Sex Party Condemns Increases in ASIO Powers

Written by fiona patten

Friday, 04 March 2011 10:43

The Australian Sex Party, has strongly criticised the passing of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment Act 2010 through the Senate, which gives sweeping new powers to ASIO of the kind that will be deployed against anti censorship groups like WikiLeaks. The Act also enables the sharing of private information between all government departments with no independent monitoring and continues the increasingly unaccountable nature of ASIO, begun by John Howard a decade ago.

Spokesperson for Security, Law Enforcement and Privacy and Sex Party candidate in the upcoming NSW election, Andrew Patterson said that the legislation handed ASIO and other law enforcement agencies further unchecked powers to invade an individual's privacy and engage in activities which undermine basic rights. He said that the tendency for governments to abandon the need for warrants in maintaining law and order as well as the exclusion of the Commonwealth Ombudsman from new legislation, represented the most serious breach of civil liberties in Australia.

"The Labor government, with support from the Coalition, has passed this Act supposedly as a way to facilitate inter-governmental communication and enable networks to be protected; whereas, in classic Orwellian Newspeak, the Act allows all Federal and State government departments to access any information ASIO gathers, whether it pertains to actual crimes or not”, he said.

All forms of networks, from telecommunication networks to the public Internet are covered in the new Act. It allows call records, access history, phone numbers, IP address, email address, and any other form of identifiable number that an individual uses to be collected. Further, voice calls, text messages and data transmissions can be intercepted, meaning records of any phone call that an individual makes, or any website they visit can now be stored by ASIO and shared with all government departments. In fact, storage of such information is often not covered by the Privacy Act.

Mr Patterson said that what made this development even more worrying was that ASIO could also share this information with the ‘broader national security community’. “This ambiguous terminology means that the information can be shared worldwide and unchecked” he said. “Once ASIO shares this data with any foreign nation, all control over it will be lost”.

“Passing this Act also shows that the Government hasn't learnt from its recent mistakes and is continuing it’s broad references to "national security", a concept which remains completely undefined and unchallenged and as we have seen, can easily be misused".

Peak law and privacy advocates, such as the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, the Australian Privacy Foundation, the Castan Centre for Human Rights Law and the Queensland Council of Civil Liberties all voiced concerns and criticisms over the Act, all of which fell on deaf ears.