The Weekly Cybers #42
Victorian court recognises a right to privacy, NACC suffers a blow to its credibility, and more.
Welcome
It’s another relatively quiet week before parliament returns for its final sittings for the year, and party-political combat has dominated the news — which we don’t cover here — so this is a short one.
There’s been a significant court decision relating to our right to privacy, however, and quite a blow to the credibility of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC).
Disclosure: Your writer has accepted a free flight upgrade only once, on a short hop from Las Vegas to Los Angeles in 2011, after attending a cybersecurity conference where McAfee paid for things. He has never even met Gina Reinhart.
Courts ahead of government in protecting privacy
The County Court of Victoria seems to be working faster than the government in recognising a right to privacy.
In a lengthy decision published last week, Judge My Anh Tran ruled that a man had breached the privacy of his daughter by writing a true-crime book and giving media interviews about surviving a murder attempt by her mother.
The information he disclosed included material from counselling sessions and private conversations.
As the Guardian reported:
Tran said that while there was already a category of case involving a breach of confidence that was founded on the “fundamental common law right to privacy” that “the case for recognising this existing category of case as a standalone cause of action, separate and distinct from the action for breach of confidence, is compelling”.
The woman was awarded some $40,000 in damages, being $30,000 for invasion of privacy and $10,000 for breach of confidence.
Meanwhile, the federal parliament is still considering its reforms to the Privacy Act 1988, with a Senate committee report on new legislation due 14 November — legislation which covers only some of the recommendations in a long-running review.
NACC chair caught in robodebt dramas
The chair of the National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) Paul Brereton should have “removed himself from related decision-making processes and limited his exposure to the relevant factual information” when the agency decided not to further investigate the robodebt drama, according to a report (PDF) released on Wednesday.
Brereton had delegated the decision to a deputy “to avoid any possible perception of a conflict of interest” — he said he had a “close association” with one of the people potentially under investigation through the army reserve — but he still took part in meetings discussing the decision.
As NACC Inspector Gail Furness wrote in her report:
I find that the Commissioner engaged in officer misconduct as defined in section 184(3) of the NACC Act in that the steps taken by the Commissioner to manage his conflict of interest arose from a mistake of law or a mistake of fact as natural justice required the Commissioner not to participate as he did in the decision-making with respect to Referred Person 1.
Geoffrey Watson SC, a former counsel assisting to the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), told the Guardian that Brereton should “think carefully about whether his continuing role is in the best interests of the NACC”.
NACC will now reconsider whether to investigate robodebt.
Meanwhile attorney-general Mark Dreyfus is “giving consideration” to releasing the restricted section of the robodebt royal commission report.
Also in the news
- The Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) says it’s making “unprecedented” investments to beat advancing surveillance technology.
- The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) has started selling its top secret cloud to other government agencies.
- Once more, Australian police want new laws and AI face recognition, having previously been burned by using Clearview AI and other such tools on the sly.
- Communications minister Michelle Rowland has received the report on the independent statutory review of the Online Safety Act 2021. “The Government will consider the extensive recommendations made by Ms Rickard and respond in due course,” though there was once talk of passing new legislation by the end of this year.
- The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is taking Optus to court over what it calls unconscionable conduct when “selling telecommunications goods and services to hundreds of consumers, that they often did not want or need, and in some cases then pursuing consumers for debts resulting from these sales” — mostly in Darwin, and mostly to Indigenous Australians. Optus’s interim CEO has apologised, saying this was “unacceptable and completely out of step with our company values”.
- Analysis at The Conversation says Australia’s new digital ID scheme falls short of global privacy standards.
- A piece at the Lowy Institute’s The Interpreter asks: Is Australia ready for deepfake elections?
- ABC News has an interesting backgrounder on autonomous weapons in the Australian military and the ethical issues thereof.
- A vast number of government agencies tabled their annual reports this week. You can grab them all by filtering for them at parliament’s Tabled documents database.
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Elsewhere
- Western Sydney University has disclosed its third cyber incident this year. In a statement released on Thursday it says that the personal information that was accessed ranges from the usual names and addresses to tuition fee information, enrolment data, and academic results.
- The Australian Nursing Home Foundation has had 1.5TB of data stolen, allegedly.
- UTS research has found that English Wikipedia “reflects an anthropocentric and neo-colonial image of Australia as a place”. And then that skewed view feeds the AI.
DOES SOMETHING IN THE EMAIL LOOK WRONG? If there’s ever a factual error, editing mistake, or confusing typo, it’ll be corrected in the web archives.
Inquiries of note
Nothing new this week.
What’s next?
The House of Representatives returns this Monday 4 November, while the Senate holds Supplementary Budget Estimates hearings. There’s then a one-week break before what are scheduled to be the final two weeks of sitting for the year.
The Weekly Cybers is a personal look at what the Australian government has been saying and doing in the digital and cyber realms, on various adjacent topics, and whatever else interests me, Stilgherrian, published every Friday afternoon (nearly).
If I’ve missed anything, or if there’s any specific items you’d like me to follow, please let me know.
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This is not specifically a cyber *security* newsletter. For that that I recommend Risky Biz News and Cyber Daily, among others.