconceptions", and the absence of a "consistent and rigorous culture of challenge to and engagement with intelligence reports". Flood found an inconsistency in assessments and very shallow analytical abilities within the security agencies he examined. On many occasions, particularly during the Howard years, intelligence analysis was 'bastardized" by political agenda. Those who criticized the political agenda ran the risk of being reframed from dissidents and classed as deviants who come under security surveillance.

The question here, can government with a long history of cover-ups be trusted?

The dream of a fair, just, and equitable Australian society where sovereignty is in the hands of its citizens may be one of the greatest myths. Australia's surveillance on its own has eaten into and taken away many of the rights and liberties of Australians, turning society into one of mistrust.

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About the Author

Murray Hunter is an associate professor at the University Malaysia Perlis. He blogs at Murray Hunter.

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