Officials from two advocacy groups say that Australians’ privacy protections have eroded more than those of citizens’ of other countries in the post-9/11 world, The Sydney Morning Herald reports. “We’ve gone further than most other countries in relation to the scope of counter?terrorism laws…partly because we have no federal charter of rights which would provide necessary criteria against which to judge the appropriateness of national security laws, whereas in the UK, Canada, the U.S. and every European country, they do,” said Liberty Victoria President Spencer Zifcak. An Australian Privacy Foundation official said the privacy commissioner is “buried inside” the information access office, creating “a potential conflict of interest.”
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