Dale Mills
Spy agencies and police across Australia may soon be given powers, for the first time, to monitor the phone calls, email and text messages of people not suspected of any crime. The power to spy on terrorism and serious crime suspects already exists.
The Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill was introduced to parliament on February 16. Under the bill, to qualify for your phone to be tapped, you merely need to be a "third party" to a serious crime.
Police will be given a 45-day warrant to monitor a person not under suspicion in the hope it might lead to a person who would be of interest to the police. The warrant can be renewed. ASIO can obtain three-month warrants.
The warrant is issued by a judge who, according to Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, "has to take into account the seriousness of the offences being investigated, how much of the information would be likely to assist in the investigation by the agency, to what extent alternative methods of investigating it have been used, and how much use of such methods would be likely to assist the investigation by the agency of the offence".
The judge "has to be satisfied in relation to a number of other matters; that is, the privacy of a person won't be unduly interfered with", Ruddock told ABC radio on February 15. However, Terry O'Gorman from the Australian Council for Civil Liberties points out that judicial oversight is not a safeguard. "Law enforcers go judge shopping. They go to the ... judges who more readily give warrants and are less questioning than others", he told the February 15 Age newspaper.
NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Cameron Murphy said the powers are unprecedented. "It massively expands police surveillance and it's directly targeted against innocent people who are doing nothing wrong." He pointed out that a phone in Australia is already 26 times more likely to be bugged than a phone in the United States.
The text of the bill can be found at <http://parlinfoweb.aph.gov.au/piweb/browse.aspx?NodeID=119>.
From Green Left Weekly, February 22, 2006.
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