Australian Spy Agency Offered To Share Data About Ordinary Citizens

An anonymous reader writes "Australian spy agencies offered to share personal information about law-abiding Australian citizens with overseas governments. This includes legal, religious and medical information, which was shared about this Canadian women. Departments in the Australian Public service has also been caught spying on citizens. Even low-ranking public servants can look up information such as phone calls and email metadata without needing a warrant. The target is not notified."

Re:Privacy != Paranoia

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really no, you had the problem upside down. You need to get data about the governments and corporations.

See, in your world what happens is that snooping is illegal, and it still happens but you've said it's illegal and when occasionally the cracks show and you realise you were spied on you rant and rave but ultimately you can't do anything about it. Like now.

Whereas if you demand transparency then yes, everybody knows you like furry porn or whatever, but you now know if the government are trying to hide anything from you because to hide something it would need to avoid the transparency that everybody would know they were entitled to.

Re:The womans case was her fault.

[TheP4st]

The book were published in 2009 [amazon.com], the agent that prevented her entry specifically referred [networkworld.com] to a hospitalization that took place in 2012. How did they know about events that should be shielded under patient privacy laws and took place years after publishing of mentioned book? Unless you can point to a source describing her 2012 hospitalization that were publicly available at the time of her entry denial, then I'd say that her story have a very interesting place in this matter.

Re:Privacy != Paranoia

[shutdown -p now]

If you want to see a colorful illustration of the above, find and watch a movie called "Lives of Others". It's a German film about Stasi surveillance in the late GDR period and its abuse by people in the system for blackmail etc.