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posted by n1 on Tuesday August 05 2014, @06:09PM   Printer-friendly
from the collecting-communications-data-is-a-government-vocation dept.

The Guardian and others report that Australian legislation mandating data retention is one step closer, as the Federal Government's National Security Committee has quietly signed off on a bill due before the end of the year requiring telcos to retain users' metadata for two years.

CNET has a good review of the issue:

Chaired by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and made up of members of the Coalition including Attorney-General George Brandis and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison, the NSC was established to address "major international security issues of strategic importance to Australia, border protection policy" and intelligence issues. Its decisions do not require the endorsement of the larger Cabinet.

Brandis has previously couched justifications of data retention in terms of "real and undiminished" national security risks and the need to keep legislation in step with the terrorist groups' "sophisticated" use of technology.

However, Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfuss (who declined to introduce a data retention scheme while in office as AG) said the push for access to metadata was not necessarily a response to current security concerns.

"This is a grotesque attack on every Australian's right to privacy and the legal principle of being treated as innocent until proven guilty, as a blanket Internet surveillance regime treats us all as suspects, sucking up a wealth of data that goes significantly beyond the pre-digital era definition of metadata," said Pirate Party President, Brendan Molloy. These sentiments were echoed by Chris Berg, policy director of the Institute of Public Affairs, who described the NSC's push to bring in a data retention scheme as "repressive and expensive".

Some of the ISP-es are also not happy. iiNet (famous for wininng a test case on copyright infringement in Australia) is educating their customers (and others) on what this means for them and also estimates the cost of the metadata retention to tens or hundreds millions dollars for the first two years.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @06:45PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @06:45PM (#77699)

    Feeding time at the zoo with the crocs would be bad for the environment.

    (w/apologies to Oz)

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:10PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @07:10PM (#77712)

    I reminded of the MAFIAA's war on piracy. Every time they tried to shut down a piracy system, they encouraged the creation of one that was more resistant to being shut down.

    By going overboard on meta-data collection and retention they are encouraging the development of systems that make meta-data less useful. The result is going to be a movement towards systems with not just payload encryption but traffic obfuscation (onion-routers, mixmasters, etc) in which even narrowly focused meta-data collection is much less useful.

    They are treating us *all* like criminals and the result is that anyone who cares about their privacy (which is nearly all of us, even if not all of us have realized it yet) becomes indistinguishable from a criminal. So instead of having only a small pool of criminals interested in it, now a significant fraction of the entire population is looking at developing and using such tools. They are making the act of hiding from authority into a mainstream behavior which has the effect of making it so much easier for actual criminals to hide from authority too.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by arslan on Tuesday August 05 2014, @10:31PM

    by arslan (3462) on Tuesday August 05 2014, @10:31PM (#77801)

    Its sad to see Australia copying the tactics of the U.S. They are using the media as propaganda to fuel "terrorist threats" so they can encroach on the liberty of its people. Unfortunately, like everywhere else, the sheeple are mostly apathetic or even oblivious to their liberty being slowly eroded as long as there's something distracting them.

    • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @11:25PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 05 2014, @11:25PM (#77816)

      Many of us never had any freedom or liberty. Americans at least had it on paper. The indiscriminate gathering of communications data is not explicitly forbidden in UK law, or indeed in the general social conscience of the UK. I would guess Australia is quite similar. Any laws that are there forbidding it are easily removed when the political will is there, unlike the rights 'guaranteed' in the US.

    • (Score: 2) by davester666 on Wednesday August 06 2014, @02:10AM

      by davester666 (155) on Wednesday August 06 2014, @02:10AM (#77862)

      They aren't copying the tactics. These are what the US gov't handed to them, as in "Do this for us. Now."