Policerazzi

A Queensland criminal lawyer has claimed that legislative amendments designed to bring the state's surveillance practices into line with other states' will impinge on privacy more than those before.

He stressed his point by saying that they would now be able to monitor all communications, "be they speech, music or sounds, data, text, images or signals."

Jokes aside about the type of person who'd find those things interesting enough to "eavesdrop" on, what Mr Cockburn fails to mention is that in the USA a group of Attorneys General had to subpoena MySpace to ban 90,000 pedophiles who were utilizing the site for unacceptable and illegal activities, and a similar situation existed with Facebook.

Though some might argue that privacy is well worth protecting, and that there are some officers who aren't anything to write home about, having some checks and balances on public forums isn't necessarily all bad.

The lawyer called the Public Interest Monitor(PIM) a 'toothless tiger,' always a great formula for winning friends and influencing people, and said they would be unable to stem the abuse of the Qld Police's new super powers.

Poor old PIM, incidentally, has lobbied the government for greater funding with which to monitor their potentially wrongful activities - hmmn...