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"State of
By Susan Bryce
Of the great issues on our political
agenda — the environment, conservation, peace, nuclear disarmament, poverty and
debt — the protection of privacy hardly rates a mention, and yet it is one of
the most important.
The protection of a citizens
privacy from state surveillance is the difference between a government that is
bearable, and one that is over-bearing; it is the difference between
governments that prefer security to freedom.
As former Communist countries supposedly
throw off the shackles of totalitarianism, Western nations are clamouring to
number their citizens like cattle and to implement surveillance and monitoring
methods that totalitarian governments only ever dreamed about.
Universal
Identifier
Since the defeat of the 1986 Australia
Card Bill, successive Australian governments have been contemplating defacto identity numbering schemes.
The key to these proposals is the quest
by the state to establish a universal identifier (used by all departments) as
opposed to a systems identifier (used by only one department).
A universal identifier provides
"linkage between different systems... consolidating the system, so that
information on individuals can be swapped and pooled." (Packard 1978)
Government
Departments
Historically, two government bodies, the
Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and the Health Insurance Commission (HIC) have
been the driving forces behind attempts to introduce universal identity
numbering schemes.
The ATO was the first department to
attempt a defacto numbering system. The Taxation Laws
Amendment (Tax File Numbers) Act 1988, allowed the ATO to issue a unique number
— the Tax File Number to taxpayers, and people receiving social security
payments.
The Health Insurance Comm-ission
devised the Australia Card and was to be the manager of the National Identity
Numbering System (NINS). From the outset, the HIC foreshadowed that the Card
would be unacceptable to citizens who valued their privacy and freedom. To this
end, the HIC decided that in the face of public adversity the Card could be
introduced by stealth.
In a leaked Outline Plan for the
introduction of the Australia Card, the HIC cautioned: "It will be
important to minimise any adverse public reaction to implementation of the
system. One possibility would be to use a staged approach for implementation,
whereby only less sensitive data are held on the system initially with the
facility to input additional data at a later stage." (Walker G, 1987) The
inevitability of gradualness became the order of the day.
In the first part of its "staged
approach", the Health Insurance Commission Regulations Amend-ment (1991) enabled the HIC to do anything required to
manage and improve the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, including carte blanche
powers to devise and implement measures to prevent or detect fraud and
overpayments.
In January 1996, a report by the Council
of Australian Governments’ Working Group on Health and Community Services
proposed an enhanced Medicare smart card called the "universal patient
record" (ie: a universal identifier). The smart
card would record basic data each time a patient dealt with the health and/or
welfare system.
The report recomm-ended
the establishment of a centralised "health and welfare bank": a
greatly expanded version of the current federal Health Insurance Commission,
which even 17 years ago, was the worlds largest online medical claims processing
system.
Following on from research conducted in
the
Smart Cards
- Big Brothers Little Helpers
Smart cards are plastic cards containing
a computer microchip that stores thousands of pages of information. Smart cards
could store digitised pictures, fingerprints, criminal
records, medical records, banking details, immigration status and a host of
other information.
Smart cards are either stored value
disposable plastic cards, like phone cards, or reloadable
cards with microchips. Electronic "cash" can be reloaded onto the
cards from ATMs, EFTPOS, home telephones, or by tapping into subscriber
television terminals.
Smart cards have been piloted widely in
the capital cities
The Big Eye
Technology has permitted an enormous leap
forward in terms of surveillance. Even in George Orwell’s 1984, citizens
were safe from the omnipresent telescreen
"eye" if they were in darkened areas of their homes. Today the police
and military have infrared light cameras that can take high quality pictures in
the dark.
Security cameras that can tilt, pan and zoom peer from the tops of buildings and can
observe people up to 3km away.
l In Adelaide, police at the State
Administration Centre in Victoria Square control 13 cameras set up to monitor
the Rundel Mall. Police watch images on five screens
— four of which are divided into quarters to show vision simultaneously.
l NSW City Rail introduced pencil thin
cameras on trains in an attempt to reduce vandalism. More than 50 stations have
closed circuit television cameras for staff to monitor activity on the
platforms.
l At Darling Harbour, citizens are kept
under surveillance by 25 cameras during daylight, and infrared cameras by
night. These are just a few examples of the use of big eye spy cameras.
l Surveillance cameras also monitor our
federal and state highways, banks, ATMs, supermarkets, government buildings,
petrol stations, national parks, defence installations and airports.
We have now reached the stage where it is
very difficult (if not impossible) for us even to begin to establish any kind
of control over our privacy in terms of data collection and surveillance.
Australian Parliamentary Paper 173/1986,
"Towards A Cashless Society" detailed how compulsory use of EFTPOS
could substitute for many of the proposed uses of the Australia Card and showed
how EFTPOS could be used to obtain detailed surveillance data.
