The Guardian has featured Civil Liberties Australia’s warning about how quickly individual monitoring could turn into instantly selective mass surveillance.
“While CCTV still images can be put into the system to identify someone, the department says it is ‘not technically possible’ to livestream CCTV footage into the system,” Guardian Australia reporter Josh Taylor wrote in late September 2019. “But should it become ‘technically possible’ under the legislation, the minister could set the rules to allow it.”
“(Dr) Kristine Klugman, the president of Civil Liberties Australia, told the committee it could happen soon,” he wrote.
“Indeed, it is only a matter of time before the combination of cloud services, mobile, high-definition video capture (including smartphones) and ‘big data’ analytics will make such real-time surveillance possible, cheap and enticing,” she said.
“When that happens, we can again expect to hear similar claims that our police and spy agencies ‘are only effective if they have the tools necessary to effectively enforce the law and detect and prevent threats to the Australian community’.”
FACIAL RECOGNITION: Plan for massive facial recognition database sparks privacy concerns
Since Dr Klugman lodged CLA’s submission with parliament, here’s what has been announced