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Australia Under Surveillance

Frank Moorhouse

$34.99

Paperback

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English
Vintage
01 December 2014
ASIO has kept a file on Frank Moorhouse since he was seventeen. Now Frank has decided it is time to report on ASIO.

This year ASIO has extended its surveillance powers, made the issuing of warrants easier and limited the freedom of journalists. At a time when the government has raised the terrorist alert level to 'high' we are facing the question of what degree of terrorist threat we are prepared to endure so as to retain freedoms of expression and what might loosely be called the 'traditional privacies'.

The paradox is an old one: is a secret agency needed for our safety as a democracy? If so, how does a democracy manage a secret agency without losing control of it? What constitutes an offence against national security? And what are we to make of WikiLeaks and socially conscious hackers and whistleblowers? Do we need a renewal of the bargain between the citizen and the secret agencies, as unreliable as it may be, as we all go into the glare and the maze of controlled and uncontrollable data collection and its consequences?

We are entering a new era, where nothing can be assumed to be private, especially at the governmental level.  More than ever before, our future is unforeseeable, but if in the unforeseeable we see a glimmer of dangerous things, perhaps we should remember that positive things can also be unforeseeable.

By:  
Imprint:   Vintage
Country of Publication:   Australia
Dimensions:   Height: 235mm,  Width: 156mm,  Spine: 24mm
Weight:   429g
ISBN:   9780857985972
ISBN 10:   0857985973
Pages:   256
Publication Date:  
Audience:   General/trade ,  ELT Advanced
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active

Frank Moorhouse was born in the coastal town of Nowra, NSW. He worked as an editor of small-town newspapers and as an administrator and in the 1970s became a full-time writer. He has written fiction, non fiction, screenplays and essays and edited many collections of writing. Forty Seventeen was given a laudatory full-page review by Angela Carter in the New York Times and was named Book of the Year by the Age and 'moral winner' of the Booker Prize by the London magazine Blitz. Grand Days, the first novel in The Edith Trilogy, won the SA Premier's Award for Fiction. Dark Palace won the Miles Franklin Literary Award and was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Literary Award, the Victorian Premier's Literary Award and the Age Book of the Year Award. Frank has undertaken numerous fellowships and his work has been translated into several languages. He was made a member of the Order of Australia for services to literature in 1985 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from Griffith University in 1997.

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