How Australia Spies On its Own Citizens

This article was written and published in the Asia Sentinel in 2013. It is even more relevant today. AI has improved so much, the capabilities of Australia’s intelligence is much greater today.

Through rapid technology advances, Australia’s security apparatus has grown to an Orwellian scale, not at the design of any elected government but something the Australian bureaucracy has been forthright in promoting.

The executive branch of government has only superficial control over the system. It is fully integrated with the NSA apparatus, which immediately brings up sovereignty issues – not about a country's sovereignty over land, but over knowledge. Through technology and its innovative applications, the concept of privacy has been reframed to the point where anything a person does outside the home or on a computer is public domain, captured through any of a large array of assets.

That has allowed the creation of a new premise that has grown up through the administrative arm of the Australian government. Australia seems to have adopted an almost fanatical compliance culture in which administrators believe that they are the natural custodians of security interests, over the temporarily elected politicians of the day.

Some of the methods the security state uses for intelligence gathering, storing, and collation are well documented and summarized below:

· The government database is a highly sophisticated group of electronic document and records management system(s) (EDRMS) for collating, storing, and matching data between various agencies and levels of governments. Consequently, data collected by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), social security (Centrelink), Medicare, immigration, customs, and police enforcement agencies are integrated with relational databases and query systems. This is supplemented by individual agency databases with extremely detailed information on citizens. These systems carry an almost complete personal history of residential details going back decades on income, occupation, spouses, children, social security benefits, medical, and travel information. These systems can be accessed by almost anybody within the public service. Every agency within the government has become part of the intelligence collection network. According to academics Paul Henman and Greg Marston of the University of Queensland, these systems that enable agencies to determine client eligibility for services are highly intrusive and used with a prevailing deep suspicion of citizens in regards to their continuing eligibility for services.

· The recent revelations about the “five eyes” countries eavesdropping on their citizens’ phone conversations, emails, and other electronic communications has been astounding. Through meta-data collection systems like PRISM and ECHELON are highly likely to be also operating within Australia due to the close relationship between the NSA and Australian intelligence community. According to AFP assistant commissioner Neil Gaughan, Australian intelligence has a much better relationship with the telecommunications companies than the US intelligence agencies. However this doesn't appear to be new. A reliable source working within one of the Australian telephone companies when manual exchanges were operating confirmed that ASIO and state special branches had secret rooms within the exchanges to run phone tapping operations.

· The NSW police are using an Automated Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system which takes continuous snapshots of car number plates. This is supplemented by tracking cars when they go through tolls.

· Law enforcement agencies have announced that they are preparing to utilize drones for crime surveillance in the not too distant future.

· State and Federal Governments have been encouraging citizens to inform on other citizens they suspect of breaking the law. Government campaigns have been very successful in achieving all-time high numbers of informants on crime, social security, and taxation related matters.

The power of these databases is exponentially enhanced when coupled with recent developments in cellular, RFID, internet, and other computer technologies. When private data in retail, banking, travel, health and insurance, etc., is linked to Intelligence collected by government, the value of data becomes massively enriched. Data collected by private organizations and utilized by security services include:

· The internet domain is under constant surveillance. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and twitter use tracking cookies to gather data. Australian security agencies employ private contractors like the National Open Source Intelligence Center (NOSIC) to monitor, collate, and report on publicly accessible information about individuals and organizations.

· Many business organizations such as shopping centers and banks now utilize CCTV. These assets can be utilized by security organizations to track and monitor individuals. This is now being supplemented with media access control (MAC) systems which can track smartphones. This technology is already being used in three Westfield shopping centers.

· Numerous private databases like electronic tenancy database which has detailed information. These include tenancy history, insurance company records that detail individuals insured assets, bank records, and university records. These can all be accessed by security agencies.

· Mobile phones can be used as a means to track people through inbuilt GPS on smartphones, triangulation, or through electronic data-collectors designed to identify individual mobile phones in public places.

· People's purchase history and movements can be tracked through the use of credit, debit, and loyalty card purchases.

Emails, phones calls, places people go, and purchase history, in the context of other data collected has the latent potential to build up a profile on anybody. Data from social media like Facebook can enhance these profiles greatly by adding thought and behavior information. It's the collection of small bits of information that can be collated into big pictures. Australian intelligence can retroactively analyze anybody with the data they have access to.

Since 2007, when amendments to the Telecommunications (Interception & Access) Act 1974 were made during the last days of the Howard government, government agencies have had the power to search meta-data without the individual's knowledge or any warrant. CCTV cameras have been installed in many communities without the development of privacy policies on how they should be used. The law has yet to catch up with the ability to collect data.

Up until the 1980s most intelligence gathering was targeted monitoring of specific groups where “persons of interest” were identified for intensive surveillance. ASIO and state special branches were videotaping activists primarily from the “left”. Surveillance was undertaken by ASIO and state special branches, where operatives used electronic means for eavesdropping, keeping index cards and files on “persons of interest”, recording mainly hearsay information.

Even then, red flags emerged. Peter Grabosky of the Australian Bureau of Criminology pointed out that “thought and discussion of public issues may be suppressed....and...excess use of (surveillance) may inhibit democratic and political freedom more subtly.” In addition, he believed that malicious accusations made from erroneous records produce false information which made innocent people suffer at the hands of the security agencies.

This problem can't be corrected as these records are not assessable to be corrected for errors. The Mohamed Haneef arrest by the AFP in July 2007 where it was alleged he was connected with a terrorist cell in the UK, but later exonerated, hints at the security services being very territorial, where ASIO knew of Dr. Haneef's innocence but didn't advise the APF.

Faceless bureaucrats are the ones defining who are 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.

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.

The Sydney Morning Herald recently reported that intelligence data was passed on to assist the mining giant BHP. Moreover, the human rights website WEBMOBILIZE recently alleged that the Australian security apparatus is being used to steal intellectual property from companies and passing it 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 state has the power to detain anyone under section 34D of the Security Intelligence Organization Act 1979 for up to seven days without being forced to reveal their detention.

With annual growth of more than 20 percent and an annual budget of over A$4 billion, ASIO has a new A$500 million building in Canberra and a secret data storage facility is being built at the nearby HMAS Harman Naval Base, where details are except from public account committees. When other government programs are being cut, the question of why there is a need to continue the increase of funding for surveillance of the nation's citizens requires national discussion.

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.

Throughout Australia's history the security agencies have blundered in the assessments they have made on many issues. The 2004 Flood report 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?

This cannot be really satisfactorily answered relying only on public domain knowledge. We can only make guesses. However, one undeniable fact is that there is presently a hidden and totally unaccountable part of government that is changing the nature of society. It is here where no media organizations are asking any questions.