Thursday 31 May 2018

Surveillance in Australia, Part Two: A Parallel Secret Police Force, Pearls and Irritations, 31 May, 2018.

JOHN STAPLETON: Surveillance in Australia: Part Two: A Parallel Secret Police Force

This is a government run on announceables.
Even without the Budget blizzard, so far in 2018 we have had major announcements on everything from the so-called Gonski 2.0 education reforms, the establishment of an Australian arms industry to compete internationally, and an investigation into the practices of the Public Service.
They cost millions, often enough billions, this government’s endless, almost daily announcements. Malcolm Turnbull began his reign, if anyone remembers, with a one billion dollar Innovation Nation program. An internal review subsequently revealed it had been a colossal waste of money.
Captured by the daily news cycle he struts the political stage launching this and announcing that, but there was one disclosure the Prime Minister was not putting his name to. And that was the deliberately leaked story that the government might expand the operations of the Australian Signals Directorate from its traditional international focus to encompass domestic surveillance.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop promptly dismissed the claims: “The present laws safeguard the privacy of Australians.”
A truly ludicrous statement. There is no right to privacy in Australian law.
In turn Dutton promptly contradicted Bishop, saying there was an obvious need to look at the capacity of the Australian Signals Directorate.
With each contradiction of Liberal Party’s leaders, Dutton, a former policeman, has emerged as a truthsayer up against the glib dishonesty of lawyers turned politicians. For those who are following the jostling for position amongst Turnbull’s heir apparents, these contratempts are campsites on the path to the Prime Minister’s office.
Dutton holds the reins over two of the most controversial issues in Australia today, high rates of Immigration and intrusive surveillance. He is already king of Australian Under Surveillance, to reference the title of Frank Moorhouse’s 2014 book.
Like him or not, and many do not, Dutton is increasingly talked of as a future Prime Minister. Australia has never had a leader with a such an extensive knowledge of or intimate relationship with the country’s national security agencies. And with that knowledge comes power.
Don’t believe a word of Dutton’s justifications for expanding ASD surveillance to the Australian public, including his repeated claim that it will help against online paedophiles. As if the 6,000 plus officers and staff at the AFP were doing nothing. As if most of the breaks didn’t come from overseas operations, particularly the establishment of honeypot sites.
Surveillance is an instrument of intimidation and social control. It is widely criticised by experts as ineffective against the bogey of terrorism.
With Australia’s history of surveying its own population to a greater extent than any other Western country, with thousands of personnel, billions of dollars and tranches of legislation already targeting everyone from journalists to dissidents to Muslims, exactly why Dutton would prefer the services of the ASD over the existing ASIO and AFP bureaucracies raises many interesting questions.
The AFP, ASIO and the ASD all got funding increases in the Budget. Yet the public know almost nothing about them and have no reason to assume that the poor quality of governance they have come to expect, just think NBN, does not extend to the nation’s security agencies.
Unlike ASIO and the AFP, Signals Directorate has acquired a reputation for efficiency and attracting smart operators.
Dr Mark Rix from the University of Wollongong puts it thus:
“My view is that Dutton isn’t so much working around security bureaucracies over which he is able to exercise little control. He’s more likely working around his colleagues in the Cabinet.  The expansion of these powers should be seen rather as an attempt to provide ASD with comparable powers to those enjoyed by ASIO, and perhaps as an attempt by Uber-Minister Dutton to work around or out-manoeuvre the Attorney-General who oversees ASIO by lavishing the same powers on ASD over which he exercises greater control. It’s just the latest instalment in the inexorable  expansion of the Australian surveillance state.”
The gifting of too much power into too few hands holds many perils for Australia’s democratic experiment.
The creation of a parallel secret police force holds a clear and present danger. Tyranny expands to fill all available space.
Australian society is sick, an illness caused by years of poor governance and contempt for the views of the general public. The country has never been more divided. The increasing resort to surveillance as an instrument of social control is proof, pure and simple.
Barrister Michael Tubb’s, who represented people whose careers had been damaged by the agency, argues in his book ASIO: The Enemy Within that political leaders have surreptitiously created an atmosphere of fear within our society. The power and reach of ASIO has increased until it has effectively become a huge national network of secret political police that spies on political parties, unions, community organisations and individuals.
He writes:
ASIO is a right wing political organisation, and part of a still growing fifth column criminal conspiracy against the political freedoms and rights we consider sacrosanct. The conspiracy was started many decades ago by fearful right wing vested interests worried at the influence, directly after World War II, of the political ideas and values of the centre and left with and across the broad political movement. It was a conspiracy against the public and its democratic processes, rights and freedoms.
No sooner had the Cold War withered away than our government imposed its rhetorical ‘war on terrorism’, and with it, its attack on our freedoms and rights.
As the years roll on, many more laws have been passed which both individually and synergistically lessen the exercise of our individual free will. At first, every conceivable thing in public life was gradually regulated, so that only in our private lives could we generally feel free. Today, even that freedom has been taken away.
Tubbs’ warnings evoke images of the Stasi, the feared East German Secret Police and the most extreme example of a surveillance state to date. As emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this was a society where everybody spied on everybody, father against son, neighbour against neighbour, colleague against colleague.
Bathrooms and confessionals, all were bugged. Nothing was sacred.
Is this the Australia we want to create?
Tomorrow: Section Three: The future has arrived.
John Stapleton worked for more than 20 years as a staff reporter on The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald.
A collection of his journalism is being constructed here.

Wednesday 30 May 2018

Surveillance in Australia; Part One: Who’s Watching the Watchers? Pearls and Irritations, 30 May, 2018.

JOHN STAPLETON: Surveillance in Australia; Part One: Who’s Watching the Watchers?

