The head of Home Affairs wants the public's help to rebuild national security laws from the ground up in order for everyday citizens to feel confident their every move is not being surveilled.
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In a panel discussion on reforming Australia's electronic surveillance laws organised by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Home Affairs Department secretary Mike Pezzullo said fears of mass surveillance had "crept" into discussions surrounding changes to streamline how law enforcement and intelligence agencies track down criminals online.
The senior bureaucrat said he and the Attorney-General's Department, which have been tasked with reforming the laws, wanted to rebuild the national intelligence community's powers from the ground up, rather than just "renovating" the legislation already there.
He said every Australian should be confident it would "highly unusual" for any of their data to be the subject of criminal inquiry, provided they're not engaging in criminal activity.
"As we move hopefully away from a notion, which has crept into the discussion around surveillance of the mass ingestion of data almost for a store-it-and-use-it-later basis ... that everyday citizens will be able to go about their daily business," he said.
"That they should feel a very high level of confidence that their communications, their devices, their interaction on the internet, is, in fact, not the subject of any kind of government scrutiny or attention whatsoever."
Cyber security expert Rachel Falk said it was important the public "have a clear-eyed view" of what the government wanted to see changed.
"[The UK] went to great lengths in public reporting to explain the cases, the contexts and the oversight mechanisms and why these warrants were necessary and what they would achieve," she said.
"While it may seem intrusive some of the powers, at the same time, intrusion is counterbalanced with warranted access, limited, and time bound."
The proposed changes, which draw from recommendations handed down by former ASIO boss Dennis Richardson, aim to streamline Australia's spying and intelligence operations.
Australian Federal Police deputy commissioner Ian McCartney said the proposals are not to reduce oversight but provide "simplification in terms of the powers that we utilise".
He added there were more than 20 law enforcement warrants for accessing information depending on the media in which it was held due to decades of "renovating" laws based on old or antiquated technologies.
"We want it to be tech-neutral and futureproof so we're not continuing to have this conversation over the years," Mr McCartney said.
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Mr Pezzullo said the discussion about government overreach failed to consider many Australians already gave much more personal and intimate information away to private tech companies overseas.
He said this societal pivot to "surveillance capitalism" meant that the data of many Australians was in turn being used as a commodity.
"Everything the government will do will always be purposefully designed by the Parliament [to be] much more restricted than that," he said.
Attorney-General's Department secretary Katherine Jones conceded, however, that government safeguards still needed the trust of the public to be "absolutely sound and as strong as they can possibly be".
"We do need to recognise whilst there's a broader conversation about what we understand privacy, what we're prepared to either offer up or share in terms of our personal information," she said.
"When it comes to government agencies accessing that, we need to have the most robust protections in place to ensure appropriate use."
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