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Inside Australia's Data Retention Proposal

Posted by timothy on from the if-you-have-nussink-to-hide dept.

bennyboy64 writes "New details have emerged on Australia's attempt at getting a data retention regime into place, with meeting notes taken by industry sources showing exactly what has been proposed. In a nutshell, the Australian government wants Internet service providers to keep anything and everything they have the ability to log and retain for two years 'at this stage.'"

26 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. As a Danish immigrant to Australia... by aojensen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... I have to say that this is nothing but seriously scary.

    1. Re:As a Danish immigrant to Australia... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Perhaps I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that this sort of policy would require ISPs to retain all sorts of illegal content - everything from illegally downloaded torrents to child porn.

      Since the ISPs are acting under orders from the government, doesn't that make the government an accessory to these crimes of possession?

  2. So...what's the next stage? by Joce640k · · Score: 3, Insightful

    (Hopefully 'voted out of office'...)

    --
    No sig today...
    1. Re:So...what's the next stage? by commodore64_love · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The new masters will be the same as the old masters (we know - the new guys still renewed the Patriot Act). A wiser course would be a lawsuit saying the central government was never given the power to store private citizens' records, therefore the law violates the Australian constitution.

      --
      "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
    2. Re:So...what's the next stage? by Eskarel · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Well, unfortunately it's not that simple.

      Here in Oz we have a choice between the current party who have a particular bent towards nanny stating but otherwise aren't too bad, the Liberal party who are no longer liberal and seem to support the idea of moving back to the 1950's, xenophobia, conservative religious values, privatizing things even the US hasn't privatized, and bending over backwards for big business(and is also a direct continuation of the bugger we voted out last time), and the Greens, who are one of those parties who have a lot of really good ideas, but who are also raving lunatics.

      So we have the choice of giving up our freedom, giving up our freedom, or giving up everything else in exchange for our freedom. It's not a whole lot different than the upcoming US election except that our lunatic fringe party is on the left whereas your lunatic fringe party is on the right.

  3. Sup? by markdavis · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Well the hell is going on in Australia lately??? Seems like every few days it is yet another article about YMBB (Yet More Big Brother). Does the populous want this stuff or did a new political machine take over or something?

    1. Re:Sup? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      what's going on is that it's popular to make a big deal of every vague intention by the Australian government, without reference to the fact that none of it is law yet. (And in the case of the infamous filter, never will be).

      What is also usually missing from at least the summaries of these articles is that most of these things are based on already implemented existing laws in either Europe, the UK, Canada or the USA

    2. Re:Sup? by mabinogi · · Score: 4, Informative

      why?

      I don't see any evidence that the filter will ever go through.
      The government isn't even trying.

      Even if they win the next election with a majority in the senate (and currently it's looking like they might not win at all), to put it before parliament Conroy is finally going to have to write down exactly what it is, which is something he's been utterly unable to do to this date.

      --
      Advanced users are users too!
    3. Re:Sup? by causality · · Score: 2, Insightful

      what's going on is that it's popular to make a big deal of every vague intention by the Australian government, without reference to the fact that none of it is law yet. (And in the case of the infamous filter, never will be).

      What is also usually missing from at least the summaries of these articles is that most of these things are based on already implemented existing laws in either Europe, the UK, Canada or the USA

      All laws started out as intentions, so this is significant. If the people of Australia don't want these measures, it's a problem that their representatives in government would like to implement them. It's also a problem because of the precedent it either sets or follows; either way legitimizes the idea.

      Personally, here is what I want: if the cops have a good reason to believe someone has committed a crime, let them get a warrant. With that warrant they can search only that particular suspect or particular group of suspects and/or conduct surveillance only on those people to gather the evidence needed to make their case. If this process yields insufficient evidence, then better luck next time. None of this requires a backlog of what everyone has said and done on the Internet for the last two years. There's no genuinely good purpose behind this that outweighs the invasiveness and potential for abuse. I don't care if every country in the whole world has similar laws -- that would merely increase the number that are doing something wrong.

      Another thing: does the government intend to provide money to the ISPs for the data centers and hard drives they will have to purchase and maintain to archive such a large volume of information, or is this yet another unfunded mandate?

      --
      It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
    4. Re:Sup? by ignavus · · Score: 2, Funny

      Today Australia, tomorrow the world!

      Previously:

      What is also usually missing from at least the summaries of these articles is that most of these things are based on already implemented existing laws in either Europe, the UK, Canada or the USA

      May I borrow your time machine?

