No doubting the veracity of this occurrence, but it is baffling that it happened nonetheless - federal government departments here (Australia) are usually cautious to a paranoid level when it comes to people even looking at information. I remember cases when curious internal staff members at the tax and social security offices being sacked on the spot for merely doing searches on celebrity names without due reason.<p>Both my sisters work in law enforcement agencies, and tell me that their every action on their computer systems is tracked and logged. Once when my younger sister worked in the Traffic infringement section of the local police department, I asked her to check up if I was actually pinged by a remote speed camera that morning as I suspected I was. She refused, on the grounds that any such searches were tracked, and if it was found she did a search against a vehicle belonging to a close family member, it would trigger an internal investigation by the ethics team.
The power corporations are accumulating with information on intimate customer behavior and the glacial response of society to this is a daily refrain on HN. Has anyone seen a comprehensive, or at least collected, list of canonical examples of strong arguments for:<p>* Raising awareness amongst non-technical folks that such incredible stocking up of PII can raise complicated ethical risks?<p>* Giving legislative representatives practical and defensible reasons to not just go with the flow and actually have a chance to offer smart legislative options without being shot down?<p>This particular example is alarming - I can picture plenty of corporations that wouldn't mind the idea of "customer service" representatives casually raising the prospect of releasing customer PII in order to "show their side of the story" as leverage in situations where a customer is threatening to go to an Ombudsman or other public forum.
It is beyond bizarre that their own legal counsel approved the release, especially since they're also under the spotlight at the moment. I'm not sure how they expect to 'maintain public trust by showing their side of the story' when that involves violating privacy.
This is a good example of why the "I don't have anything to hide" argument is incorrect.<p>That way of thinking only works as long as your goals and positions are aligned with the entity collecting information about you to begin with.
If they're not, or the situation changes, imbalances of information lead to <i>disadvantages</i> for you pretty quickly.<p>All it took was some bureaucrat feeling petty.
In the event that this release was illegal, I really do feel for the people at the agency. Someone made public false allegations about them and they are legally forbidden from proving that person wrong. It's a tough position to be in.<p>I don't have a good solution to this, but I do think that there should be a legal way to prove a person is lying if they directly make accusations about you. After all, they are the one who made the situation public, not you.
This story follows a pattern of coordinated attacks on public services in The Guardian and other left leaning media outlets. Usually with the agenda of demanding more money and funding.<p>No doubt, mistakes happen in large bureaucracies but the story is usually slanted as some evil agency trying to destroy certain 'marginalised' sections of society. Whereas the truth is probably nothing like that.<p>I cannot help but think it is agenda pushing, distortion of facts and playing on emotions. Read the woman's original article and see the emotional language and phrases used. I think it says a lot about the intent of these media pieces.<p>Read the linked Centrelinks response and several things are refuted, so why in these comments is there an automatic pile on one side?