Names

'Pseudonyms and the Rise of the Real-Name Web' by Bernie Hogan in Hartley, Burgess & Bruns (eds) A Companion to New Media Dynamics (Blackwell, forthcoming) 290–308 comments that

Despite their ubiquity, pseudonyms are an under-theorized element of online participation, as is the use of real names (or names commonly used to personally identify someone). This absence has become especially acute in recent years as sites listing an individual’s real name have become common. This shift towards real names is not merely a technical convenience, but a specific political turn. As pseudonyms are often associated with Internet trolling and cyberbullying, it is useful to track the use of pseudonyms in history and to consider many of their positive functions. Ironically, pseudonyms help to solve a problem that Facebook creates – the single heterogeneous audience, i.e., the collapsed context.

I describe three classes of pseudonyms: functional, where pseudonyms denote a specific social or technical function, such as eight character names or official titles; situational, where an external motivating force compels people to hide their real name identities (and of attributes) and personal, where an internal drive to adopt a different persona makes pseudonyms useful. I then describe how these uses operated in a pre-web 2.0 era, and how their use persists.

In discussing the 'nymwars' he argues that

These issues came to a head in the summer of 2011 with the rise of the "nymwars". This term emerged to capture the dissatisfaction with Google+’s assertion that people who joined the service had to use their real name. This decision was widely derided as problematic by a host of scholars and policymakers. As mentioned above, in one such example boyd (2011) called this policy an abuse of power. The counter arguments, however, were just as strong, and based on two general claims (see comments on boyd’s post for examples of this discussion). The first theme is ‘‘don’t like it, don’t use it; its Google’s house, not yours.’’ The second is ‘‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear.’’ The third is ‘‘it doesn’t matter since it is all going public anyway.’’

The first claim carries the most weight insofar as, indeed, Google is the architect of this system, and can make good claims to determining how it is run. However, Google’s policy is nevertheless a presumptuous one. That is, it presumes its particular model for the distribution of content is sufficient for selective sharing, when there are good reasons to think otherwise. Google+ offers individuals the ability to place friends in lists (or ‘‘circles’’). One can share content with these friends or any combination of lists. However, once the friends view this content, there is nothing except a polite pop-up preventing them from redistributing that content to whomever they choose.

The most concerning aspect about this claim is that Google’s policy has the potential to become national or state policy as well. Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, reinforced this with comments at the same Marie Claire panel where Randi Zuckerberg was quoted above. He believes that at some point all governments will demand real names.

The second claim is more easily discredited. In particular, Solove has made a strong case that ‘‘nothing to hide, nothing to fear’’ is a red herring. Even without the assertion of privacy as a fundamental right, Solove (2007) was able to demonstrate a convincing case for why individuals should have an interest in the sort of informational self-determination that is central to an interest in privacy. In particular, people self-incriminate in many unanticipated ways and lose control when they lose privacy. This claim dovetails Nissenbaum’s (2004) notion of ‘‘privacy as contextual integrity.’’

This article on privacy reframed the debate and crystallized the sentiments of many in both policy and academic circles. For example, if we are so close to our parents or spouses, why do we tell things to our doctor that we do not tell them? Nissenbaum argues that privacy is intimately bound up with the notion of contextual integrity. She explores not what privacy is from a positive point of view but what constitutes a breach of privacy. To breach privacy is to move information from one context where such information is understood or expected to reside and into another context where that information was neither intended nor appropriate given the existing social norms. For the hedonistic tourist, Las Vegas is a vacation, not just from another place but another context of norms. Consequently, the Las Vegas tourist board did well with the slogan ‘‘What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.’’

This is privacy understood as informational self-determination. One has privacy when one can assume that information created by a person will be managed in the way that the person deems appropriate. A doctor who calls a patient’s boss to tell them of a recent diagnosis is breaching privacy. It is unprofessional, but might happen if the doctor and the boss are friends. A website that reveals the IP address and email of someone who posts anonymously is breaching privacy. By linking all information to one’s real name, one effectively transfers informational self-determination into information curation, and allows Google or Facebook to be the curator.

