Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus has mostly got headlines as one of the Gillard Government's better-performing ministers. Last week, however, he managed to trigger deep anxieties about the Government's attitude to the relationship between citizens, the law and those who enforce it.
Asked about the startling revelation at a Senate estimates hearing that federal police obtain phone and internet records without a warrant nearly 1000 times a week, Dreyfus was curtly dismissive. If warrants had to be sought before police could acquire the information, he said, 'law enforcement would grind to a halt'.
Whaaaat? Is the government's chief law officer really saying that judicial warrants, which protect privacy by authorising the interception of telecommunications only on suspicion of criminal conduct, are an obstacle to effective policing?
No, Dreyfus didn't quite say that. But his answer conveyed no recognition of the alarm that many people, across the political spectrum, will feel at knowing how easily police and other government agencies can obtain what they had presumed would be private information.
Those feelings of alarm may diminish when it is understood that the information police garner so easily is not the content of telecommunications but so-called 'metadata' — phone numbers, and the date, time and duration of calls. Warrants are not required to obtain metadata, which is why, on the Senate estimates testimony of Australian Federal Police deputy commissioner Michael Phelan, the AFP made 43,362 requests for metadata in the last financial year and 50,841 in 2010–11.
The unease, however, will not entirely disappear. It is not unreasonable for people to expect that whom they call, as much as what might be said during a call, is their own business and that police shouldn't have automatic access to their records.
The Greens agree, and their communications spokesman Scott Ludlum is sponsoring a bill that would impose a warrant regime for metadata requests as well as for direct intercepts of phone and email traffic. But the major parties have remained silent on the issue, apart from Dreyfus' untested claim that routine policing now depends upon being able to keep track of who is calling whom.
Unease at the AFP's admissions about metadata requests coincided with a greater, global anxiety about the activities of the US National Security Agency (NSA). In a series of stories published in The Guardian, Edward Snowden, a former employee of a NSA consultancy company who is now in hiding in Hong Kong, described the NSA's PRISM project, through