In 2020, journalists asked Australian police forces whether they were using Clearview AI — the American company that scraped three billion social media photos without consent to build a facial recognition database. The answer, from several state forces and the AFP, was no.

Then Clearview suffered a data breach. The stolen customer list included Australian law enforcement agencies. At that point, the denials stopped.

That sequence — quiet adoption, public denial, disclosure only under external pressure — is the pattern. Last week I wrote about the cultural conditions that make it possible: the institutional trust, the “she’ll be right” pragmatism, the absence of organised civil liberties infrastructure that might have generated friction. This post is the inventory. Here is what Australia has actually built, layer by layer — and what you can do about it.

A few days ago I was listening to an episode of It Could Happen Here — Cooper Quintin and Colonel Panic from the EFF walking through the American surveillance state. Flock cameras on every corner. Cell site simulators at protests. Facial recognition with no accountability, built on databases scraped from your social media without asking. PenLink buying location data harvested from your phone’s apps and selling it to law enforcement — no warrant required, because it came from advertising networks instead of a phone carrier.