Page 3958 - Week 09 - Thursday, 25 August 2011
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obtaining information that tracks car movements in the ACT, that tells them what cars we drive or how often we drive them.
The Australian Privacy Foundation has raised some very valid concerns about the technology and the bill that is before us today, concerns that they have raised with the government through correspondence to the former minister, Mr Stanhope, and with the Greens and me. Mr Stanhope responded to the group at the time that they raised concerns, but was very dismissive, saying:
I can understand your concerns about the use of point-to point-cameras for mass surveillance purposes. This is not the government’s intention …
In a letter to me, the president of the Privacy Foundation said:
The ACT Government has breached its undertakings in relation to open government and community consultation, in that it has avoided public scrutiny of this initiative.
The president went on to say:
The collection and use of the registration data of ‘vehicles of interest’ is of much greater concern, and needs to be subjected to careful controls. However, the collection of any registration data that is not justified by reasonable grounds for suspicion of a criminal or traffic offence represents mass surveillance.
Further:
The Bill seeks the Assembly’s authorisation of the arbitrary gathering of data about people’s movements on public roads. This would be the first occasion on which any Australian Parliament has sanctioned such a gross intrusion into freedoms.
The literature is full of warnings about the creation of a surveillance society more efficient than that of East Germany in the 1980s. The Assembly is in dire danger of sleep-walking the population of Canberra into just that scenario. By doing so, the Assembly would provide the extremist elements within the national security community with the beachhead that they have been seeking, and make it much easier for the resistance in other jurisdictions to be overcome.
It is essential that data be collected only where it is justified by the existence of evidence of a breach of traffic laws. Collection in any other circumstances is a gross invasion of privacy by the State and an invitation to abuse.
That was from the Privacy Foundation. Whilst the government and the bill state that data will only be used for traffic purposes, we are in shaky territory here, and the risk of function creep is very real. In a 2008 submission to a Queensland parliamentary committee into automatic number plate recognition technology, the Privacy Foundation said the following:
ANPR has very substantial negative impacts on privacy, the seriousness of which is not adequately reflected in the Issues Paper—
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