Shouts from the desert

A Sydney Morning Herald article posted last night, Police, spies to get power to tap phones, and not thought important enough to make their top stories, reveals that the Coalition party room agreed to give police and ASIO the permanent power to tap the phones and intercept the email of people who are not even suspected of a crime.

The powers have been in place "temporarily" in the name of fighting terrorism, but in a move that must give even the most paranoid civil libertarian cause to pause and take stock, these "temporary" powers are now to become a permanent part of our laws.

People who value their privacy should look at GnuPG or other OpenPGP software to protect their email from eavesdropping (this is a good idea anyway, but now is even more important).

It is disturbing that the right of the individual to privacy has such a low value to our Parliamentarians. Those who are in favour of giving increased powers to police like to say "you have nothing to fear if you obey the law" (like nobody is ever suspected, accused, or convicted of crimes they did not commit), but now they cannot even make that argument. Even law abiding people have a legitimate expectation to keep their personal affairs private, but this move throws that concept out the window.

It is inevitable that the executive Government will seek more power - more power certainly makes things easier for them, and executive Governments have always been on a quest for increased power. Affording citizens with adequate civil rights, including privacy, does make policing harder, but making policing easier is not a value that overcomes all else - a citizenry that lacks civil rights is just as much oppressed as one that suffers under crime.

Our members of Parliament, on the other hand, have a responsibility to keep this in check. When they endorse a plan like this, they fail in their responsibility and in doing so let down those who elected them.

Of the civil rights, privacy is the most important - it underlies all the rest of our rights, and when undermined, any other right we may think we have becomes weaker. As Justice William O Douglas of the Supreme Court of the United States said, "The right to be let alone is the beginning of all freedom".

It seems it was only a few years ago that I was arguing that people no longer feared government power and that corporate power was the real threat. Little has been done to constrain corporate power since then, but government power has been increasing at an unsettling rate. It may be only lawyers and civil libertarians who truly appreciate the degree to which our rights are being eroded, but fear of government power is now well within the domain of rational behaviours.

By assisting the executive Government to take away the privacy of law-abiding citizens in this way, our Parliamentarians demonstrate that they are not the right people for the job.