From revelations around bungled[1] and secret[2] Australian government censorship to explosive new details about the massively expanded surveillance apparatus of the United States, the people of western nations are being treated like citizens under an authoritarian regime, deprived of their right to know what their governments are doing in their names, under the auspices of ‘national security’.

As the world continues to learn the full extent of spying and surveillance by the National Security Agency (NSA) in the United States, questions must be asked as to whether Australians have been caught up in the surveillance. Further revelations now implicate the United Kingdom’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) agency as participating in the PRISM program[3], an NSA program intercepting communications such as emails, photos and videos from the largest technology companies including Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype and more [4].

Australians have a right to know if and under what terms any Australian intelligence agencies may also have been involved in the PRISM program and whether their personal information has been compromised or surreptitiously accessed by foreign intelligence agencies.

Of equal concern are the revelations by the Guardian[5], and subsequent confirmation by other news sources[6], that the majority of the population in the United States has been under complete metadata surveillance for potentially many years. While metadata may exclude the content of a communications, granting governments and their security agencies continuous access to every person’s communications history, the date and time, the caller and the recipient, the duration and even the locations where communications occurred is not just the definition of Orwellian, it is an almost complete implementation of a total surveillance state.

“If metadata was not privacy-destroying, it would have no value to police or security agencies and they wouldn’t be interested in it,” commented Thomas Randle, Senate candidate for Tasmania. “Collecting and storing metadata en masse is dangerous and destructive to everyone’s right to privacy and freedom of association.”

“The type of surveillance revealed in the United States would allow security agencies to completely understand the structures and relationships in every activist organisation, community group, or family. From what we have seen, ‘trust us’ is not an acceptable level of accountability from Government in this area. This kind of surveillance, as revealed in the United States, must never be replicated in Australia.”

It is presently unclear whether Australian intelligence agencies have had access to the information collected by the NSA under intelligence sharing agreements.

The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security’s inquiry into potential reforms of national security legislation mentioned a similar scheme for blanket, warrant-less collection of metadata for all Australians.

[1] http://delimiter.com.au/2013/06/05/250000-sites-blocked-asics-massive-crackdown/
[2] http://www.itnews.com.au/News/345010,attorney-general-agency-implicated-in-web-blocking-scandal.aspx
[3] http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/jun/07/uk-gathering-secret-intelligence-nsa-prism
[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
[5] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
[6] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324299104578529112289298922.html