Australia has become a surveillance society without virtually no public debate, according to author Simon Davies.
Mr Davies said yesterday that with present government surveillance, “”we already have the Australia Card, and worse. It is more sophisticated and efficient that the Australia Card could ever have been. We don’t have a card itself but we have data matching between departmental computers putting thousands of innocent people under suspicion and investigation.”
Mr Davies, a lecturer in law at the University of NSW, argues that Australians are far too complacent about invasions of privacy. He thinks the word privacy has become a dirty word and prefers to call a spade and spade. He refers to the collection of information by government as surveillance.
Mr Davies is author of Big Brother, published last week by Simon and Schuster.
His book tells of ever increasing surveillance with promises of preventing crime and increasing government revenue. However, governments display very little evidence that any benefits flow before moving on to the next expansion of surveillance.
For example, data matching was done between nine million Department of Social Security computer records and one million Department of Employment Education and Training records files. As a result, 65,000 individuals were identified for further investigation. The Government has not released any details on the number of people, if any, that have been prosecuted.
Another DSS data-matching exercise resulted in only 61 prosecutions of 2334 under investigation. The other 2273 were investigated needlessly.
The Government was still pressing ahead with the Law Enforcement Access Network, he said. This would enable different government departments to match records in the hope of exposing tax and welfare cheats.
Mr Davies says nearly all the mismatches are innocent or can be explained by people and departments using different words in different ways (child, dependant, de facto, income, permanent and so on).
There was never any evidence that these schemes lived up to promise. The tax-file number scheme was to deliver a billion dollars, but it did not. Data-matching was to bring $340 million in 1991-92, but brought in only $35 million.
The rewards were not worth the threat to our liberty, he said.
Computer matching was like a police search of the home without a warrant. It presumed guilt until proven innocent.
Once under investigation, the innocent could expect denial of government benefits, delays in tax returns, delay and other detriments of being under suspicion.
He said 200,000 thousand individuals had been reported under the cash-transactions-reporting scheme (now called Austrack).
“”I cannot believe there are 200,000 crooks, drug dealers and bank robbers out there,” he said. “”They are more likely people with the proceeds of garage sales and cars, yet these people are reported to the government.”
No figures had been given on whether the reporting had resulted in prosecutions.
“”If you had told someone 25 years ago that in 1992 they would be required to provide 100 points of investigation and all the other parapernalia to open and operate a bank account, they would say the Australian people would not stand for it; but it has happened,” he said.
Technology was like a cargo cult. Ultimately there would have to be a reckoning.
“”We cannot assume that more and more computer technology will benefit society,” Mr Davies said. “”Serious issues about our humanity and individuality have to be discussed. We have just allowed things to happen because they appear to give us a better life.”
The linking of computers in the Australian bureaucracy “”is the systematic development of a vast, multi-faceted database that reaches into every aspect of our lives”.
The apathy of the Australian people was letting it happen. There was too much that we did not know. People who objected to this increasing surveillance were accused of having something to hide, of being cheats or of supporting cheats.
“”It comes down to whether you trust government or don’t trust government,” he said. “”If you don’t trust government, then you have to treat with suspicion governments gathering information. The history of the planet is that when governments get information, they misuse it. Every time there is a weakening of liberty and democracy. Australia is not going to break the mould.”
Politicians were too scared to challenge the technology that promised to solve their budgetary problems; the people of the next generation, whose liberty was threatened, would look back and blame them.