Promoting And Protecting Digital Rights Since 1994
EFA is an independent non-profit association that relies on membership subscriptions and donations. If you’re concerned about digital rights in Australia, please join or donate today.
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The security paradox: individual privacy versus digital driftnets
This article, by Suelette Dreyfus, University of Melbourne and Shanton Chang, University of Melbourne was originally published in The Conversation. See the original article. The great irony of the Abbott government’s plan enforce the mandatory data retention legislation is that while this is being done to make us safer, in fact it creates new data security risks for us all. While much of the debate has been dominated by the anti-surveillance…
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Go dark today against data retention
The Government’s data retention scheme looks set to pass the Senate this week with Labor’s support. This scheme is rushed, costly, ineffective, and against the public interest. Also, absurdly, the flawed legislation leaves open numerous loopholes, which can be used to evade the scheme. This means the data retention dragnet will capture the data of innocent Australians and cost millions of dollars, while allowing those who don’t want to be…
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Data Retention Vote This Week: Call Your MP Today!
The government is pressing ahead with its plans to rush the data retention legislation through the Parliament, with a vote due in the House of Representatives this week. This is despite them having not yet published their amendments resulting from the Intelligence & Security Committee’s recommendations. That Committee has also initiated another Inquiry, looking at the effect on journalists and their sources. This Inquiry is due to report in early…
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Data Retention – Its Not Where You Go, But Who You Talk To
This article, by Luke Heemsbergen was originally published at The Interdisciplinary Internet Institute. It has been edited slightly to better address a domestic audience. See the original article. Data retention may well be a valuable resource to fight serious crime and terrorism, but it’s not, when, if you decide to be a terrorist, you can also decide to evade the whole system by using Gmail. The purpose and implementation of the Australian government’s proposed…
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CitizenFour: Why it’s already the movie of the year
By Alex Schlotzer, EFA Board Member Less than two weeks after its Australian release, CitizenFour today received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film had previously won the British equivalent (BAFTA) as well as a long list of awards from film festivals and critics societies. I was fortunate enough to catch the Melbourne preview screening earlier this month organised by EFA, Madman and civil liberties councils across Australia…
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Ludlam demolishes data retention bill
At the end of January, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) held two days of hearings into the government’s data retention legislation (transcripts here and here). These hearings were at times a testy affair, with a number of Coalition members particularly being openly antagonistic to privacy advocates, including EFA’s Jon Lawrence (see the transcript of EFA’s testimony), while accepting, almost completely uncritically, the largely unsupported assertions of…
Help fight for our digital rights
What We Do
Policy
We actively monitor a number of policy areas and specific issues. The topics below provide a detailed view of EFA’s policy positions.
Copyright
Australia’s copyright laws are outdated, inflexible and not fit for the digital age. As such, EFA is a long-standing supporter of reform of Australia’s Copyright Act.
Privacy & Security
Privacy is fundamentally about consent and control over access to information, and goes hand-in-hand with security. Privacy is a human right.
Censorship
Adults should be able to make their own informed decisions about what content they create and consume.
Encryption
Access to encryption technologies is vital for individuals and groups to be able to safeguard the security and privacy of their information.
Internet Safety
Surveillance is not safety. Safety for whom, against what? This complex problem is more likely to be exacerbated, rather than solved, by measures that allow for unaccountable surveillance and the undermining of communications security.
Surveillance
EFA is committed to ensuring that Australian’s home life is not subject to arbitrary interference.