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 […]
EFA’s testimony to the Senate TIA Act Inquiry
On 29th July 2014, EFA Executive Officer Jon Lawrence and Alex Vulkanovski from EFA’s Policy & Research Standing Committee testified before the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee in relation to the Committee’s Inquiry into the Comprehensive revision of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979. Read EFA’s submission to the Inquiry [PDF, 571KB] Here is an extract from […]
Police using mobile phone tower dumps for fishing expeditions
Fairfax Media is today reporting that Australian police are receiving metadata dumps from mobile phone towers. These data dumps provide information about “the identity, activity and location of any phone that connects to targeted cell towers over a set span of time, generally an hour or two. A typical dump covers multiple towers, and mobile […]
WA Senate Re-election scorecard
As we’ve done with previous federal polls, EFA has rated a selection of the parties contesting this Saturday’s Western Australian half-Senate re-election. The Greens and the Pirate Party remain the stand-out choices for people concerned about digital rights, however the Secular Party, the Sex Party and the Wikileaks Party all score well, but have not articulated […]
Australians deserve a surveillance oversight inquiry
Ever since Edward Snowden’s first NSA spying revelations, the Australian Signals Directorate (formerly Defence Signals Directorate, DSD hereafter) has been implicated as a complicit ‘Five Eyes‘ partner. The Guardian has today released shocking new information from Snowden showing just how complicit DSD has been. These latest revelations involve documentation of a ‘Five Eyes‘ information sharing meeting hosted by Britain’s GCHQ […]
