American journalist Glenn Greenwald—who famously broke a report on Edward Snowden‘s historic NSA leak in June 2013 with the Guardian US—has publicly criticised Australia’s “mass surveillance” in an appearance on ABC’s Lateline last night.
According to Greenwald, the Australian government’s surveillance practice is rampant: “Australia is one of the most aggressive countries that engage in mass surveillance as a member of the Five Eyes partnership,” and added that we have been flying under the radar while doing so, claiming Australia is “probably the country that has gotten away with things the most in terms of the Snowden revelations.”
Greenwald cited the Five Eyes partnership, an alliance between Australia, the US, the UK, Canada and New Zealand – which was linked to an alleged hack of the google app store last month.
The rhetoric and reasoning surrounding the retention of Australian journalists’ data was also criticised by Greenwald, who claimed that the extent of a terrorism threat in Australia was exaggerated: “If you are an Australian citizen, you are more likely to die by being struck by lightning or by going out to dinner tonight and contracting a fatal intestinal illness than dying in a terrorism attack.”
But meanwhile, in the United States, the USA Freedom Act passed on Tuesday—a landmark reform that signalled the end of the NSA’s bulk collection of data, significantly reducing the government’s involvement with data retention, and passing any data collection on to telcos—a move which was unequivocally spurred by Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing.
Today, on the two-year anniversary of The Guardian’s report, The NSA Files, Edward Snowden has written a stirring op-ed for The New York Times from Moscow—where he is currently seeking asylum from the European Union before his three-year Russian residency permit expires—saying, “This is the power of the informed public,” over this week’s data collection reforms in the US.
Snowden also claims, “Spymasters in Australia, Canada and France have exploited recent tragedies to seek intrusive new powers despite evidence such programs would not have prevented attacks.”
Read Snowden’s whole piece here.
Australia, catch up.
