New Police Phone Scanning Law Could Target Protesters: Interview NSWCCL’s Timothy Roberts

New South Wales parliament is reconvening for its spring session on Tuesday, 15 September 2026, and before it is the Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment (Further Organised Crimes Reforms) Bill 2026, which the NSW Council for Civil Liberties has warned that despite its organised crime title should rather be called the NSW State Surveillance Bill.

This legislation consists of four broad reforms. And the first measures, which double the penalties for refusing to answer the questions of the NSW Crime Commission do tend to target organised crime, whilst the three remaining changes can be used against those involved in such crime, but they might also be applied to regular law-abiding constituents, in a manner that impinges their privacy.

The reform that’s garnered the most concern from the public is a measure that would allow police to use a device produced by Israeli company Cellebrite to download the entire content of a mobile phone for investigative purposes. This power is currently linked to the execution of a search warrant but is set to be broadened to traffic stops and regular arrests.

Further, the bill before parliament provides that all NSW drivers licence photos are to be transferred to a federal database to be used to match a person identifying as a particular individual with the driver licence photo under that name. However, this capability could be used to match images of anyone captured by CCTV anywhere against the entire database, like a mass surveillance system.

The final measure in this legislation entails changing the law, so that road toll cameras capture the identity of people in vehicles, rather than just their number plates. These images will then be stored for use in criminal investigations. But one can image that such a power could be used to police the movement of activists in terms of protest activity.

NSWCCL president Timothy Roberts warns that if protest are framed as being organised then all these measures could be unlocked and used against them. The bill before parliament defines organised crime as a crime committed by two or more or involving substantial planning or systemic and continued activity, or has been committed for “profit, power or influence” or for retribution.

And the Minns government last week announced its third tranche of organised crimes laws for 2026, which are about to be introduced into parliament, and the new package further contains a state government investment of $15 million to expand the technology that NSW police use to download and analyse digital devices. This could be more Cellebrite or new devices from another producer.

Sydney Criminal Lawyers spoke to NSWCCL president Timothy Roberts about the criminal lawmaking drive the Minns government is on, the fact that these laws do hold the potential to be used to crack down on public protests, and the manner in which successive governments in this state have been trading in constituent civil liberties for quick fix law enforcement solutions.

Timothy, NSW parliament is reconvening for spring on Tuesday and before it is the second tranche of a series of organised crime bills.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties pointed out three weeks back that this legislation, while marked as being organised crime-related, would be better titled the State Surveillance Bill.

So, as this legislation goes before parliament this week, what are your concerns about it?

We have this increasing trend of giving police exactly what they want when it comes to accessing cameras, footage, recordings and more.

What we are really concerned about is entrenching into law this permission to essentially surveil us through the broad way that technology is involved in our lives.

So, police will have access to this type of information without any constraints, including, for instance, going through our phones – going through that material which is so intimately concerned with our lives.

We have a real concern that this government, in an effort to try and appear popular, is appeasing police in terms of what they want regarding tackling crime, and they’re essentially throwing the baby out with the bathwater in terms of civil liberties around privacy.

This bill has caused a lot of concern, especially around the unlinking of dedicated evidence access orders from search warrants, which will mean that during arrests and traffic stops, when a phone is seized, police will be able to download the entire content of it using a Cellebrite device, if a requested order is granted.

A lot of people are concerned that this marks a major encroachment into the general public’s right to privacy.

So, how do you understand this process of phone scanning will be applied on the beat? And does it mark a serious, major shift in the powers that NSW police have to invade constituents’ privacy?

It is an undermining of all our privacy. You have to understand here that we already have far too much use of Cellebrite devices to extract data from phones that the police then use.

Sure, police might now be using warrants and the like to do this. But they are doing this for the most basic of crimes.

So, criminal defence lawyers are receiving complete police briefs of evidence that have a massive amount of phone data. All of your private, intimate messages, all of that, can be turned up if the police so choose.

What is worse is if that information is connected around a protest, they will try to use the information that they get from that phone to connect to other people that may or may not have been involved in some demonstration. This is a real concern around our right to privacy.

So, already the levels, as they are now, are wrong. This does not take into account the important place that phones have in our lives. We do all our life through our phones and technology like this.

