The State of Digital Rights

The State of Digital Rights is Digital Rights Watch's annual flagship publication examining the erosion of digital rights in Australia — the primary vehicle through which Australia's leading civil society digital rights body brings together activists, lawyers, academics, and technologists to document tech policy developments and make clear recommendations to policymakers. The inaugural edition was released on 13 May 2018 with the backing of seven national human rights organisations; subsequent editions have been published annually since, tracking the evolution of surveillance infrastructure, platform power, and algorithmic governance through Australia's particular policy landscape.

Digital Rights Watch: founding and context

Digital Rights Watch was founded in 2016 in Melbourne, largely in response to the passage of Australia's mandatory telecommunications data retention scheme — legislation requiring telecommunications providers to retain customer metadata for two years and making it accessible to law enforcement and intelligence agencies without a warrant. The organisation emerged from a meeting of representatives from Australian digital and human rights organisations, activists, political advisers, technology consultants, and academics who judged that Australia lacked a dedicated independent voice capable of educating citizens about digital rights and counterbalancing surveillance-expansive policy trends. Registered as an Australian charity and incorporated association in Victoria (ABN 90 509 129 914), it operates as a member-run organisation with an annually-elected board. Tim Singleton Norton served as founding Chair until mid-2020, during whose tenure the organisation launched the State of Digital Rights report, the "Get a VPN Day" public action against metadata retention, and a national campaign opposing facial recognition. Lizzie O'Shea, a human rights lawyer and co-founder who received the 2019 Human Rights Hero Award from Access Now for her work campaigning against Australia's encryption laws, has served as Chair since. Lucie Krahulcova, a digital rights advocate with prior experience at Access Now specialising in surveillance, encryption, and data retention, serves as Executive Director. Tom Sulston, a co-founder with twenty-five years in software consultancy, serves as Head of Policy.

The inaugural 2018 report

The first edition of The State of Digital Rights was released in May 2018 with the stated purpose of supporting, enhancing, and promoting debate by analysing key digital rights issues facing Australians and making clear recommendations for policymakers. Endorsed by seven civil society bodies — the Australian Privacy Foundation, Australian Lawyers for Human Rights, Amnesty International Australia, the Human Rights Law Centre, Liberty Victoria, the Queensland Council for Civil Liberties, and Save the Children Australia — the inaugural report contained more than 24 recommendations addressed to the Australian federal government. Its primary target was the mandatory metadata retention scheme: the report called for its abolition, arguing that the regime constituted warrantless surveillance of the population and, in Lizzie O'Shea's framing, risked "creating a chilling effect on freedom of expression in Australia" and violated the right to privacy. Beyond metadata retention, the report called for the introduction of a statutory civil cause of action for serious privacy invasions, an end to commercial espionage by the Australian Signals Directorate, copyright law reform to restore user flexibility and due process, and Australian government support for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child in digital contexts.

Annual series: evolution and scope

Following the inaugural edition, Digital Rights Watch established the report as an annual series in which activists, writers, academics, and technologists are invited to reflect on the state of digital rights in Australia across the prior year. The 2020 Retrospective, published February 2021, examined surveillance expansion (facial recognition, drone deployment, workplace monitoring), the CovidSafe contact-tracing app as a case study in government digital overreach during crisis, corporate content moderation and platform power, and technology's impact on worker rights and housing justice. Chair O'Shea framed the movement's position: "While digital rights might be under attack, there is a growing legion of people who now appreciate their importance more than ever."

The 2021 Retrospective, edited by Samantha Floreani and published in March 2022, expanded the multi-essay format across seven thematic areas: surveillance culture (Lucie Krahulcova and Kieran Pender); platform regulation and the News Media Bargaining Code (Dr Jake Goldenfein); labour and automation (Lauren Kelly); data governance and census failures (Lilly Ryan and Tom Sulston); equity and surveillance in COVID-19 context (Dhakshayini Sooriyakumaran); global tech power dynamics (Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker); and content moderation and sex worker protections (Gala Vanting). The 2022 dedicated report, hosted at a standalone microsite, documented DRW's engagement that year — 12+ roundtables, 10 government submissions, 8 community events, and over 100 media appearances — and focused on three major developments: data breaches and privacy, facial surveillance technology, and social media platform privatisation.

Position in the corpus

This publication fills the Australia / Oceania civil society publication anchor slot in the corpus. The corpus holds Oceania-located entries — PauseAI Australia, Reset.Tech Australia, and the Reset.Tech Australia children and algorithmic harms campaign — but lacked a standalone Australian publication providing the documentary and analytical backbone that DRW's annual report supplies. The State of Digital Rights is distinctive within the broader corpus because it operates in Australia's specific policy context — mandatory data retention, encryption legislation, facial recognition deployments by state and federal agencies, and a privacy law framework widely judged inadequate — that differs materially from both the European GDPR context and the US free-speech context. It represents the grassroots and civil society lens on those policy failures: not institutional policy analysis, but an annual accounting of how digital rights are actually experienced by Australians, authored collaboratively by practitioners, advocates, and affected communities building the movement from the ground up.