EFA welcomes proposed amendments to section 35P
EFA welcomes Tuesday’s announcement by the Attorney-General that the government has accepted and intends to implement all of the changes to section 35P of the ASIO Act that have been recommended by the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor. Section 35P of the ASIO Act was added in 2014 as part of the government’s first ‘tranche’ […]
Attorney-General must properly resource Information Commission
EFA today calls on the Attorney-General to cease his absurd war of attrition with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Since announcing in 2014 that it intended to abolish the Office, the government has starved the agency of funds and has failed to reappoint two of the three statutory officer positions, despite the reality […]
AG must reject agencies seeking access to telecommunications data
EFA today calls on the Attorney-General to promptly reject the requests from most of the 61 agencies that are seeking to be provided with warrantless access to telecommunications data (metadata). It is less than a year since the parliament resolved to restrict warrantless access to telecommunications data to a carefully chosen list of agencies, and […]
EFA calls for universal warrant requirement for data retention
EFA welcomes the report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights [PDF] which confirms that the protections for journalists included in this year’s mandatory data retention legislation are inadequate and may ‘limit the right to an effective remedy, fair hearing, privacy and freedom of expression.’ While the Committee’s report primarily addresses the procedural shortcomings […]
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 […]
