This week, the Coalition and Labor reached a deal on legislation put forward by Attorney General ‘Curious’ George Brandis that will allow the federal government unprecedented access to your ‘metadata’.
The laws force internet service providers to hold all your metadata for a period of two years, at an industry cost to implement of between $200-400 million.
But activist group Beyond Green has come up with a better solution.
Rather than relying on spooks and spies to monitor your every online utterance – at great expense to the taxpayer – Beyond Green is calling on all Australians to just courtesy copy every email they ever send to George Brandis. At his parliamentary email address. Which is senator.brandis@aph.gov.au
Beyond Green promotes itself as “developing a unique platform for policy development, creative activism and economic transition in Australia”.
Their campaign ‘Please pledge to help Curious George’ is detailed here.
“Attorney-General George Brandis is very very curious,” the site notes. “He wants to know exactly what we're all up to online. And the phone.
“Email, Facebook, Twitter. Calls, Texts, Skype. Friends, Family, Politics. The lot!
“We like 'Curious George'. He's such a clever little monkey. But he's really not too technical. Please pledge below to help George feed his insatiable curiosity. All you need to do is to cc senator.brandis@aph.gov.au on all your emails. Easy!”
Obviously, Beyond Green's strategy will only work if you CC Curious George into everything that you send… better add him to your address book. And you can sign the pledge by clicking on the image below.