The third claim, typified by Marc Smith’s notion of ‘‘the myth of selective sharing’’ (Smith 2011), draws upon Brand’s earlier claim that ‘‘information wants to be free’’ (1987: 202). That is, it does not matter whether one uses a filter or not; information will end up unified and searchable in the end. This claim is a moderated version of the second claim as Smith is not saying people have nothing to fear but only that, if information is encoded in some form, it is both possible and plausible that it will first escape from the confines of the desired context and second make its way back to the producer. This makes the case a fortiori that labeling all information with one’s real name will undermine informational self-determination. It remains to be seen whether a user interface will emerge that can allow selective sharing with audiences in a useable form, and in its absence we are again left with curation.

He concludes

I conclude by returning to the claim made at the beginning of the chapter: the real-name web is not a technology; it is a social practice. But, in light of this discussion, it is clear that there are both technical trajectories and historical antecedents that foster a trend toward real-name spaces as well as a persistent need for pseudonyms. In particular, the early days of the web were characterized by the paucity of social cues, the sparsity of one’s social network, and the strangeness of people who might be quite different from what they say they are. Pseudonyms made sense both technically and contextually. The modern web, by contrast, is a rich multimedia experience where large corporations curate content on our behalf via cloud services. These corporations continually seek ways to assert their legitimacy, through technical interfaces (e.g., Google’s social circles model) and politics (e.g., real-name policies). In essence, they are suggesting that they have figured out a solution to context collapse (their particular interface). To push people toward these solutions, it is conventional to publicly discourage the use pseudonyms, despite their efficacy.

The increasing use of real names does not, however, attenuate the motivations for pseudonyms. It only mitigates against the personal motivations of cranky and vulgar users and serves to make people and their content more findable. There still exist functional reasons for pseudonyms (such as a unique name or email address), situational motivations in response to context collapse, and personal motivations of identity play beyond trolling and flaming. Through pseudonyms people can express their competitive urges in gaming environments, their health concerns on specialist sites, their sexual urges on pornographic sites, and their political appetites on blogs without these getting in the way of each other or personal and professional obligations.

In light of this, there is much work to be done both academically and politically. Academic work ought to provide greater nuance to identity practices online – when do people adopt a different mask and ‘‘troll’’ or play with identity? Under what conditions, such as those of Wikipedia, do pseudonyms enable effective local collaboration? Are pseudonyms dying out or surging, especially in crosscultural contexts? Policy scholars ought to consider work such as the current Canadian legal trend of balancing privacy online and public interests for freedom of speech. Reidentification practices ought to be lifted out of discussions about vandals and terrorists and reframed in terms of free-speech practices in a new era of persistent content and collapsed contexts.

Finally, we ought to dispel myths that pseudonymous online interaction is a Hobbesian state. In its place we ought to consider such interaction as a localized social contract and response to the increasing array of technologies focused on identity consolidation for profit rather than for the social good. Sites such as the fleeting protest site http://my.nameis.me helped to focus the discussion to good effect. After a protracted public relations war, Google+ has dropped its realname requirement and joined a growing number of sites that acknowledge the legitimacy, functions, and utility of pseudonyms as well as real names. This was announced at the 2011 Web 2.0 forum. At the same summit the day before, Poole (moot) made his most eloquent plea yet for rethinking identity: ‘‘Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, but we’re actually more like diamonds ... Look from a different angle, and you see something completely different . . . . Facebook is consolidating identity by making us more simple than we truly are’’ (Poole 2011a).

The web is not merely a highly connected place out there but a codification of the social relations that bind much of the developed and developing world. The real-name web helps to reinforce this sense of global connectivity. But it also runs against limits inherent in a system curated by third parties with persistent content. Pseudonyms are both an antecedent to this situation and also a partial solution. We may live in a global village but our huts still need curtains.

Desensitisation?