During the past ten years, Australians
have embraced surveill-ance technology. ATM and
EFTPOS use in this country is among the highest in the world (Greenwood, R.,
1994).
The Payments Systems Council, an umbrella
body for the banking industry, recently published figures which show that
Australians have more access to EFTPOS facilities than most Western nations,
including the
Figures from the Australian Bankers’
Association show that Australians conduct 40 per cent of all retail purchases
on plastic and that the use of EFTPOS leapt 40 per cent in 1994.
Databases
Australian governments have justified the
formation of databases for the most unlikely purposes. The former Labor Government extolled the virtues of forming a national
database to keep track of people who had been immunised (and convers-ely, identify those who had not).
We all remember the Deakin Centre saga,
where a "telephone exchange" was found to be masquerading as a
National Computer Centre — the Deakin Centre. In the white-wash that
followed Wilson Tuckey, the then Shadow Minister for Health and the Identity
Card, confirmed that the Centre housed computer equip-ment
for Social Security, Taxation, Telecom, Aviation and Defence.
At the time, the Hawke govern-ment maintained that although comp-uters
were housed together there was no interlinking of databases. Today the government
openly admits comp-uter linking of various
departments.
In February 1994, 142 federal, state and
territorial Australian govern-ment departments,
were linked to a new interactive computer network known as Min-Net.
"All government departments in
Lean Times
for Privacy
In 1992, the Attorney General’s
department unveiled the Law Enforcement Access Network (LEAN). LEAN was
ostensibly established as a fraud control facility, with a central computer
database acting as a "lending library".
LEAN enables government agencies with law
enforcement and protection of public revenue respons-ibilities,
access to Australia-wide corporate and land data. It is now believed that LEAN
has greatly expanded its capacities to include far more data than its original
charter specified.
A 1992 Federal Government fact sheet
written by the LEAN Project Team states: "[T]he establishment and
operation of the LEAN facility is not contrary to the Privacy Act 1988 because
exemptions to the Inform-ation Privacy Principles
apply." LEAN was established via regulation, rather than legislation and
is exempt to the 1988 Privacy Act and Schedules because it is used for law
enforce-ment purposes.
The agencies believed to have access to
LEAN are: Australian Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, Australian Customs
Service, Attor-ney General’s Department, Austral-ian Federal Police, Australian Taxation Office, Department
of Education, Employment & Training, Department of Defence, Office of the
Director of Public Prosecutions, National Crime Authority, State and Territory
Governments, Department of Administrative Services, Health Insurance
Commission, state police forces, state Tax Offices and the Department of Social
Security. AUST-RAC (formerly the Cash Transactions Reports Agency) and the
Department of Immigration, Local Government and Ethnic Affairs are also
believed to have access to LEAN.
It was Adolf Hitler
who said: "What good fortune for the Govern-ment
that people do not think." Our freedom tomorrow depends upon our vigilant
thoughts today. We must consider the potential for the surrep-titious
elements of surveillance techn-ology and identity
numbering should they fall into the wrong hands.
It is our obligation as citizens of a
"democracy" to maintain a wariness against
governments that would use information as power. It is our duty as "free
citizens" to question the motives and intent of governments and
corporations that use monitoring, surveillance and numbering to imply that law
abiding people are guilty until proven innocent.
References
Anonymous, "Security is all in
vain", The Courier Mail,
Aubin, T., "Australia Card III: a fait
accompli", The Australian,
Austrac., Annual Report 1992-1993, AGPS
Australian Council of Science and
Technology, "Towards A Cashless Society", Parliamentary Paper
173/1986, AGPS
Cathro, A., "Goodbye to cash", Daily
Telegraph Mirror,
Clarke, R., "Tax File Number a defacto I.D. Card", The Australian
Coffey, M., "Privacy concern tempers
health ‘smart card’ plan", The Weekend Australian, 3-4 January,
1996, p.5
Commonwealth Government Parliam-entary Standing Committee on Public Works,
"Telephone Exchange Building, Deakin, ACT."
Cribb, J., "Secure passport jumps airport
queue", The Australian,
Delvecchio, J., "Big Brother’s eyes see
all", Sydney Morning Herald,
Dow, S., "Conceivable need to
bar-code baby", The Age,
Fitzgerald, K., (1989) "The Quest
for intruder proof computer systems", IEEE Spectrum, August
Fox, B., "ID cards for a smart new
world", New Scientist,
Happell, C., "Privacy row may scuttle tax
file plan", The Courier Mail,
Susan Bryce is an
investigative journalist and researcher whose interests include issues which
affect individual freedom, environmental health, surveillance technology and
global politics.
She can be contacted c/- Mapleton Post Office, QLD 4560.