ALP & GREENS Living in DENIAL On Friday, the director-general of ASIO David Irvine and the deputy commissioner of the Australian Federal Police Andrew Colvin tried to address some of the misinformation the ABC and Fairfax media have been promulgating. The principal points Irvine made was that though the current terrorism threat level is “medium”, that is, a terrorist attack is likely and could occur, there is increased concern that there could be multiple attacks in “a dozen different places”. With as many as 150 Australian-born jihadists fighting in Syria and elsewhere with murderous terrorist organisations, he did not need to expand on the nature of the threat. Both men stressed that the changes they sought from the government were necessary, in line with international security requirements, and essential to meet the changing communications technologies. They were, said Irvine, an “absolutely crucial tool to protect Australia and Australians”. Colvin used the identification and capture of ABC staffer Jill Meagher’s killer as an example of the use of metadata to illustrate the need to access stored communications information. Without accessing the metadata, he said police “would not have solved the crime as quickly as we did”. But they both also stressed that such material was also valuable in eliminating suspects from suspicion. Which leaves the civil liberty argument and the discrimination argument mounted by the Muslims, Labor and the Greens looking pathetic. The proposals do not represent an expansion of powers, rather they are designed to ensure that the data currently available remains available. With evil braggarts including convicted terrorist Khaled Sharrouf and Mohamed Elo-mar, who was pictured holding the severed heads of Syrian government soldiers, threatening to enact the same sort of horrific crimes in Australia, the need to give the security authorities the assistance they seek is obvious. Labor and the Greens can suffer whatever electoral backlash occurs when one of the nut jobs breaches the security barrier, and there have been a number of horrendous attacks thwarted through good intelligence and policing.
Posted on: Sat, 09 Aug 2014 22:44:40 +0000
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