'Silent Listeners: The Evolution of Privacy and Disclosure on Facebook' by Fred Stutzman, Ralph Grossy & Alessandro Acquistiz in (2012) 4(2) Journal of Privacy and Con fidentiality argues that

Over the past decade, social network sites have experienced dramatic growth in popularity, reaching most demographics and providing new opportunities for interaction and socialization. Through this growth, users have been challenged to manage novel privacy concerns and balance nuanced trade-off s between disclosing and withholding personal information. To date, however, no study has documented how privacy and disclosure evolved on social network sites over an extended period of time. In this manuscript we use profile data from a longitudinal panel of 5,076 Facebook users to understand how their privacy and disclosure behavior changed between 2005 - the early days of the network - and 2011. Our analysis highlights three contrasting trends. First, over time Facebook users in our dataset exhibited increasingly privacy-seeking behavior, progressively decreasing the amount of personal data shared publicly with unconnected profiles in the same network. However, and second, changes implemented by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or in some cases inverted that trend. Third, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users revealed privately to other connected profiles actually increased over time|and because of that, so did disclosures to "silent listeners" on the network: Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers. These findings highlight the tension between privacy choices as expressions of individual subjective preferences, and the role of the environment in shaping those choices.

In discussing research limitations and conclusions the authors comment that

We have presented the results of a longitudinal analysis of 5,076 Facebook users who were members of the Carnegie Mellon Facebook network in 2005. Over the course of seven years, we captured pro file content with a goal of understanding how disclosure practices change over time. Before summarizing our results, we point out a number of limitations of the current analysis.

First, as we have observed in the introduction, one limitation of this data is that it does not originate from a random sample of Facebook users - nor could it, as the bulk of Facebook users in 2013 did not have Facebook accounts in 2005. Our trends are based on a panel of Facebook users dominated by undergraduate students, and our analysis focuses on one specifi c Facebook network - the Carnegie Mellon network - and only on those who were members of that network in 2005. Hence, our results may not extrapolate to more diverse samples of users. However, both survey data and analyses of other Facebook networks are consistent with one of the results presented here: that over time Facebook users have become less likely to share their personal information publicly. Our analysis extends that research by offering evidence that the privacy-seeking behavior started early in the life of the network, and then progressed over several years of Facebook usage - until it was partly obstructed by Facebook's policies and interface changes.

Second, in this manuscript we did not distinguish between non-disclosures due to the member actually not filling out a field, and those due to the member altering the privacy settings of that field (or of their entire profile) in order to limit public disclosures. While such distinction is of interest (and is the object of our ongoing research), it does not invalidate the main conclusions of the current analysis, which focused on the trends in public disclosures of personal information over time. It does affect, however, the discussion of how much information remains available to third-parties (such as apps providers) and to Facebook itself.

Third, our quantitative analysis was restricted to the fields which existed on Facebook in 2005, and the analysis presented in Section 5 was mainly qualitative, and included only a preliminary investigation of additional fields. However, using a consistent set of fields, and a consistent set of users, allowed us to more precisely define and explain trends in disclosure and privacy behavior over the past seven years. As our analysis revealed, a robust trend of declining public disclosure emerged over the years across a broad range of Facebook pro file elements - including personal, contact, and interest information. We also observed a signi cant shift for many of these profile elements between the years 2009 and 2010, when public disclosure increased. We concluded that changes to privacy policy and interface settings by Facebook produced greater public disclosures. In other words, exogenous changes effected by Facebook near the end of the period of time under our observation arrested or inverted an endogenous, user-driven trend of members trying to protect their privacy by managing the public disclosure of their personal information.

On the other hand, we also observed that, over time, the amount and scope of personal information that Facebook users have revealed to friends' profiles seems to have markedly increased - and thus, so have disclosures to Facebook itself, third-party apps, and (indirectly) advertisers. Such findings highlight the challenges users of social network sites face when trying to manage online privacy, and the power of providers of social media services to affect individuals' disclosure and privacy behavior through interfaces and default settings.

