Dave Milner
PM and Premiers endorse the fascist digital dystopia
The NSW Minns government has introduced legislation (more of it) expanding police powers, this time to extract data from mobile phones without a warrant using military-grade Universal Forensic Extraction Devices (UFED) developed by Israeli firm Cellebrite. In isolation, the legislation is alarming enough, but when viewed through the wider lens it fits a rapid clampdown on the public freedoms of Australians.
While Cellebrite technology is already widely deployed by Australian law enforcement agencies, and highly despised by the population aware of its presence, new laws significantly broaden its application beyond devices seized under traditional warrants, effectively enabling more routine and random extraction of messages, photos, location data, search history and biometric information.
According to a report from Declassified Australia, as of 2023, there are 128 government contracts (including with police forces such as NSW Police), that involves Israeli intelligence operatives and enables phone data access. Critics like Digital Rights Watch, Human Rights Law Centre, and lawyer Nick Hanna have raised alarms over the lack of transparency, accusing the measures of being part of a broader trend toward diminished privacy under the guise of targeting organised crime. That broader trend extends to many areas where the technology is impinging on the freedom, health, safety, and privacy of Australians.
The citizenry is already tentative about the ridiculous amount of revenue-raising road safety cameras that generate handsome guilt-free incomes for state coffers around the country, wary of the new overhead AI assisted road safety cameras at intersections, and still only mumbling with the technological developments in parking fine technology. But, when faced with AI tracking software linked to drone warfare in the genocidal state of Israel, there is a sentiment that this technology has evolved into something far more sinister.
When a family gets a Bunnings sausage, they are getting full spectrum coverage with experimental facial recognition technology. When an elderly citizen languishes in the Coles auto-checkout corral like a wounded animal, they are surrounded by the surveillance technology of a company that has proudly boasted about improving the deadliness of the killing fields of Gaza. Palantir founders Peter Thiel and Alex Karp openly spruiked its use in controlling civilian populations and generating targeting lists using AI generated kill lists. It’s a dark collaboration that requires a profit-laden duopoly giant and a company who takes full page ads pledging their support for Israel and war.
Alex Karp: You need a higher purpose and I also think you often need a lower purpose.
Interviewer: What’s a lower purpose?
Alex Karp: Well, I love the idea of getting a fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts who try to screw us.
The situation at the supermarkets is grim, where facial recognition technology is trialled on the sly, and nefarious company suits talk about “a range of initiatives to ensure the safety of our team and customers”. In reality, they’re cutting staff to force us through the auto-checkouts, where we do their jobs for them, shuffle out hoping we scanned the right apples, all while they scan our children’s biometric data from multiple vantage points. Meanwhile, they make year on year profits and send our data to some unknown location to be shared by who exactly?
Though our rulers claim their rollout is for the high computing joy of banking apps, cloud demand and medical AI, the surge in data centre construction is simply infrastructure to run these large-scale modern digital surveillance systems.
The unholy whirr of diesel generators, spinning fans and screaming silicon wafers that data centres emit have already proven to be harmful to living things, and unsustainable in their demands for power and water. Then there is the waste. Dozens of cooling system chemicals impact concentrated wastewater filled with elevated salts, bacteria and metals, including the presence of PFAS (“forever chemicals”). Then there’s the thermal pollution from the discharge of contaminated warmer water into local ecosystems, air pollution from generators that feed the grotesque electricity demands of the technology, and e-waste from the rapid turnover of the hardware and components needed to keep these data centres glowing in the suburban landscape — many set near access to suburban utilities close to thousands of residents. What the fuck are we doing here?
According to the Climate Council’s 2026 report Clouded Future: Managing the Risks of the Data Centre Boom, Australia’s rapidly expanding data centre industry poses serious threats to the country’s clean energy transition and climate goals. With energy demand from data centres already nearly doubling in Victoria and rising by 18% in NSW in a single year, and projected to reach around 6% of the main grid’s electricity use (12 TWh) by 2030 — enough to power every home in Victoria — the sector risks locking in greater reliance on coal and gas. Yet the Albanese government, along with so many things, opens the gates under the pretext of “taking advantage of the AI revolution – the Australian way.”
Representing the demeanour of the technolords constructing digital temples with permission of our amoebic governments, Elon Musk looked nothing short of a maniacal supervillain with a matching maniacal laugh and cravat, when swatting off local claims that he is stealing water in the region. “There is water everywhere here, it’s ridiculous”, he cackled at a Gigafactory in Berlin. And so the datacentres that hoover up all the energy and water, make possible the technology designed to stop us (in a range of fucked up ways) from acting on our anger at the situation. Canberra seems on board with that these days. Welcome to neo-feudalism in Australia.
Speaking to the Cellebrite legislation, Greens Senator David Shoebridge, one of the few federal politicians able to communicate the dire state of affairs, is calling Australia a “surveillance state,” raising our lack of a Human Rights act. Our uniparty in Canberra has managed to protect gambling companies, mining giants, banks, but won’t protect the Australian people from the digital panopticon it assists in erecting over our heads.
Our leaders, pitting us against Israeli operated military AI technology, and facial recognition software scanning us as we try to buy overpriced groceries, is the quintessential human rights issue and the essence of an impending struggle, for resources, freedom, and independence from fucking machines. These data centres will be used to assist the Minns Government to conduct random Cellebrite data grabs (with comprehensive 24 hr desk support in Tel Aviv) on the denizens of NSW, and provide the cloud computing power necessary to map our families in Palantir databases adjacent to databases of families in Gaza.
The rapid implementation of invasive technologies with backdoors to countries committing war crimes, and the private/government partnership that seeks to ram the technology into place, raises questions about the future of activism and ultimately civil disobedience as a response. The digital panopticon needs computing power, energy, water, sovereign handover, and most importantly, a willingness from elected governments.
Governments may expect populations to absorb this new batch of invasive technology as some addition to the network of nanny state safety. But populations are seeing something entirely more diabolical developing before them.
“Australia’s democracy is stronger than ever. And that’s something to be proud of,” posted the Prime Minister at the Address-in-Reply. The photo he took looked like a tacky real estate promo, but the words he said smashed like a broadside against the fragile underbelly of the Australian population who are experiencing an all encompassing attack on their freedom. Australian democracy is cooked.
The Albanese government has changed funding and campaign donation laws to heavily impact independent and minor parties, it has codified and spiced up AUKUS, it has shaken the hands of Epstein linked tech moguls who build the data centres, and overseen our political decision-making during a genocide and an illegal war without so much as a humanitarian whimper. It has imposed drastic slights on public freedoms, opened up Royal Commissions on behalf of Zionists unhappy that a majority of Australians oppose Israel, and condemned our nation to a series of US bases preparing for a war that cannot be won and should not be fought with our largest trading partner China. All against the majority of public opinion and the bellowing of experts, all with the knowledge that these decisions have altered the DNA of this country, and all with the willingness to continue fucking things up unabated.
The digital tyrants speak openly about the oppressive world they are building. Larry Ellison, key architect of this bleak future, speaking to connoisseur of the macabre, Tony Blair, paints this picture with disturbing clarity: “Citizens will be on their best behaviour, because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on”.
There are other things our state and federal governments could be doing rather than putting beleaguered Australians at odds with foreign owned genocide linked technology designed to consolidate power and control human populations. Having your phone data mined, knowing your children’s faces are scanned by Palantir as they grab a piece of fruit at Coles, feeling the environmental and health issues in your bones as you live next to a data centre that serves no purpose other than to hasten and compound the dystopia — these are the things an Australian citizen has to consider and what an Australian government has made us endure. For now….
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