Australia spies on citizens without a Warrant

All in the name of safety, off course, but who's safety is this for?

2025-09-21 by Steve Forkin

I spent my teenage years in what was then West-Germany, during the seventies and eighties. These were the days before the internet, when information spread via TV. Easterners, who lived close enough to the border to the West, were able to receive the Western News, but this was strictly verboten by the state.

I spent my teenage years in what was then West-Germany, during the seventies and eighties. These were the days before the internet, when information spread via TV. Easterners, who lived close enough to the border to the West, were able to receive the Western News, but this was strictly verboten by the state.

The way the East German Security Police (called the Stasi), tasked with ensuring all citizens were good little socialists — found out whether households were watching West German News, was via the practice of “dobbing in”. School teachers were tasked with asking little kids at school, you know kids at the age too innocent to realise the effect of honesty in a totalitarian state.

What’s the logo that appears on the News when your parents watch TV in the evening, the teacher would ask?

If little Johnny simply said the number “1” he gave away that his parents were dissidents being infected by the west. His parents were watching all that filthy capitalist propaganda and must be protected from the lies that Socialism isn’t utopia after all.

A little while later, his parents would receive a visit by the Stasi and in many cases the parents were sent to “socialist re-education (= jail)” and the kids were made wardens of the state. In “socialist reeducation”, people were systematically, physically and mentally tortured until they re-canted all their rejection of Socialist utopia.

Sadly, Australia itself got infected with this devious practice during the Covid years, when politicians & the media encouraged citizens to dob in their neighbours for covid-infringements and praised them for reporting the “evildoers” to the police. This was so prevalent, it will take decades for the memory to fade. Worst of all, the free citizens of this country still await an apology, now that it has been proven beyond all reasonable doubt that the lock-downs, masks and vaccine mandates did nothing to avert the crisis. All the dissidents — yes. those the Government encouraged everyone to dob in — turned out to be right after all.

Totalitarianism isn’t when the state polices you, that’s merely tyranny. Totalitarianism is the state convincing your neighbours, friends and family to do it for them. That is when the control is complete. Anyone remotely familiar with history knows that totalitarian states — of all shapes and creeds — have a very well defined practice of encouraging citizens to spy on each-other.

This week I received the response of a Freedom of Information request lodged with the E-safety commissioner about a month ago. Given the recent high profile cases of the our “E-Karen” Inman Grant — current head of the E-Safety commission against Billboard Chris and his very public stance on the West’s collective crusade against children calling into question basic biology — accepted as objective reality for thousands of years — and the extremely damaging effects this has. Rather than protecting children — that is certainly the idea you get when you read the front facing web page of the E-safety commission — E-safety has been actively working to silence any and all opposing voices seeking to raise public awareness of the “hyper - genderisation” of Children.

I digress..

To my shock I received a 141 page long PDF file with excerpts of daily emails from a private contractor called Meltwater, reporting directly to senior staff at the E-safety commission. Each of these daily emails contain some of my tweets. None of them would be regarded as offensive in any rational sense, not mine or any of the other tweets in these emails. Since the emails also contain tweets of other people on X, I don’t believe I am legally permitted to make this entire report public, else I would.

Let’s take them by their own word for a moment and accept their own definitions of what is legal content online and what legally constitutes online harm:

https://www.esafety.gov.au/report/what-is-illegal-restricted-content

Effectively, this report claims the following to be illegal content.

It shows, describes, promotes, incites or instructs people in violent crimes including:

• sexual exploitation of children

• terrorist acts

• murder

• attempted murder

• rape

• torture

• kidnapping with violence or threats of violence

• suicide.

End of excerpt of the E-safety doc on “what is illegal content”.

Let’s further assume that the E-safety commission gives this document to Melwater as “template” asking them to scan all public content on X for any content that fits those categories & report this to the E-safety folk.

Firstly, none of the tweets in the reports contained in the 141 pages contain any such information, secondly one has to therefore ask, what is the contractual agreement between E-safety and Meltwater, and finally, what exactly is E-safety doing with this information.

Not being a conspiracy theorist, I like to deal with facts & logic. That’s basically how I treat all thing in life. The reason I am convinced of Christianity is due to the historical data underpinning the Christian faith. The reason I believe in Libertarianism, is because factually & morally it is consistent, rational sound.

Approaching receipt of this report, I can clearly see that the following is true:

• E-safety has engaged with a private contractor to spy on Australian citizens well outside of their own stated goals.

• Everyone one of the tweets highlighted in the report — as coming from me — relates in some way to the office of E-safety, the person of Julie Inman Grant and their desired goal of “keeping certain kinds of speech” off the internet.

• Not one of the tweets in question fell into any of the categories stated in their documents

• If this was truly about what they say it is, then the report on me should have been empty

Without applying any motives, it can be clearly seen from this report that the goals of E-safety are broader than stated on their website, and appear to be falling well and truly into the category of “policing online speech”.

In my FOI request I asked for the names of those who had worked on researching my content and or had reported the content about me to the E-safety office. This request was denied with the reason “they will not disclose any personal information for safety reasons”. All this sounds very much like, I am the guilty person, I am at risk of harassing a person who did the spying on me.

Australia as a country has sadly stepped away from regarding human rights as foundational — in the Christian sense and historically understood as given by God — and treats these as mere privileges that can be given and removed by the state as it sees fit.

As a citizen I have no recourse against a government agency that chooses to spy on my internet activity, and retains this information much like a dossier on me. The question that very much remains on my mind is “what will this be used for?”

Given my Jewish ancestry, I have sufficient reason to fear what governments might do. Pre-WW1 Germany was regarded as the most technologically advanced and most well educated country in all the Western world. Americans sent envoys to Germany to learn about how the German education system worked. Yet within less than 30 years Germany descended to depths of evil unparalleled in history.

No government seeking ever more power and ever more ability to surveil and censor its citizenry, is immune from the corrupting influence of such power.