US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden has criticised the Australian Government's data retention laws which passed in March.
Speaking at the Progress 2015 conference in Melbourne - from Moscow where he has sought asylum, Mr Snowden labelled the metadata collection laws as dangerous.
"What this means is they are watching everybody all the time. They're collecting information and they're just putting it in buckets that they can then search through not only locally, not only in Australia, but they can then share this with foreign intelligences services," Mr Snowden said on Friday.
"Whether or not you're doing anything wrong, you're being watched."
Mr Snowden also weighed in on the additional protections for journalists, saying they are minimal.
News that makes sense
Your trusted source for staying up-to-date with the world around you. Get free daily news updates and analysis, straight to your inbox.
"Under these mandatory metadata laws you can immediately see who journalists are contacting, from which you can derive who their sources are."
Mr Snowden told the conference metadata collection does not prevent terrorism: "The reason these attacks happened is not because we didn't have enough surveillance, it's because we had too much."
The criticism comes as the US spying program that systematically collects millions of Americans' phone records, which Mr Snowden publicly exposed, was ruled illegal.