Rawls, Rights Hierarchies and the CJEU

'Fundamental Rights and the EU Internal Market: Just How Fundamental are the EU Treaty Freedoms? A Normative Enquiry Based on John Rawls’ Political Philosophy' by Nik J. de Boer in (2013) 9(1) Utrecht Law Review 148-168 assesses

whether the EU Treaty freedoms - the free movement of goods, persons, services and capital - should be considered as fundamental rights which are hierarchically equal to other fundamental rights. It uses the political philosophy of John Rawls to assess why we should attach priority to certain rights and which rights should therefore be considered fundamental rights. On this basis it is argued that we should recognise two main types of fundamental rights, namely basic rights and liberties associated with Rawls' first principle of justice and the rights associated with the principle of fair equality of opportunity. This is followed by an analysis of the interpretation that the European Court of Justice (CJEU) gives to the Treaty freedoms. On the basis of the normative framework, it is argued that the Treaty freedoms can be seen as fundamental rights insofar as they embody the value of equality of opportunity. Nonetheless, the CJEU increasingly seems to rely on a broader market access approach rather than an equal treatment approach in interpreting the Treaty freedoms. It is argued that where equal treatment is not at stake, the Treaty freedoms should not be seen as fundamental rights. Therefore, in cases where there is a conflict between a fundamental right and a Treaty freedom the CJEU should carefully distinguish between these two different interpretations of the Treaty freedoms. In cases where it is merely market access that is at stake, the CJEU should regard the protection of fundamental rights as more important, and be very careful in allowing a restriction of fundamental rights in order to protect the exercise of the Treaty freedom. On the other hand, in cases where the Treaty freedoms can be seen as protecting equality of opportunity and where they conflict with other fundamental rights, the Court is justified in construing the conflict as a right-right conflict in which a fair balance has to be sought.

Positive Privacy

'Toward a Positive Theory of Privacy Law' by Lior Strahilevitz in (2013)113(1) Harvard Law Review argues that

Privacy law creates winners and losers. The distributive implications of privacy rules are often very significant, but they are also subtle. Policy and academic debates over privacy rules tend to de-emphasize their distributive dimensions, and one result is an impoverished descriptive account of why privacy laws look the way they do. The article posits that understanding the identities of the real winners and losers in privacy battles can improve predictions about which interests will prevail in the agencies and legislatures that formulate privacy rules. Along the way, the article shows how citizens whose psychological profiles indicate a strong concern for their own privacy are less likely to be politically efficacious than citizens who do not value privacy, producing a substantive skew against privacy protections. The article employs public choice theory to explain why California’s protections for public figure privacy are noticeably stronger than the protections that exist in other American jurisdictions, and what factors might explain the trans-Atlantic divide over privacy regulation with regard to Big Data, the popularity of Megan’s Laws in the United States, and the enactment of Do Not Call protections. The article concludes by noting that structural features of privacy regulation can affect the public choice dynamics that emerge in political controversies. Individuals seeking to expand privacy protections in the United States might therefore focus initially on altering the structure of American privacy laws instead of trying to change the law’s content.

Strahilevitz comments that

Privacy protections create winners and losers. So do the absence of privacy protections. The distributive implications of governmental decisions regarding privacy are often very significant, but they can be subtle too. Policy and academic debates over privacy rules tend not to emphasize the distributive dimensions of those rules,1 and many privacy advocates mistakenly believe that “all consumers and voters win” when privacy is enhanced. At the same time, privacy skeptics who do discuss privacy in distributive terms sometimes score cheap rhetorical points by suggesting that only those with shameful secrets to hide benefit from privacy protections. Neither approach is appealing, and privacy scholars ought to be able to do better.

This Article reveals some of the subtleties of privacy regulation, with a particular focus on the distributive consequences of privacy rules. The Article suggests that understanding the identities of privacy law’s real winners and losers is indispensable both to clarifying existing debates in the scholarship and to helping us predict which interests will prevail in the institutions that formulate privacy rules. Drawing on public choice theory and median voter models, I will begin to construct a positive account of why U.S. privacy law looks the way it does. I will also suggest that a key structural aspect of U.S. privacy law - its absence of a catch-all privacy provision nimble enough to confront new threats - affects the attitudes of American voters and the balance of power among interest groups. Along the way, I will also make several other subsidiary contributions: I will show why criminal history registries are quite likely to become increasingly granular over time, examine the relationship between data mining and personality-based discrimination, and explain how the U.S. political system might be biased in favor of citizens who do not value privacy to the same degree that it is biased in favor of highly educated and high-income citizens. Part I assesses the distributive implications of two privacy controversies: the extent to which public figures should be protected from the nonconsensual disclosure of information concerning their everyday activities, and the extent to which the law should suppress criminal history information. In both instances the United States is far less protective of privacy interests than Europe, and, as a result, the U.S. government has been subjected to criticism both here and abroad.

