The Toilet Camera File — When a Privacy Incident Becomes a Fight Over Identity, Redaction, and What Courts Can (and Cannot) Decide

This book begins in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, with a concrete allegation and a concrete address: that on 27 June 2023, at Geekstar Internet Café, Level 3/630 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000, I observed what appeared to be a security camera positioned inside a male toilet space, oriented toward an area of maximum privacy. I treated the event as urgent and reported it to NSW Police that night. What followed—rather than a clean evidentiary pathway—became, in my experience, a prolonged contest over identity, redaction, and the practical ability of an ordinary person to commence civil process when an alleged wrong has occurred.

The hinge document in the narrative is the police record itself: COPS Event E77625117. The book’s claim is not that this record “proves” every contested proposition, but that it becomes the administrative spine around which every later institution rotates. The version released to me was redacted in a way I contend removed the identifying material needed to plead and serve a defendant. In civil litigation, without a usable name, nothing proceeds; a claimant cannot sue a blank space. That is the book’s central institutional question: whether accountability is real, or effectively performative, when the identity required to initiate ordinary civil proceedings is withheld.

The dispute then moves into the statutory access framework under the Government Information (Public Access) Act 2009 (NSW), and then into NCAT, where the legal framing narrows. The NCAT phase is presented as pivotal because it illustrates how a lived privacy intrusion can be converted into a technical administrative question about disclosure thresholds, and how a closed institutional setting may see the unredacted record, rely upon it, and yet place it behind statutory barriers. The matter includes the NCAT decisions Adams v Commissioner of Police, NSW Police Force [2024] NSWCATAD 243 and Adams v Commissioner of Police, NSW Police Force [2025] NSWCATAP 58, and the NCAT Appeal Panel file number 2024/00324512.

From there, the narrative reaches the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The Supreme Court phase is not presented as a “retrial” of the incident. It is presented as a test of the legal system’s core boundary: legality versus merits. The case is Adams v Commissioner of Police, New South Wales Police Force [2025] NSWSC 1181, before Griffiths AJ, heard on 1 October 2025 and decided on 9 October 2025, Supreme Court file number 2025/00143980. The key point for a general reader is structural: judicial review is not primarily a forum for proving that an act was morally indefensible or factually wrong in the everyday sense. It is a forum for testing whether an administrative decision was lawful—whether the decision-maker stayed within power, applied the right legal test, observed procedural fairness, and gave reasons that performed the legal work the statute required.

That distinction is not academic. It is the difference between arguing, “This was a serious privacy intrusion and the system must expose it,” and arguing, “Even if the system refuses exposure, it must refuse in a way that is legally valid.” In the Supreme Court’s administrative law frame, the battleground becomes the record and the reasons. The record defines what the decision-maker could legitimately take into account and what was actually before the tribunal. The reasons are where the law is supposed to show itself: a lawful administrative outcome is not just a conclusion, but a recognisable chain of reasoning that engages with the statutory task.

A central argument I pressed concerned what I regarded as a genuine legal gap: whether the law draws any distinction between information supplied by an innocent informant and information connected with an alleged wrongdoer, and whether confidentiality protections can, in practice, operate as an immunity mechanism by shielding the identity needed to commence ordinary civil proceedings. In that frame, the question is not merely whether the incident is serious, but whether the system’s method of maintaining non-disclosure is consistent with statutory purpose and the disciplines of lawful decision-making.

The Supreme Court judgment also records—and rejects—my complaint that an issue raised during the NCAT Appeal Panel hearing by Senior Member Durack SC was not ultimately carried through into the Appeal Panel’s final reasoning. The judgment explains, in substance, that tentative impressions or probing concerns expressed in oral hearing exchanges are not findings, that such exchanges are common in adversarial hearings, and that the determinative material is the tribunal’s formal reasons, not the transcript, except in limited contexts such as procedural error analysis.

The formal outcome is clear. The amended summons was dismissed. However, the Court made no order as to costs, and the respondent was given leave to arrange the return of the sealed envelope containing the unredacted COPS report. The “no costs” outcome matters to the narrative because it is tied to how the Court viewed the proceeding: the judgment indicates the challenge could be seen as brought in the public interest, and that the construction issue raised carried an element of novelty where existing authority did not directly resolve the precise point pressed. I also record that I understood His Honour to have observed that I conducted my case in a focused and respectful manner, and that His Honour’s overall approach in court was gracious and respectable, even though I remained dissatisfied with the outcome.

The book’s method is deliberately disciplined. Where a proposition is supported by a document, a date, a case citation, or a procedural step, it is stated as such. Where a proposition is a conclusion drawn from patterns—referral loops, redactions, contradictions, or institutional positioning—it is framed explicitly as an inference. Where impropriety or pressure is suggested, it is stated as opinion and acknowledged as not proved. The aim is not to dress speculation as certainty. The aim is to provide a documentary case file through NSW Police, LECC, NCAT, and the Supreme Court of NSW, so that a reader can see how a privacy allegation can be transformed into a prolonged contest over the one thing a civil claimant cannot proceed without: a usable identity.

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Numbers and identifiers included in this article

• COPS Event E77625117

• NCAT Appeal Panel file number 2024/00324512

• Supreme Court file number 2025/00143980

• Adams v Commissioner of Police, NSW Police Force [2024] NSWCATAD 243

• Adams v Commissioner of Police, NSW Police Force [2025] NSWCATAP 58

• Adams v Commissioner of Police, New South Wales Police Force [2025] NSWSC 1181

• Hearing date: 1 October 2025

• Decision date / orders: 9 October 2025