Beyond the daily media coverage of the frenetic efforts of a failing Prime Minister, the biggest unexplored story in Australia of Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership has been the massive expansion of state surveillance under his watch.
It is a story which goes straight to the heart of Australia’s failing democracy, the dangerous gifting of authoritarian powers to bureaucrats and secretive national security agencies.
The latest news, that the government is contemplating granting the Australian Signals Directorate powers to spy on Australian citizens, including emails, texts and bank records, on top of the extensive surveillance powers already held by ASIO and the AFP, is a cause for significant alarm.
As Richard Flanagan put it so eloquently in his recent National Press Club address:
There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon. Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal in disposition … Our society grows increasingly more unequal, more disenfranchised, angrier, more fearful. Our institutions are frayed. Our polity is discredited, and almost daily discredits itself further.
Holderlin, the great 19th Century poet, wrote of the “mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake nations. That yearning can overtake Australia as easily as it has many other countries, damaging our democratic institutions, our freedoms and our values.
Excessive, abusive and intrusive surveillance, not just of journalists and intellectuals but of broad swathes of the population, has been championed by the Abbott and Turnbull governments as a necessary limitation on civil liberties in the age of terror.
But the war on terror has become a war on the people; and increased surveillance is a step straight to the chasm’s edge.
ASIO has publicly boasted it is placing anti-Muslim or ultra-nationalist groups such as Reclaim Australia under surveillance, while Islamic groups such as Hizb ut-Tahrir frequently complain about ASIO surveillance and advise their members not to speak to the “cockroaches”.
This is a new frontier of policing, where people are being targeted not for what they do, but what they think. It is a step into the realm of dark policing, where people are placed under intensive levels of surveillance without having committed a crime.
There is no redress. Attempts to claim compensation for the personal damage thus wreaked, through avenues such as the office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, are likely to get little more than a bureaucratic brushoff.
The Hizb, which former Prime Minister Tony Abbott so enthusiastically wanted to ban, passionately believe it is their duty under Allah to promote the overthrow of the Australian government in favour of an Islamic caliphate.
Equally Reclaim Australia and a significant number of similar groups passionately believe the country’s traditionally values are being destroyed by creeping Islamisation and the government’s chronic mismanagement of immigration.
These groups have two things in common: they both believe multiculturalism is a failed theory, and they are both under intense levels of government surveillance.
Essentially, people from all sides of the political spectrum are being placed under scrutiny because they fail to agree with the official narrative that Australia is a successful multicultural society. According to Turnbull, the most successful in the world.
Since September 2014, the government has passed eight ­separate tranches of national security legislation that have ­either amended existing offences, created new ones or extended far-reaching surveillance, arrest and control powers to security agencies. And exempted officers from being charged for illegal conduct.
The blanket legislation also includes restrictions on the reporting of Special Intelligence Operations.
However, thanks to ASIO boasting about placing anti-multicultural groups like as Reclaim Australia under surveillance it is legally possible to write about these operations.
ASIO wants the plethora of far-right groups, including the United Patriots Front and the True Blue Crew, to know they are under surveillance.
As is now well understood, people behave differently when they know they are being watched. Demonstrations are more difficult to organise when activists know every detail of their planning is being followed by the authorities.
It is no coincidence that the spate of sometimes violent demonstrations have decreased since dramatic coverage of clashes between anti-Muslim and anti-racist groups became a feature of 2015.
However the groups and their spin-off sites remain highly active on social media, attracting tens of thousands of followers. Their hot button issue remains multiculturalism and Muslim migration. Pauline Hanson is regarded as a patron saint.
Suppression of healthy debate in a democracy only makes things worse. The rapid demographic transformation of the country is exactly one such issue which would have benefited from an open airing, not a battle of shouting ideologues.
Ironically, in 2018 the central issue of the so-called “far right groups”, that the Australian government has badly mismanaged immigration, has moved to become a mainstream issue.
Cautionary tales, from crowded schools to choked cities to the creation of ethnic enclaves, from escalating costs of housing and power to a failing sense of national identity, all are front and centre in the national debate.
Many Australians, once sold on the feelgood propaganda of multiculturalism, now openly express their hostility in increasingly racist tones, belying the billions governments have spent encouraging “diversity”.
One of the most obvious results of government mismanagement has been the rise of ultra-nationalist groups. The commonplace patriotism of many of the individuals involved often belies the “far-right”, “Nazi” and “racist” labels their opponents and the Australian media frequently place on them.
Fully conscious of the signal he was sending, at a Senate committee hearing ASIO director-general Duncan Lewis said Reclaim Australia was of interest to intelligence agencies, with the threat from such groups growing. He said Reclaim had “offered violence” in the past and he expects it will continue to do so.
 “It is certainly the case that violence has been and, I anticipate, may well continue to be offered by these groups as they confront one another – the Islamic and pro-Islamic group on the one side and the anti-Islamic groups on the other,” Lewis said. “That is business for ASIO: the inciting of what is essentially political violence.”
Those who disagree with the official story of Australia’s multicultural adventure may be the present target.
But all the additional surveillance powers being gifted by the current crop of politicians are highly unlikely to remain so narrowly focused.
At the bottom of the chasm, noone can hear you scream.
Or as Flanagan put it:
The consequence is a time bomb which simply needs as a detonator what every other country has had and we have not: hard times. But hard times will return. And when they do what defence will we have should a populist movement that trades on the established scapegoats arises? An authoritarian party with a charismatic leader that uses the poison with which the old myths are increasingly pregnant to deliver itself power?
Tomorrow Part Two:  A Parallel Secret Police Force
John Stapleton worked for more than 20 years as a staff reporter on The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald.
A collection of his journalism is being constructed here.