The Article shows that defensible distributive judgments undergird the American position. The European approach to celebrity privacy is highly regressive, and causes elites and nonelites to have differential access to information that is valuable to both groups. The U.S. attitude toward criminal history information may be defended on pragmatic grounds: in the absence of transparent criminal history information, individuals may try to use pernicious proxies for criminal history, like race and gender. The Article then shows how these distributive implications affect the politics of privacy; California’s interest groups are pushing that state toward European-style regulation, and there is an apparent emerging trend toward ever-increasing granularity in criminal history disclosures.

Part II analyzes the emerging issue of Big Data and consumer privacy. The Article posits that firms rely on Big Data (data mining and analytics) to tease out the individual personality characteristics that will affect the firms’ strategies about how to price products and deliver services to particular consumers. We cannot anticipate how the law will respond to the challenges posed by Big Data without assessing who gains and who loses by the shift toward new forms of personality discrimination, so the Article analyzes the likely winners and losers among voters and industry groups. The analysis focuses on population segments characterized by high levels of extraversion and sophistication, whose preferences and propensities to influence political decisions may deviate from those of introverts and unsophisticated individuals in important ways.

Part III glances across the Atlantic, using Europe’s quite different legal regime governing Big Data as a way to test some of the hypotheses articulated in Part II. Although U.S. and European laws differ significantly, the attitudes of Americans and Europeans toward privacy seem rather similar. The Article therefore posits that different public choice dynamics, especially the strength of business interests committed to data mining in the United States, are a more likely cause of the observed legal differences. But this conclusion raises the question of why European business interests committed to data mining do not have similar sway. The Article hypothesizes that structural aspects of U.S. and European privacy laws substantially affect the contents of those laws. In Europe, open ended, omnibus privacy laws permit regulators to intervene immediately to address new privacy challenges. The sectoral U.S. approach, which lacks an effective “catch-all” provision, renders American law both reactive and slow to react. As a result, by the time U.S. regulators seek to challenge an envelope-pushing practice, interest groups supporting the practice have developed, social norms have adjusted to the practice, and a great deal of the sensitive information at issue will have already been disclosed by consumers.

Part IV examines a rare case in which U.S. regulators were able to combat a substantial privacy harm despite these structural and interest group dynamics. The fact that the National Do Not Call Registry took more than a decade to be implemented, despite its enormous popularity with voters, shows just how difficult regulating privacy can be, especially since many other privacy regulations will create a substantial number of losing consumers who are likely to buttress the interests of prospective loser firms in opposing the new regulation.

Quantitative Privacy

'The Right to Quantitative Privacy' by David C. Gray and Danielle Keats Citron in (2013) 98 Minnesota Law Review argues that

We are at the cusp of a historic shift in our conceptions of the Fourth Amendment driven by dramatic advances in surveillance technology. Governments and their private sector agents continue to invest billions of dollars in massive data-mining projects, advanced analytics, fusion centers, and aerial drones, all without serious consideration of the constitutional issues that these technologies raise. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court signaled an end to its silent acquiescence in this expanding surveillance state. In that case, five justices signed concurring opinions defending a revolutionary proposition: that citizens have Fourth Amendment interests in substantial quantities of information about their public or shared activities, even if they lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the constitutive particulars. This quantitative approach to the Fourth Amendment has since been the subject of hot debate on and off the courts. Among the most compelling challenges are questions about quantitative privacy’s constitutional pedigree, how it can be implemented in practice, and its doctrinal consequences. This Article takes up these challenges. 

