What are the laws and rules around capturing images of your face in Australia? What are the rules about storing the images/videos, and how they can be used. We don’t have any clear explanation…just as a dire warning emerges from police plans in the UK for wholesale, widespread facial tech capture and use/abuse there.
The chair of Republican Governors of the USA, Texas Governor Greg Abbott, has ordered his Family and Protective Services Department to investigate parents who get medical treatment for their children, and told other state agencies to pry into health facilities who provide the services. His target: children and their parents facing gender identity health issues. The fascist order is a foretaste of what a future American society might look like if an extremist is elected President in 2024.
How come governments can ‘downskirt’ drivers and passengers without regard to their personal privacy? What happens to the raunchy photos spotted by the government road spies? We need a human rights act, and privacy laws, to protect us from our governments.
Air travel is providing an inisght into how widespread citizen recording and pigeon-holing will become in the very near future, an academic suggests. He warns that thought control is not far behind.
From Canada comes a cautionary tale of how digital trackers – already approved in the USA – can be put inside the body of patients and prisoners in particular to keep them docile and permanently monitored ‘in the cloud’ in real time. Is this happening in Australia: CLA would like to know.
How would you described Australian Members of Parliament who want Pacific islanders to have more rights and greater decision-making powers than the Australians whom the MPs represent? Hypocrites would be the only world: meet the retiring Kevin Andrews MHR and Minister for the Pacific, Senator Zed Seselja…islander advocates but no lovers of equal democratic rights for all Aussies.
Police Minister’s so-called ‘ring of steel’ is actually giant privacy-invading mechanism, with no public, police or political-legislative safeguards, CLA VP Rajan Venkataraman says. It’s typical of a repressive approach to governing in a state which has no human rights charter to provide a modest baseline against which to measure surveillance intrusion into citizens’ lives.
A man who was there are at the foundations of legal structures in Canberra, Allan N Hall AM, has explained clearly why citizens of the the NT – and of the ACT – should have equal rights to all citizens of Australian States in a submission to the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee. The committee clearly states it is considering voting rights, and is not interested in rehashing the voluntary assisted dying debate The committee’s report is due on 6 October 2021.
A federal parliament committee is hearing widespread views on the state of Australian democracy, including our inability to amend the Constitution and a reluctance to hold many referendums, in a series of ‘public’ meetings available to all citizens through streaming. Here is a precis of the comments in a submission by academic Dr Bede Harris, who has recently launched a major book on the subject.