In under 24 hours, the Australian Parliament passed the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill on Aug. 25. The bill allows the government to modify or delete the data of suspected offenders, collect intelligence on criminal networks and take control of a suspected offenders’ online account.
According to the Department of Home Affairs, this bill is necessary because more and more criminal activity in the modern age makes use of the “dark web” and “anonymizing technologies.”
Many people are concerned about the bill and the issues it brings to the privacy of Australia’s citizens. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has raised concerns that the bill may impact third parties who are not suspected in the investigation of criminal activities. Specifically, the bill can authorize access to third-party computers, communication and data.
Another issue of concern is that the bill may enable law enforcement agencies to modify potential evidence in a criminal proceeding. Because of these concerns, human rights groups in Australia have called for the bill to be abandoned altogether.
Kieran Pender from the Human Rights Law Centre expressed concern to a parliamentary committee back in March.
“Any surveillance law intrudes on the rights of everyday Australians,” Pender said. “Any surveillance need to be strictly necessary and really tightly proportionate to the legitimate purpose they are trying to address.”
CEO of Civil Liberties Australia, Bill Rowlings, told SBS News in March, “These are particularly draconian and particularly bad, so my message would be to throw these out, start again and get some proper consultation from the beginning.
“They are draconian, right-wing, extreme, they are removing civil liberties and human rights from Australians.”
Similarly, in the U.S., the Los Angeles Police Department has been collecting social media information from citizens.
In 2015, then-LAPD Police Chief Charlie Beck told the department in a memo that, “similar to a nickname or an alias, a person’s online persona or identity used for social media and communication can be highly beneficial to investigations and possibly even future outreach programs.”
Beck said that officers should collect “social media and email account information” when filling out field interview report forms.
This is not the only way that the LAPD has increased surveillance. The department also used tracking service Geofeedia to monitor protest-related keywords, including #BlackLivesMatter. And more recently, the LAPD has entered a contract with Media Sonar Technologies that gives them the ability to “automatically find digital footprints in a matter of seconds.”
Many are questioning the LAPD’s expansion of social media surveillance and have raised concerns regarding potential violations of privacy rights and civil liberties, especially for communities of color and activists.
“There are real dangers about police having all of this social media identifying information at their fingertips. There’s a chance that they are storing it all in a database,” Brennan Center deputy director Rachel Levinson-Waldman told The Guardian.
Freshman music composition major Adrian George described the LAPD’s new tactics as “extremely shady.”
“It’s definitely a way to cover up their tracks,” George said. “They’ll probably use it to get rid of evidence of police brutality.”
