The NSW Surveillance Bill Is Set to Impact Us All, Regardless of Any Guilt

A piece of legislation currently before New South Wales parliament is increasingly causing alarm amongst the constituency, as, whilst the bill is being framed as part an ongoing legislative crackdown on organised crime, the majority of the laws contained in it create new powers and frameworks that rights groups warn will result in an “unprecedented police surveillance network” in this state.

NSW police minister Yasmin Catley introduced the Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Further Organised Crimes Reforms) Bill 2026 into parliament on 6 August. And she then asserted that the laws involve a response to “emerging techniques and evasive methods used by organised crime offenders”. Yet, she neglected to mention that this is at the expense of all our privacy.

The first changes in the bill don’t casually infringe on the rights of all, as they merely hike the penalties applying to refusing to cooperate with NSW Crime Commission questioning. But the rest of the laws impinge on all.

These additional laws would see images of people captured by road toll cameras being stored for police, NSW driver licence images uploaded into a national database and an extreme law to facilitate the scanning of the content of digital devices enacted. 

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties has condemned “the tenfold increase in state surveillance”, which is due to the significant expansion of “police powers across three key areas that massively increase state surveillance”. The rights group further insists that the provisions of the bill “cast a dangerously wide web” that seeks to treat regular law-abiding citizens as “automated suspects”.

This shift towards mass electronic surveillance further comes on the back of growing concerns around the ever-increasing NSW Police Force powers to invasively monitor the public, which involve the recent incorporation of slated statewide drone surveillance and the expansion of wanding laws, which are similar in effect to ubiquitous sniffer dog operations and accompanying strips searches.

All pervasive powers to watch

“We are looking at a future where police can demand your phone passcodes on the beat under threat of seven years in prison, using controversial forensic software to download your entire digital life, including encrypted and deleted content,” said NSWCCL president Timothy Roberts in a 21 August press release, as he raised issue with the Further Organised Crimes Reforms Bill.

“At the same time, the Minns government is quietly trying to hand over our driver’s licence photos to a federal biometric database without any public consultation, resurrecting Peter Dutton’s mass surveillance network plan that federal bipartisan committees rejected,” the NSW lawyer continued.

The first key surveillance reform involves the expansion of the digital evidence access order (DEAO) regime, which permits NSW police to scan the entire content of a person’s mobile device, including encrypted and deleted information, instantly. This power that is currently linked to the execution of warrants, will now be made available in the field, under certain conditions and with court approval.

The second reform involves sharing NSW driver licence images and identity photos to a federal database of ID images. This will create the ability to verify the identity of a person with the matching of a single image to prevent fraud. However, this capability will have the ability to facilitate the matching of an image against the entire database, but the government has promised not to do this.

The final major change in this omnibus bill that’s hard to believe is actually before state parliament seeks to ensure that when road toll cameras are capturing images of a vehicle that photos of the driver and passengers will no longer be redacted and will rather be collected and stored to be available in cases relating to toll payment and for NSW police law enforcement investigations.

“By giving police unredacted access to our toll networks and ability to face match, the government is effectively building a state-owned version of the ‘Flock’ camera networks used in the United States,” Roberts underscored.

“In the US, such surveillance systems are seeing massive public opposition with reports of the cameras producing incorrect suspects, systemic corruption and dozens of rogue police officers using the cameras to stalk their wives and ex-partners.”

NSW has long been surveilled

Roberts also insists that NSW citizens and residents are already subjected to a truckload of surveillance, and Sydney Criminal Lawyers has long been banging on about this. These methods have involved the warrantless use of drug dogs in public going back to the turn of the century, the increasing use of strip searches to accompany them and the recent onset of knife wanding laws.

NSW police commenced using sniffer dogs in 2002, on the understanding that it was targeting drug supply. However, over the decades since, it has become clear that officers are employing a method that turns up no drugs on two-thirds to three-quarters of the time, and when illicit drugs are found, on the overwhelming majority of times, it consists of a small amount of cannabis.

Midway through last decade, it became apparent that strip searches had begun to accompany sniffer dog indications that result in a pat down search that turns up nothing. The use of this method to locate illegal items is again unsuccessful on about two-thirds of occasions. And the use of strip searches by police has been widely condemned as a form of mass sexual assault by the state.

The onset of wanding trials in 2024 has involved allowing NSW police officers to randomly approach members of the public to scan them with a wand, or a small metal detecting device, to see if they might have a concealed knife or another type of weapon on them, when in a zone declared for this activity. A bill before parliament intends to make this permanent and broaden the regime.

New surveillance measures likely to grow

The NSWCCL warns that the laws in this bill “will strip existing privacy protections to build an unprecedented police surveillance network in NSW”. The civil liberties group adds that the laws won’t solely impinge upon privacy but will further serve to curtail freedom of movement and expression and the right to peacefully assemble.

As for the sharing of all NSW driver licences to a federal database known as the National Driver Licence Facial Recognition Solution or the NDLFRS, it serves to resurrect the wet dream of former Liberal leader Peter Dutton, as circa 2018, the then home affairs minister was seeking to establish the National Facial Biometric Matching Capability as a key policy.

‘The Capability’ was to comprise of the NDLFRS and the interoperability hub. The hub was to facilitate the matching of CCTV stills of a person captured anywhere against the entire database to identify the individual. But the legislation that provided for this lapsed with the dissolution of parliament and when it resumed the reintroduced laws failed to garner committee support.

The Albanese government, however, passed laws to solely establish the NDLFRS in 2023. The NDLFRS went live in October 2025, and South Australia and Western Australia have facilitated the sharing of their driver licence databases to the federal system. Then attorney general Mark Dreyfus confirmed that while matching one image to the whole will be possible, he promised this wouldn’t occur.

But there is no way of ensuring that the federal government won’t break a former AG’s promise and employ the NDLFRS in the same manner as was planned for The Capability.

Indeed, in terms of the slated toll camera reforms, in 1999, these devices were rolled out on the understanding that drivers wouldn’t be identified. Yet now it’s come to pass that NSW premier Chris Minns has waved away this privacy concern, as he stated that it is “insane that a picture could be taken that could help NSW police in a criminal case but not be able to use the information”.

So, the idea that federal parliament has built half the mass surveillance system that had been proposed by political forces within it some years back, and that the public can trust that no future government minister will recommend that the capability be extended in order to help assist in the fighting of crime somewhere down the track, also sounds a little “insane”.

“NSW residents are already subjected to an intense level of overpolicing. This bill further removes independent judicial oversight, excludes the role of the NSW Surveillance Devices Commissioner and explicitly overrides privacy protections,” NSWCCL president Timothy Roberts further outlined in his comments last week.

“We call on the crossbench and the opposition to protect basic civil liberties and block this bill,” the lawyer ended.