      What he meant to say was: "Today Australia, yesterday the world!"

      --
      I am anarch of all I survey.
    5. Re:Sup? by schwaang · · Score: 4, Informative

      I remember backpacking around Europe 20-ish years ago. You run into many Aussies on walkabout, and some of them complained to me that this one guy was pushing their politics far to the right. By controlling the newspapers he had every politician running scared. The guy? Rupert Murdoch.

      Murdoch's grip on the Australian press is extraordinary. Of all the daily newspapers published in the capital cities, where most Australians live, two out of every three copies sold are Murdoch's. Three out of every four Sundays are Murdoch's. In Adelaide, he owns everything, including the printing presses.

      At the time I remember thinking "Well, good luck with that!"

      Fox News and the George W. Bush presidency later, I'm no longer surprised by Australia's bent towards authoritarianism.

    6. Re:Sup? by jmello · · Score: 2, Insightful

      From what I understand, the parties in Australia are so evenly split that in order to win votes, they have to appeal to the christian right, and is doing so with a "somebody think of the children" approach.

    7. Re:Sup? by rtb61 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Could be thin edge of the wedge global politics. With the Australia government being put under pressure by the US and Europe to try to squeeze in these laws, so that they can be used as an example by others to introduce them elsewhere.

      Silly stuff recording emails sent and received, so what happens if you run your own email server (something that will eventually become the norm), by law you will be required to monitor your own activities and dob yourself in. Broadband always on connections, so you logged in on april 2005 and are still logged in, no what is the point of that. Recording all web site visits, easy solution web accessing equivalent of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3173/ track me not a search engine obscuring addon .

      Likely also in the future in will be more common to have a home web server that you and your family can log into remotely, to get and leave messages, access your content, to work on your content from remote locations, so will you have to record this and report any suspicious activity by you or your family.

      The cloud services in their real application are distributed services (not big data centres renting access, the deluded dreams of the lock in monopolists). The traffic flow will be enormous and intertwined, as people collect, collate, alter, update and redistribute data in every direction imaginable. Logging all of it all of the time is simply a ludicrous idea, especially when people will take the logical step to protect their privacy by burying their actual activity under a mountain of automated obfuscating activity.

      --
      Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
  4. Re:A classic example... by mabinogi · · Score: 3, Informative

    it would be true though. There can be many different (and unrelated) sites hosted on one IP address, and of course there can be many different pages on each of those sites.

    There's a big difference between logging the ip addresses used in tcp connections and actually inspecting the http and logging page requests.
    (Not that I'm in favour of either of them)

    --
    Advanced users are users too!
  5. Will eventually lead to more robust anonymity by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Seriously, the more that world governments try to push these proposals, the more demand there will be for robust anonymity online. Whatever data they collect will eventually be used against the citizens, and when citizens start seeing their friends in legal trouble, they will start looking into ways of preventing the same from happening to them. It will become a cat and mouse game, and if the game is allowed to continue long enough, we may see things turn violent (e.g. what happens in countries like China).

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  6. Re:A classic example... by betterunixthanunix · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Of course, TCP session information could be used to figure out which website on a particular server was actually visited. A certain pattern of connections resulting from the loading for off-site content (i.e. advertising), for example, might be used in making such a determination.

    --
    Palm trees and 8
  7. Who are the funding the lobbyists? by CormacJ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm betting Seagate dropped some serious $AU to get this passed.

  8. Broken by design. by samson13 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    As seems typical with this government they don't think through the consequences of their laws (or proposed laws). A good law should:
    1) Feel guilty if I break. (not applicable in this case cause it is a proscriptive law)
    2) Solve a problem.. In this case it will just lead to more off shore services, encryption and obfuscation in existing communications. This will just lift the bar so that a warranted tap will no longer be likely to provide anything useful.
    3) Hurt the bad guys more than the good guys. This just lifts the cost for everybody and depending on what the ISPs need to do to collect this data then it may effect performance.
    4) Be technically possible.

    I've got a plan with a static IP so my ISP doesn't do any transparent proxying so they don't automaticaly get my URL history. I'm running my own mail server so they don't get my email information. I trust them becuase I know they couldn't afford to be bothered.

    So the ISP is going to have to start doing deep packet inspection on all my traffic to pull out these bits of information to log. That starts to get expensive and intrusive to their operations and my bill.

    If we start to use more TLS on our smtp connections then they just won't have the information to log.

