Pirate Party Australia is deeply concerned about the increasing international trend of widescale surveillance, such as the possible implementation of the Trapwire surveillance system in Australia, due to the significant potential for abuse.

Yesterday, the Sydney Morning Herald revealed[1] ties between a government contractor and a company manufacturing sophisticated surveillance equipment that claims to detect “suspicious activity”, which ultimately means activity that marks a person as suspicious without the person actually committing any crime. To increase its efficiency, the system collects information from its multiple installations and combines it, even across borders.

“These systems claim to detect ‘pre-crime’ activities and tag individuals as suspects automatically. Such systems, when deployed in the public space, are an encroachment on the privacy of the users of public spaces,” said David W. Campbell, President of Pirate Party Australia. “They have the effect of suppressing the legitimate activities of law abiding individuals, who become justifiably worried about being mislabelled and prosecuted.”

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Update (11:29am): corrected PR to point out that it was anonymous security bureaucrats who made the announcement, not the Government.

Pirate Party Australia are pleased with, but skeptical about, by the announcement by anonymous security bureaucrats that the Australian Government will delay implementing mandatory two-year data retention plans until after the next election.

Yesterday, anonymous security bureaucrats announced that proposals contained within the National Security Security Inquiry discussion paper to store the web history of all Australians for up to two years will be stalled until 2013. The National Security Inquiry has been labelled as “controversial” and the Attorney-General’s Department expects it to attract “significant public interest”[1].

“While we are happy that action on this issue will be delayed, we are skeptical that this may mean they will push the changes through quietly once no-one is looking,” said Simon Frew, Deputy President of Pirate Party Australia. “Given the very short timeframe that the public were given to hand submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, we anticipate there will be minimal oversight when legislative changes are put forward.”

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