What if they recorded every click you make?

What if they recorded every click you make?

How would you feel if your internet service provider (ISP) kept a record of every article you read online, every email you sent or received, all location data collected by your phone, every call you made, everything you bought online?

How would you feel if it was made an offense to refuse to hand over your computer passwords?

The Attorney-General Nicola Roxon set up a Parliamentary Inquiry last month that could require ISPs to store all this information on you for at least two years and make it available to government to access.

The government’s discussion paper doesn’t provide any justification for these vastly increased surveillance powers.

We have very limited time to have our voices heard on this and tell the government that we are citizens, not suspects.

Submissions are due on Monday 20 August. Please find out more and send your submission today.

The Greens believe there are better ways to prevent identity theft, online crime and acts of political violence that don’t turn all citizens into suspects, eroding the very freedoms that our security agencies were intended to protect.

If we don’t stand up for our democratic rights to privacy, freedom of expression and the presumption of innocence, we will lose them.

As Julian Assange and his Wikileaks publishing organisation have discovered, governments around the world are demanding secrecy for themselves and total transparency for citizens. We believe this has the equation the wrong way round.

Send your submission today to tell Nicola Roxon know that Australians want their democratic rights protected, as enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Yours sincerely,

Scott Ludlam

P.S. Security agencies obtained nearly a quarter of a million requests for access to our telecommunications data in 2010-11. Enough is enough.