Metadata Retention
With the Australian government pressing hard for mandatory metadata retention, it seems all that stands between us and the possibility of total surveillance of the entire population is a vote in the Senate. If I had the ear of opposition leader Bill Shorten right now, this is what I’d say to him.
Dear Mr Shorten,
I know the Australian Labor Party likes to indulge in me-too chest thumping when it comes to security issues, despite the better instincts of many of its members, but dragging Australia down into the ethical murk of total surveillance of all its citizens is where I would hope you would draw the line.
Metadata retention is simply wrong. However benign the proposed uses of this data might be, the existence of such a repository of information on each and every person in Australia, every phone call, every email, would create a tool for oppression the like of which has never existed and should never be allowed to exist. Think of what Stalin could have done with this resource, or the Stasi, or US Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
We need to think hard about what kind of society Australians want to live in but also what kind of dangers we are opening ourselves up to. Spying on every single Australian may indeed help prevent the occasional terrorist outrage or even some crime, but the cost is so very high and the dangers so very real that we should resist it vigorously. The step from police support to police state is not such a large one.
Regards,
Graham Storrs.
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Hi Jai, The only way to get off that dark and scary path is for us to keep resisting it! It's not as if there aren't many far bigger issues facing politicians than terrorism. It's probably the case that domestic violence and climate change are each already killing far more people each year than terrorists ever have, for example. Even if it was true that terrorism was our biggest problem, increasing surveillance and oppression is probably exactly the opposite of what we should be doing about it.
I agree that there are greater threats, yes. But when resisting we need to be sure what we are resisting. And I don't think it's about data or metadata retention. What we are resisting is the power and reach of the state. It's the use of the metadata in combination with a host of new anti-terror laws that, together, support an extension of the power of the state and make us as individuals ever more powerless against the misuse of that power. And attacks on the rule of law such as the recent attempts to denigrate the Human Rights Commission aren't very reassuring.
Absolutely! The way the present government attacks anyone who disagrees with them or might embarrass them is very Putin-like. However, it's not the present government I'm worried about - authoritarian as they are - it's some future government we haven't yet seen that can use the powers we're handing them to pursue whatever kind of racist, sexist, homophobic, Tea Party agenda they might happen to have.
I agree with that too. Our society is becoming divided against itself, and we seem not to be able to see that mistreating one group of scapegoats, or denigrating and humiliating and disempowering another, is opening a door to the same thing to happening to all the rest of us.Dismissal of the experiences of the other spreads fast. I was in Brisbane just before their big flood, watching floods in Canberra on TV. Someone said, 'who cares about them!' and strangely, when the Brisbane flood happened a couple of weeks later, I didn't care about them right back. This shouldn't happen in a country, we should all empathise with each other, but it's frighteningly easy to break that, and amazingly easy for people in power to influence what is publicly acceptable. That isn't political correctness, it's setting a good example. I'd like to see a lot more of it.
It's not so much the metadata retention, as I have little faith in people's ability to make much use of such data (ten years working with ordinary metadata has convinced me that it's mostly useless); it's more the attitudes behind the whole approach, the fear-mongering and creeping militarisation we are seeing. And it all seems very contrived and far-fetched.
Of course I live in a quiet country area and so do you, things might be more frightening if we lived in densely populated cities or worked in higher-risk places like Parliament House.