In an office in the Immigration Department's Canberra headquarters in early 2011, a public servant was hunched in front of a computer monitor experimenting with something called Radian6.
The bureaucrat was testing the capacity of the software to monitor comments about the politically charged department on Twitter.
Elsewhere in the sprawling building, the former bureaucrat believes, other public servants were testing the software's ability to keep tabs on other social media platforms, and to give the department's bosses - and their political masters - a high-tech picture of who was saying what about them and their policies.
Radian6 is a commercial tool used by companies to track chatter about their brands on millions of blogs, comment sites, Twitter accounts, and on Facebook.
Fairfax Media has been told the Immigration Department was initially excited by the application, which could compile lists almost instantaneously, of citizens tweeting about certain issues, simply by using the right keywords, such as ''detention'', ''asylum'' or ''Malaysia solution''.
But even that department, with its large unit of spin doctors, didn't have the staff to trawl through the sheer volume of online dross generated by Radian6, so the program wasn't adopted.
Three years later, it all seems a bit quaint. Radian6 is not shiny and new any more; it's commonly used by companies to keep tabs on their ''mentions'', and the software is certainly no longer the weapon of choice for the public service.
A program called BuzzNumbers is now all the go in Canberra's government departments, routinely doing what Immigration was only dreaming of in 2011 - monitoring the online lives of millions of Australians.
Public service bosses say the activity is simply market research, no different from that of commercial players, but for many Australians, particularly those from the digital left, the Immigration Department upped the ante last week with a dramatic public confrontation of a Sydney-based political activist.
Vanessa Powell said she was shocked and surprised when Immigration Department officials tracked an entry on her Facebook page and then took to Twitter to confront her.
The department warned that it would ''consider our options further'' if Powell did not immediately remove an ''offensive remark'' about a departmental officer.
Exactly how Immigration came across the Facebook material has been declared a secret by the department, although Fairfax Media understands it is likely to have been as low-tech as a phone call.
Immigration's position that there was nothing political about its confrontation of the activist and that it was simply defending a relatively lowly government employee from abuse did not impress its many online critics.
Ironically, the department's communications unit does not carry out routine mass-monitoring using Radian6, BuzzNumbers or anything else. Instead, it hires private contractors to deliver ''media positioning analyses''.
The key contractor, Melbourne-based Cubit Media Research, this week said it had never, and would never, participate in tracking groups or individuals with a view to compiling ''hit lists''.
But Immigration's ultimatum to Powell came within 24 hours of the Public Service Department's new internal social media policy calling on bureaucrats to dob in colleagues who criticise policy online.
For a government trying to sell itself as the champion of free speech as it battles to wind back sections of the Racial Discrimination Act, the perceived clampdown on dissent by its public servants is a troubling look.
Cubit's Warren Weeks says he sees nothing sinister in government departments wanting to know what the public is saying about them. But, ultimately, he says, the public would do well to remember a fundamental truth about social media: that it's public.
