The Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 28 September 2001.
return to column list
HERE
OH, bring back those glory days of August, before it felt like One Nation was running the Government, before we'd ever heard of Tampa, back when New York still had its towers and we still had all our airlines. Obviously we're living in a new world now, a darker, unhappier place. Who would have thought we'd be looking back on earlier this year as the good old days? Certainly, it's not the best of times to be a whining small ``l'' liberal. Who wants to hear about things such as civil liberties, compassion and personal freedom in a world apparently at war? Even those who make a career out of such beliefs are having a hard time of it. ``Some of the comments we're hearing from world leaders are very worrying,'' offers Cameron Murphy, president of the NSW Council Of Civil Liberties. ``When you've got President Bush talking about hiring criminals and the CIA assassinating people. ``It means civil liberties have gone out the door. ``If you go to an airport at the moment, or any government or public building, you have to justify your existence to someone in a uniform every 10m.'' It's in this environment, in the dark shadow cast by the modern terrorism, that it would appear governments -- the American Government, at least -- are endeavouring to exploit public fear and implement surveillance systems that will live on long after the fear has passed. In recent weeks in America, ``Carnivore'' has become a new buzz-word. Carnivore, or the DCS-1000 as it is otherwise known, is a mechanism developed by the FBI to survey internet communications, allowing the organisation to intercept and analyse huge amounts of e-mails and all sorts of internet traffic. When the existence of the system first came to light last year, it caused an uproar in the US. Now, suddenly in this new paranoid environment, it's being touted as a firewall against terrorism. ``Which is utter nonsense,'' says Irene Graham, executive director of Electronic Frontiers Australia. ``One of the biggest problems with Carnivore is when it's put on an ISP (an Internet Service Provider) system, it collects vast amounts of information on anyone who's using that system. ``And the American public is expected to believe the FBI only selects information about suspected criminals that they're targeting. But there are considerable concerns about the amount of information that the police can collect about people who are not suspects.'' Graham explains that here in Australia, law enforcement agencies have the power to ask an ISP to hand over information on particular users through the Telecommunications Interception Act (1979), but a warrant or similar authorisation is required in each instance. ``To say something like Carnivore should be allowed to become common is the same as saying the police should be allowed to automatically monitor every single phone call, that they should be able to survey people just in case that information should ever be of use to them.'' Cameron Murphy believes that people's willingness to accept personal intrusions such as the Carnivore system borders on exploitation of a world in mourning. ``There are a couple of fundamental things,'' reasons Murphy. ``It was a terrible tragedy in the United States, but it was a crime, not an act of war. And the appropriate way for it to be dealt with would be to bring the perpetrators to justice. ``For all the rhetoric that we've heard about the importance of our democracies in the Western world and that we have to maintain values, the worrying thing is that Governments are undermining their own democracies to fight this. ``And that's not the right approach.''
