The primary goal of national security is to protect citizens, but too often this is only pursued through defence spending and programs of mass surveillance. To truly keep citizens safe, governments must address all threats to Australians, whether it be climate change, corruption, economic insecurity, or simply pursue a more equal society.

What unites The Conversation and Leave No Trace is the shared desire of their protagonists to evade particular forms of capture. This desire to live off-the-grid is, inherently, a rejection of the terms of the world as-is, and the limited possibilities of life lived on those terms. It’s a practice of resistance, skirting systems of power by refusing to be made legible within them.

So while they have a file on almost anyone new to the left, these files are pointless. Indeed, they are a monstrous waste of time and resources.

This Bill will introduce unprecedented new powers for government and law enforcement, and Coalition politicians are treating the public, and our concerns about it, with utter contempt.

Today, it is no longer uncommon for businesses to place regulations on their employees’ behaviour beyond the workplace. Such provisions will now often form part of an employee’s contract; sometimes couched in terms of a specific social media policy, or else as a general exhortation against bringing the company into disrepute.

But the tracking of lives through government documentation, in particular Aboriginal lives and the lives of other racialised people, has a long history. Despite Keane’s alarm, this kind of surveillance is not a novel breach of privacy. Certain lives and populations have been subject to tracking and surveillance since the beginnings of colonisation in this country; such scrutiny has been a key tactic of various Australian governments.