The Liberals’ new anti-terror laws and plan for mass internet surveillance have earned Australia a place on the watch list of global human rights violators.

Not the first time, the World Report 2015, published by Human Rights Watch, has listed Australia for multiple abuses including the indefinite detention of refugees, the 10-12 year life expectancy gap of Indigenous people and now for its crackdown on civil liberties.

The Australian director of Human Rights Watch, Elaine Pearson, stated: “Australia’s new counterterrorism laws mean journalists, whistleblowers, and activists will risk prison for certain disclosures – even if it’s in the public interest.”

Under new laws listed in the ASIO Act, it is now an offence to make “unauthorised disclosures of information related to special intelligence operations”. Australian journalists, or whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden, now face up to 10 years in prison. One of the most intrusive laws gives police and ASIO the right to access a limitless number of computers on a “network” with a single warrant. The broad use of the term “network” in effect means that any computer in Australia connected to the internet can now be monitored, seized and searched.

One of the most controversial elements of the Liberals’ agenda is Malcolm Turnbull and attorney general George Brandis’ plan for retaining metadata. Human Rights Watch’s report singled out the government for its “proposed additional measures that would force telecommunications companies to retain metadata for a period of two years so Australian intelligence organizations can access the data”.

If the Liberals manage to push this through, the full metadata records of every Australian will be stored for at least two years. Which websites you visit, who you email, what you search for, who you call – all of this could be stored. In December, Australian ISPs were asked the cost of implementing such a scheme, and the additional cost if this timeframe were increased to three years. Whether this is what the government will propose is unclear.

In a 2014 National Press Club address, then ASIO head David Irvine warned against too much critical discussion of these proposals. He stressed that we must “avoid paranoia, including evoking the spectre of Big Brother, 1984, mass surveillance and mass violations of privacy”. But this is exactly what is happening.

With or without Turnbull and Brandis’s metadata retention scheme, data are currently retained and accessed by governments – just for shorter periods of time. In 2013-14, more than 500,000 requests for metadata were made to Australian telecommunications companies. That number doesn’t include ASIO requests.

But don’t take my word for it. Irvine was incredibly blunt when he boasted: “We have been using metadata, as it seems to be called these days, for many years … [we] use it as frequently as any of us in the old days used to go and look up a telephone book.”

He then warned the government that if it changed the law to require warrants to access metadata, “not only is ASIO going to come to a halt but all the law enforcement in Australia is going to come to a halt”.

Straight from the horse’s mouth.

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