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from the they-should-look-into-getting-some-artificial-intelligence dept.
One of the individuals who first brought the Internet to Australia, Geoff Huston, writes in his blog:
I recall from some years back, when we were debating in Australia some national Internet censorship proposal de jour, that if the Internet represented a new Global Village then Australia was trying very hard to position itself as the Global Village Idiot. And the current situation with Australia's new Data Retention laws may well support a case for reviving that sentiment. Between the various government agencies who pressed for this legislation, the lawyers who drafted the legislation, the politicians who advocated its adoption and the bureaucrats who are overseeing its implementation, then as far as I can tell none of them get it. They just don't understand the Internet and how it works, and they are acting on a somewhat misguided assumption that the Internet is nothing more than the telephone network for computers. And nothing could be further from the truth.
The intended aim of this legislation was to assist various law enforcement agencies to undertake forensic analysis of network transactions. As the government claims: "telecommunications companies are retaining less data and keeping it for a shorter time. This is degrading the investigative capabilities of law enforcement and security agencies and, in some cases, has prevented serious criminals from being brought to justice." ( https://www.ag.gov.au/dataretention ). So what the agencies wanted was a regulation to compel ISPs to hold a record of their address assignment details so that the question "who was using this IP address at this time" had a definitive answer based on the retention of so-called meta-data records of who had what IP address when.
[Also Covered By]: Australia the idiot in the global village, says Geoff Huston
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 04 2015, @12:31PM
We then get to say things like "the internet isn't fast enough in region XXX, bring the internet to there", establish a budget, and watch it enacted.
That said, like a real mayor, we end up saying things like "we are going to schedule trash pickup on Tuesdays with light trucks." and the companies say things like "we have a load of heavy trucks over here... we could double pickup". "I said light trucks on Tuesdays!".