President Obama began his reign as the hope of the civil liberties movement, but he ends a four-year term with a worse record than the President Bush he followed. Obama's remorseless assault on basic rights in America, Bernard Keane says, sets the tone for continuing loss of liberties and freedoms in Australia and globally as drone kills, loss of free speech and mass surveillance become 'normalised'.

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Do you think Australians have less freedom, less democracy, than 10 years ago when the planes crashed into New York's Twin Towers? Have terrorists changed the way Australians live? PM Julia Gillard said those questions were how we should test our decade-long, multi-billion response to terrorism. CLA asked the PM to set up a public inquiry to get the answers to her own questions...but she has declined to do so. They're important questions: what do you think?

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As Australia readies for new see-through – and mandatory – airport scanners from 1 July, international security guru Bruce Schneier has put the entire issue of "security theatre" in context with some apt examples. He explains that national transport authorities are actually doing the terrorists' work for them.

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A Senate Committee is inquiring into proposed mandatory see-through scanners at airports from 1 July but doesn't have all the information it needs, CLA says. CLA is calling for a standards-based security risk assessment, an obligatory step under government protocols, which may or may not have been done for the controversial new devices.

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Anti-terorrism laws, it seems, worry government more in prospect than reality. Passed in haste, with assurances about reviews later, these abusive laws have received no scrutiny as promised. Now even the idea of review has slipped into limbo, off the COAG agenda, Bernard Keane reports.

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Mandatory, see-through, airport scanners ride roughshod over our civil liberties, CLA says in its submission to the Senate Committee set up to rubber stamp the proposal. The federal government is hell-bent on forcing us to go through the revealing scanners, without an alternative pat-down procedure, from 1 July 2012...even though two of the world's most security-conscious nations, Israel and Germany, have actively rejected them, as CLA's video on the proposal demonstrates.

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Other submissions to the Inquiry » ...
CLA video » ...

Plans to introduce see-through scanners at airports don’t allow you any choice, like frisking or pat-down as alternatives. The scanners are bad in principle, will cause delays and produce false positives, and they create a head-on assault on Australians’ civil liberties. They are also a waste of taxpayers’ money, hundreds of millions of dollars of it – you can email/SMS/Tweet the Minister with your thoughts (details are on screen in the video). If you like, you can join CLA or donate so we can continue this campaign and others to help protect Australians’ rights and freedoms - click here.

Click here for the Freedom Has Flown video telling the real story of what’s wrong with Australia’s proposed airport scanners.