    If they are logging URLs then I'd be tempted to do my backups with encrypted data in the get request. Can't be compressed and can't be used. This sort of attack with expensive noise could be implemented on a lot of websites... Say google with their stance against the Australian governments stupidity put more hash codes in their URLs. It would make the hard drive manufacturers rich trying to supply the ISPs fast enough.

  9. Do Australians care? by mangu · · Score: 2, Funny

    I don't know too many Australians, so this is anecdotal, but they don't seem to be very active politically. As the old Kiwi joke goes, it takes 21 Australians to change a lightbulb, one to hold the bulb and twenty to drink beer until the room starts spinning.

    1. Re:Do Australians care? by crafty.munchkin · · Score: 2, Interesting

      interest rates are still fairly decent (around 4%).

      WHAT?!?!?!? can you tell that to my bank? they seem to be consistently increasing my mortgage, and have been since the GFC. Currently at 7% and scheduled to go up again RealSoonNow.

      Frankly, this issue hasn't really got any mainstream coverage. People simply don't know about it. And if they did, the classic government response would be "well, if you're not doing anything illegal you have nothing to worry about"

      And this is the problem. We geeks/nerds/whatever derogatory term you want to use for the people who fix your PC when you've visited a dodgy porn site have been trying desperately to get this issue (and the internet filter) the attention it deserves, but it's only just come to some peoples attention that the internet filter is going to be mandatory and most people still think it's a good thing. Seriously, most people just couldn't give a flying fuck sideways - and bringing up the topic for conversation is a great conversation killer and way to make sure you don't get invited to parties.

      It's not going to stop me trying though.

      --
      ... wait, what?
    2. Re:Do Australians care? by Lord_of_the_nerf · · Score: 2, Informative

      I don't know too many Australians, so this is anecdotal, but they don't seem to be very active politically. As the old Kiwi joke goes, it takes 21 Australians to change a lightbulb, one to hold the bulb and twenty to drink beer until the room starts spinning.

      Depends on who you ask. There are a vocal number of people who are reasonably savvy. There is also the general population who are slowly becoming aware of the situation and the politics. Previously there was some support for the filter on the basis that it's stated goal had an inarguable 'protect the children' motif. Gradually the holes are starting to show and this growing awareness is turning the tide.

      However, the current government has been thwarted far too often (often by it's own inaction rather than the opposition leader Tony Abbott's tomfoolery) and this seems to be the one election promise they can fulfill. Granted it was to the one party (Family First) that seems determined to wrap Australia in cotton wool, blind itself and set fire to anyone who wanders too close to their kids.

      They (Labour) are staring at an election that they could lose to an unpopular bigot and admitted liar who happens to be the 'lesser evil'.

      Anyone want to trade countries?

  10. Re:Vote em out I say by zuperduperman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'm seriously scared by this upcoming election. There are only two possible outcomes and both of them are nightmares. If the neocons get in then we are up for all kinds of horrendous stuff and if Labor retains power then they will be claiming they have a mandate for turning the country into a police state. The only useful option seems to be to selectively target individual senators but that has only a slim chance of making a substantial difference.

  11. Re:Vote em out I say by Eskarel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Personally I'm hoping for a situation where labor can only pass legislation with the help of the greens. That should tone down the crazy of the greens, and tone down the nanny of labour.

    Of course it would be even better if we could get that combination plus a liberal party who had some policy other than "oppose everything" so that some debates went right and some debates went left depending on the interests of the country.

  12. Re:Vote em out I say by zuperduperman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    There's a problem: the libs will happily vote for much of the evil stuff that Labor wants. Abbott *loves* the idea of the filter and I'm sure would be all over data retention (of course, he won't say this publicly - but when it comes to a vote they'll back it). So there is no scenario where the greens will be able to protect us completely, even if they hold the balance of power by a significant margin.

  13. Re:Vote for the Pirate Party by Merls+the+Sneaky · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Australians hardly ever vote for parties with silly names. I propose the form a a coalition with other parties with civil liberties in mind and drop the silly names. We also have The Australian sex party. They get bugger all votes because "working family's" won't vote for a single issue party or a party with a silly name.

    I know it is frustrating but it is one of the issues that we face and that is one possible solution. It also concentrates the civil libertarian vote to gain more power.

  14. Re:Vote em out I say by dakameleon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    And unless Rudd grows the balls to call a double-dissolution, it's only a half-Senate election in any case, so there's only so much shift that can occur. The Senate is our best chance to shaft them on this, but you have to keep the Liberals on the opposition benches in the lower house.

    This election and nation is screwed.

    --
    Man who leaps off cliff jumps to conclusion.