Australia’s New Online Surveillance Push
Australia’s new $74M Counter-Terrorism Online Centre raises urgent questions about surveillance overreach, civil liberties, and who gets to define extremism.
The Australian government has announced $74 million over two years for a new Counter-Terrorism Online Centre led by ASIO and the Australian Federal Police.
Monitoring the Digital Landscape
This centre will monitor “high-risk online spaces” including social media, gaming platforms, Discord channels, encrypted chats like WhatsApp, online forums, and the dark web. Teams of analysts and sophisticated AI tools will scour these spaces for extremist material and work to disrupt potential threats.
The stated concern is that too many young Australian men are being radicalised online. While some level of monitoring presumably already occurs (we’re unsure exactly how much), this formalises and expands it. In plain terms, we’re being told the government must spy on its citizens. For our safety, of course.
This announcement follows the recommendations of the interim report of the Royal Commission into Anti-Semitism and Social Cohesion (announced after the horrific terrorist attack at Bondi late last year) which exposed serious intelligence failures despite clear red flags.
Nobody wants to see young men drawn into violent and dangerous ideologies, yet I also don’t think many want to see surveillance that casts a wide net over young Australian men.
Expanding Powers Without Oversight
This coincides with ASIO expanding its interrogation powers by making permanent what were intended to be temporary post-9/11 measures. These compulsory questioning powers allow ASIO to force individuals, including non-suspects and those as young as 14, to appear for questioning that can last many hours, with up to five years’ imprisonment for non-compliance. What began as emergency powers are now, as usual, being entrenched without regular parliamentary oversight.
Just like with “hate speech” laws, the critical question remains: Who gets to define what counts as “extremism”? Vague rhetoric about “radicalisation” is instead being used in ways that can be interpreted broadly.
The United Kingdom offers a sobering warning. There, citizens have been imprisoned for social media posts. Those raising concerns about extremism are too often the ones being punished.
I don’t want Australia to go down the same path as the United Kingdom, where legitimate concerns are treated as the real threat.
The government should focus squarely on the ideologies driving actual violence instead of casting a wide net over everyday Australians.
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Republished with thanks to Senator Alex Antic. Image courtesy of Adobe.
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Its claims such as “young Australian men are being radicalised online” that tell me its mostly about gaining more control over social media for the purposes of censorship. Because this phrase simply means that men are not buying into the propaganda that is being pushed on everyone, instead rebelling against it. Whereas the women are buying into it because they’re not a problem. Yet the women are problems in reality with their activism, and are the main targets of the fearmongering that takes place.
Is this what AFP or ASIO people signed up for? How come there’s plenty of money for sinister things but not things that we really need?
Whatever happened to “Habeas Corpus ” which protected citizens ? We are going down a dark path of dictatorship like Stalin’s Russia with its 50 forms of torture, etc . Be informed and read ex-communist and victim Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago ” . I’ve had 2 tries at finishing it, but, found it too awful, I had to stop. One day soon, I’ll finish reading it.