An interesting snippet on the AFP Big Brother

Yesterday Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie wrote in The Age:

THE internet communications and websites of anti-war campaigners, environmentalists, animal rights activists and other protest groups are being secretly monitored by state and federal agencies.

A Melbourne private intelligence firm specialising in "open-source intelligence" has been engaged by Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police and the federal Attorney-General's Department to monitor and report on the protest movements' use of the internet.

Which is somewhat interesting as it was only at the beginning of this year that the Australian Federal Police granted contract number CN60721 to a Melbourne firm Global Edge Group Pty Ltd [trading as National Open Source Intelligence Centre (Australia)] for just such work worth $184,800.00.

http://www.geg.com.au/ / http://www.nosic.com.au/

So if your political or social commentary blog has a few visits from IP addresses in the range of 202.125.35.165 or 203.147.239.149, then you have possibly been visited on behalf of the powers that be in Australia.

Or perhaps you should consider yourself to be of interest if you have ever visited No Bases which was obviously on past peek list: 017 http://www.nosic.com.au/cgi-bin/iB/ikonboard.cgi 97 22 119 30-Jun-2004 21:04

Ah! The dubious joys of modern blogging - if Conroy doesn't get you then McClellan or Keelty will :-)

Graphic found at Spy Lab