The conversation after Jones has been dominated by proposals that seek to assess and protect quantitative privacy by focusing on the informational “mosaics” assembled by law enforcement officers in the course of their investigations. We think that this case-by-case approach both misunderstands the Fourth Amendment issues at stake and begets serious practical challenges. Drawing on lessons from information privacy law, we propose as an alternative that legislatures and courts acting in the shadow of Jones focus on the technologies. Under this technology-centered approach, any technology that is capable of facilitating broad programs of continuous and indiscriminate surveillance would be subject to Fourth Amendment regulation. This does not mean that government would be barred from using these technologies. Rather, it would require that the terms of their deployment and use reflect a reasonable balance between privacy concerns and law enforcement’s interests in preventing, detecting, and prosecuting crime. This Article offers concrete proposals for how legislatures and courts might strike this balance while providing the clear guidance and predictability that critics of the mosaic theory rightly demand.

Organ Trafficking

The Crimes Legislation Amendment (Slavery, Slavery-Like Conditions and People Trafficking) Act 2013 (Cth), in effect as of today, amends the Criminal Code Act 1995 (Cth), Crimes Act 1914 (Cth), the Migration Act 1958 (Cth), Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (Cth) and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (Cth).

The primary amendment is to the Criminal Code Act to:

• insert offences of forced labour, forced marriage, organ trafficking and harbouring a victim;
• ensure the slavery offence applies to conduct which renders a person a slave, as well as conduct involving a person who is already a slave; 
• extend the application of existing offences of deceptive recruiting and sexual servitude to non-sexual servitude and all forms of deceptive recruiting; 
• increase penalties for debt bondage offences; 
• broaden the definition of exploitation to include all slavery-like practices; and
• amend existing definitions to provide that the broadest range of exploitative conduct is criminalised, including psychological oppression and the abuse of power or taking advantage of a person's vulnerability

Changes to the Crimes Act 1914 increase the availability of reparation orders to individual victims of Commonwealth offence.

There are consequential amendments to  the Crimes Act 1914, the Migration Act 1958, the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979.

The Explanatory Memo indicates that

The Bill limits the right to privacy. Article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides that no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation, and that everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks. The right to privacy may be subject to permissible limitations. In order for an interference with the right to privacy to be permissible, the interference must be authorised by law, be for a reason consistent with the ICCPR and be reasonable in the particular circumstances. Reasonableness, in this context, incorporates notions of proportionality, appropriateness and necessity. In essence, this will require that limitations: 

• serve a legitimate objective 

• adopt a means that is rationally connected to that objective, and 

• the means adopted are not more restrictive than they need to be to achieve that objective.

 The consequential amendments to the TIA Act will classify the new offences of forced labour, forced marriage, harbouring a victim, and organ trafficking as well as the amended offences of debt bondage as `serious offences' for the purposes of the TIA Act, which will enable law enforcement agencies to obtain warrants to intercept communications of persons of interest, including third persons they are likely to be in contact with, for the purpose of investigating these crimes. 

The powers to intercept communications will be prescribed under the TIA Act and will therefore be authorised by law. 

The limitation on privacy serves the legitimate objective of investigating and prosecuting slavery and people trafficking-related offences. This legitimate objective reflects the absolute right to freedom from slavery and forced labour contained in Article 8 of the ICCPR. Australian authorities are increasingly identifying situations of exploitation that are beyond the scope of the current slavery and people-trafficking related offences. It is necessary to ensure that law enforcement agencies have the means to investigate the new offences of forced labour, forced marriage, harbouring a victim, and organ trafficking, as well as the amended offences of debt bondage in the same manner as the current slavery and people trafficking-related offences. 

Prosecutions reveal that offenders of slavery and people-trafficking offences are often reliant on mobile phone services to organise such crimes. It is therefore very likely that interception would reveal valuable evidence which will improve the ability of law enforcement agencies to investigate and prosecute these crimes. This is particularly pertinent in an area of crime where a victim's testimony is often the primary source of evidence. Implementing the consequential amendments to the TIA Act will ensure that enforcement agencies have the power to investigate the new slavery and people-trafficking related offences in the same way they currently investigate similar serious crimes and to prosecute offenders. 

Less restrictive alternatives to telecommunications interceptions, such as witness testimony, have proven to provide insufficient evidence for the prosecution of offences similar to those proposed by the Bill. This is particularly the case when witnesses are reluctant to testify. In light of the fact that the offences under the Bill, by their nature, are extremely difficult to investigate, a reliance on voluntary testimonies is an insufficient mechanism. 