The police shouldn’t have access to this information, unless it is a really serious crime. Police should have a more balanced approach in terms of the alleged crimes that warrant looking into someone’s devices.

So, undermining that any further is a huge step in the wrong direction. It undermines our right to privacy.

Even the most simple erosion is going in the wrong direction, at a time when the balance is already not right, and it now favours police far too much compared with the interests of the community to have the right to privacy.

You’re talking about the ability of police to download phone content in relation to digital evidence access orders, and you too suggested these laws could be used in response to protesters.

These new powers are being sold as a response to organised crime, but do you think that the law, as it is written and is about to be passed, could result in protest being considered a form of organised crime, and hence, open up the ability to scan protesters phones?

That is right. I see this expansion as being far enough that it can capture broader political interests, as well as organised crime.

Not to get too philosophical, but we have a government here that views active and legitimate protest as criminal activity. And the organisation that goes into putting on a protest makes it simple for them to cast protests around issues that they don’t agree with as organised crime.

We are concerned, therefore, that we have a police force that is about to be empowered to pursue, really, the political agenda of the current time, which is to oppress protests and organisation around political dissent that they don’t agree with.

This is a massive problem that we don’t have the appropriate guardrails here to stop.

So, protest, and any criminal offences perpetrated during a demonstration, could be classified as organised crime?

Well, you have got to remember here that organised crime, in a general sense, is the organisation to commit criminal activity.

Then we have a government who considers that certain protest is criminal activity, and it has passed laws that see protests being considered criminal activity, such as those around places of worship.

And there is organisation involved around them, so that is essentially, in a broad sense, organised crime.

The Minns government announced its third tranche of organised crime laws to be rolled out last week, whilst the second tranche is still before parliament.

The three sets of organised crime bills come after a suite of hate crime and antiprotest measures passed in early 2025. And this has all come after NSW Labor in opposition, waved through the legislative framework that is the 2022 NSW antiprotest regime.

This appears like rolling out one criminal law after another. Is there a sense that the Minns government is going to town with criminal lawmaking? Are there concerns around the passing of so many restrictive and invasive laws?

This Minns government is absolutely going to town, as it leads into this March 2027 election. They’re taking a law-and-order approach to government.

This is the only trigger, the only lever, they have and it shows a considerable lack of leadership and capacity in this government and their idealism.

It is a time when the community needs real ideas, real political leadership and for all perspectives from community to be heard, and instead, we have a government that only knows how to give police everything they want, and it only knows how to increase an authoritarian approach to regulation in the community.

This is more than damaging. It is the exact opposite of what we should be doing at this point in time. 

We should be bringing the community together, and making sure that everyone’s perspectives are being heard, in moving forward in very challenging circumstances in the international climate.

And lastly, Timothy, there is a gangland shooting crisis in Greater Sydney at the moment. So, new laws to curb this activity appear justified.

But as Australian governments have rolled out a huge framework of antiterrorism laws over the last two decades, commentators have warned that these measures impinge upon the rights of all and not just the terrorists.

So, is there a sense with this latest roll out of criminal laws that some of the rights erosions involved in these measures are going to impinge upon the entire community? And should state lawmakers be so ready to sacrifice the liberties of constituents for some quick fix crime fighting measures?

One hundred percent. We have to also remember the historical context of where gangs and organised crime come out of.

It often comes out of the impression from certain sections of the community that they cannot access our society and its protections, so they then turn to illegal and organised criminal activity to deal with the disempowerment they are facing.

What we are seeing here is the approach of the government to continue this trend – which hasn’t fixed it up until now – of taking an authoritarian, anti-civil liberties approach to organised crime and undermining and further suppressing the community. This is only going to make things worse.

This is more than just damaging to our liberties. It is making the problem they are proposing to solve worse.

If you are removing rights and interfering with the presence of police in the community, or say, western Sydney, you will only disenfranchise and move more people into the organised crime shadow syndicates to further correct this disempowerment.

This is not only a real affront to all of us, in terms of our liberties and our freedoms being eroded, but this is an affront to the proposed purpose of these laws, as it is just going to make this situation worse.

Main image of NSW police by Paul Gregoire