There’s a bit of a turf war brewing in the government at the moment. No, not between the Nationals and the Liberals, that’s been going for a long time. And not the one between Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull. Or the one between Abbott and Josh Frydenberg. Or the one between Kevin Andrews and Trent Zimmerman. Or the one… look, there are a lot of turf wars going on.
Anyway, this one is between our Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, who thinks there is an urgent need to expand surveillance of Australian citizens, and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop who feels that the current intrusive level of surveillance is enough.
And this increasingly fraught disagreement over how much information Peter Dutton should be able to access about you is now threatening to derail the plans for a national facial recognition database as the Victorian government is now getting cold feet and hold on we have a national facial recognition database?
Dutton is worried that the current powers for see what you’re up to are inadequate because sure, he can currently access your computer and phone data but how can he know if you’re… um, harming children on Facetime.
“If we had a capacity to disrupt, for example, the live-streaming of children being sexually exploited, would we explore ways that we could do that within the law? Of course we would,” he said, seemingly unaware that that’s already something in which the law is entirely able to intervene, what with that being a horrific crime and everything.
Also, who the hell is live-streaming child abuse? That doesn’t sound like a thing.
The Victorian state government have threatened to pull out of the planned national network on the grounds that the new laws Dutton is pushing would give data access to local government and private sector if he felt it appropriate, which was not part of the agreement and what is this sort of like those CSI shows where they go “enhance!” and the computer zooms in? Why was this not a bigger deal?
Enhance! ENHANCE! Goddammit, Mandelbrot was right!
So in other words, Australia is apparently about to become a China-style surveillance state with Minority Report tech, assuming Dutton gets his way and the Victorian government fall into line.
Does anyone know where we can get about 24 million of those Guy Fawkes masks from V For Vendetta? Seems like we might need them fairly soon.