The ability of law enforcement agencies to intercept communications is limited to the investigation of serious offences for the purposes of the TIA Act, where agencies have applied for, and been issued, an interception warrant by an issuing authority. Issuing authorities may be eligible Judges or nominated Administrative Appeals Tribunal members. The TIA Act requires that in deciding whether to issue an interception, an issuing authority must have regard to how much the privacy of any person or persons would be likely to be interfered with by interception under a warrant. This provides a strict judicial oversight mechanism to prevent arbitrary interference to privacy. 

The TIA Act strictly regulates the use and communication of information obtained by law enforcement agencies under interception warrants. Any information collected may only be used for defined purposes and purposes connected with the investigation of serious offences. The TIA Act also imposes a number of recordkeeping and accountability requirements, including a requirement for law enforcement agencies to record particulars of, and report information about, the `use' and `communication' of intercepted information. Communications are destroyed where the Chief Officer of the agency is satisfied that the record is no longer required for a purpose permitted by the legislation. 

Persons affected by an interception warrant have relevant judicial avenues through which to challenge the validity of the interception and the use of any intercepted communications. They also have the right to access communications being used as evidence against them during prosecution.

Mercantilism

'Who Owns the Firms That Own IP?' [PDF] by Jonathan Band and Jonathan Gerafi comments that

There is absolutely nothing sinister about foreign ownership of firms in IP intensive industries, including foreign ownership of companies originally established in the U.S. This is to be expected in a globalized economy with multinational corporations and complex cross-border supply chains. Moreover, many countries in Western Europe and East Asia are at the same level of technological and economic development as the United States. The critical point is that in such a globalized economy, U.S policymakers should no longer assume without reflection that the beneficiaries of protectionist IP policies are U.S. firms and, by extension, U.S. workers and shareholders.

The paper examines whether "firms in IP-Intensive industries" are owned by US companies or are foreign owned, concluding that contrary to popular belief (and the belief of policymakers) there is substantial foreign involvement in those industries and that "IP policies adopted by Congress and the Executive Branch may benefit foreign corporations at the expense of U.S. consumers".

The paper's  “key findings” include -

•  Four of the “Big Six” publishers, the largest English language trade publishers, are foreign-owned. Over 80% of the global revenue of the Big Six is generated by those foreign-owned companies. Those foreign-owned companies publish more than two thirds of the trade books in the U.S. 
• Four of the five largest STM (science, technical and medical)/Professional publishers are foreign-owned. Over 90% of the revenue of the five largest STM/Professional publishers was generated by foreign-owned firms. 
• Only seven of the world’s 50 largest publishers of all categories are U.S.-owned. The book publishing industry in Europe has approximately twice as many employees as in the United States. 

US nationalists may be distressed by the finding that

• Thirteen of the twenty best-selling recording artists are foreign
• Of the top ten best-selling fiction authors in any language whose work is still in copyright, five are foreign. A British author wrote three of the top five best-selling books in the U.S. in 2012
• In 2013, the Oscar winners in thirteen of 24 categories were foreign. In 2012, the Oscar winners in eleven of 24 categories were foreign. 

For people who are unfussed about JD Rowling, Enid Blyton, Barbara Cartland and JR Tolkien it's perhaps more serious that

• Two of the three major record labels are foreign-owned. These two labels have a market share of 59%. 
• Of the 50 most popular motion pictures in the United States in 2012, 50% were filmed partly or entirely outside of the United States.  
• 70% of the most recent generation of game consoles were manufactured by Japanese companies. Japanese companies have manufactured 92% of all game consoles ever sold. 
• In 2011, foreign companies obtained 7,000 more U.S. patents than U.S. companies. In 2011 and 2012, seven of the top ten companies receiving U.S. patents were foreign. 
• 57% of the global revenue of the fifteen largest pharmaceutical companies was generated by foreign-owned companies. The majority of the employees of both the U.S. and the foreign-owned pharmaceutical companies work outside of the United States.