Australian Spy Agency Offered To Share Data About Ordinary Citizens

An anonymous reader writes "Australian spy agencies offered to share personal information about law-abiding Australian citizens with overseas governments. This includes legal, religious and medical information, which was shared about this Canadian women. Departments in the Australian Public service has also been caught spying on citizens. Even low-ranking public servants can look up information such as phone calls and email metadata without needing a warrant. The target is not notified."

Comments

This is an outrage

[Anonymous Coward]

Government officials behaving like Internet businessmen!

Privacy != Paranoia

[SirGarlon]

All the way back in 1995, when I first started using the World Wide Web, some users were advocating for strong privacy protections. We were ignored, then laughed at, then insulted with the "tinfoil hat" labrel.

Are you ready to reconsider our point, that society is better off if governments are corporations do NOT have free reign to collect, store, and mine as much data about us as they want?

Re:Privacy != Paranoia

[TheMeuge]

Actually, it's worse than that. What will undoubtedly affect most people is not the power imbalance between the individual and the government as a whole, but the tremendous power imbalance between an individual and the lowest tier public worker that has access to that information. When your local policeman will be browsing your daughter's naked photos (that she took in the shower with her cell phone) while contemplating which would be better to coerce her into sex, her confession about cheating in French class, smoking a joint once a year ago, or going on a date with two different people without them knowing it; and when you find out, and the same person will threaten you with being arrested for anything he could make up he saw in the surveillance, put you on a watch list, destroy your life.... that's when you will realize how far the power separation has gone.

Take it from someone who was brought up in the Soviet Union - even the lowliest civil servant had power, and exercised it. There was no action without bribery, and there was not even a concept of freedom... not because of power coming from the top down, but because the system was so skewed at a traffic cop could pull you over, rob you, rape your wife, then kill you both, and if anyone witnessed it, they'd keep their mouth shut.

Power corrupts.

If you give someone absolute access to your information (even forgetting the concept that the latter will likely mean absolute access to making stuff up), you given them absolute power over you.

Re:The womans case was her fault.

[TheP4st]

The book were published in 2009, the agent that prevented her entry specifically referred to a hospitalization that took place in 2012. How did they know about events that should be shielded under patient privacy laws and took place years after publishing of mentioned book? Unless you can point to a source describing her 2012 hospitalization that were publicly available at the time of her entry denial, then I'd say that her story have a very interesting place in this matter.

Re:Where is this leading?

[TheMeuge]

No one seems to think we are on a slippery slope here.

Not anymore. I think we're long past it. We're like Wile E Coyote... we've run off the cliff, just haven't fully realized it yet.