>We will get there. Things like GDPR are starting to grapple with the subject

I'm jealous of your optimism, but I'm in Australia and our politicians don't care about the freedom of our citizens. The exact opposite, in fact.

They have already brought in draconian metadata retention laws [1], despite the ministers involved not even being able to explain what metadata is [2], and are now trying to bring in a bill to literally install malware on our phones with no judicial oversight. This all happens unopposed in a bipartisan way, I suppose because no politician has the spine necessary to defend a position that, even though good for the vast majority of people, could be trivially misrepresented as being "soft on terror".

I'm as much in favor of stopping terrorism and most other crimes as anyone else, however I am far from convinced that blanket spying is an effective way to achieve those aims, and the negatives are so great. There has been no discussion on whether the loss of our freedoms is worth the actual damage. The people did not vote on these laws. Instead it is secret this and secret that, and everything is by default classified for "security reasons".

On a population scale the losses from terrorism have been minimal. Far too minimal to justify such massive changes to our fundamental way of life with no provided metrics in support, or any way provided to measure how effective those changes have been.

And what are we protecting if not freedom? Because a world where everywhere we go, and everything we do or discuss is recorded forever by Big Brother for later analysis is not freedom. There should be a right to privacy.

I guess that's why the people were not consulted. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Although in this case they haven't even asked for forgiveness - they're not asking at all, and when discovered, doubling down!

Such surreptitious behavior does not inspire trust in people in charge of the greatest surveillance apparatus the world has ever known.

Frankly I do not trust our security services to safely handle all our personal data. There will be abuses of that information as well as false positives. Also data breaches and leaks. The government is not adept enough at data security to handle the multitude of hackers that will want to gain access to the worlds largest honeypot of blackmail information.

With the metadata retention laws of 2015, there has been an "authority creep" to now 81 entities who have requested that data, most of those agencies being unrelated to terror.

When the legislation was introduced, cutting down on the number of organisations that could access the data without a warrant was used as a selling point by the government, something which now seems laughable.

Centrelink is on that list of entities that have accessed that data, despite them having no authority under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 to request metadata. [3]

The safest thing is not to collect all that dangerous data at all. There is enough data available with a warrant now (eg location data from phones) to investigate crimes. In the old days, actual police work was necessary. Every contact leaves a trace.

Anecdotal, and possibly I'm just uninformed about this, but it seems that almost every time there is a terrorist incident, the people responsible are already on some watchlist and known to the authorities.

[1] https://sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2017/07/31/new-data-...
[2] https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/george-bran...
[3] https://www.computerworld.com.au/article/641100/digital-righ...