Lizzie O’Shea, writer, lawyer and founder of Digital Rights Watch, told the New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties’ (NSWCCL) annual fundraising dinner and journalism awards on October 1 that the rapidly developing surveillance technology is throwing up many challenges.

Digital technology and democracy are in a “significant amount of tension”, O’Shea said. She added that defending civil liberties is not about “clever people working to impose civil liberties on everybody else”, but that campaigners “have to convince a critical mass that they have to defend their own rights”.

Referencing the origins of professional policing in London in the late 18th century, she described it as “a period of immense technological disruption” as the Industrial Revolution was reshaping society.

The new police force, O’Shea said, was used to “monitor, enforce and impose the new conditions of social order”. Specifically, it ensured merchants’ profits and prevented dockworkers from supplementing their wages by pilfering stock. The idea was to get the state and industry to collaborate, with a “form of surveillance of everyday people”.

“Policing was talked about as a new science in the detection and prevention of crime,”........

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