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Oz Govt Pushes Ahead With ISP Customer Data Retention

Posted by Unknown on from the security-through-rampant-privacy-violation dept.

angry tapir writes "The Australian federal government is pushing ahead with reforms that could see consumers' information kept on file for up to two years by ISPs. This could include the data retention of personal Internet browsing information which intelligence agencies could access in the event of criminal activities by individuals or organizations."

37 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Wow! Teetering on the edge! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    It was sent to a parliamentary committee for public discussion! We all know how productive and fast moving those are!</sarcasm>

    1. Re:Wow! Teetering on the edge! by Sorthum · · Score: 1

      Sure, but that's still far closer than it should be to becoming law.

    2. Re:Wow! Teetering on the edge! by coastwalker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Don't kid yourself, the security forces have been monitoring for years, Carnivore started in 1997. I don't think many people have qualms about the spooks looking for nutters with explosives from their IP traffic.

      Its just time to start opening the data up to regular law enforcement agencies so that they can openly take to court all you criminal copyright thieves and put you in jail. Because we all know by now that 'home taping kills music' and that copyright infringement is 'Terrorism' or 'Pedophilia', just ask Hollywood or the RIAA.

      You might feel that this is a little excessive, especially as the next tier of petty bureaucrats to be given access to your traffic will be Local Government and Social Service droids. Don't kid yourself that the Sheeple are going to object to this, after all it will be done to catch 'Terrorists' and 'Pedophiles', and anyway Facebook will be telling them what to think by then anyway.

      Isn't it weird how we fought a cold war for half a century against totalitarian communism and now we are becoming totalitarian democracy's.

      Its a bit disappointing.

      --
      Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
    3. Re:Wow! Teetering on the edge! by mwvdlee · · Score: 3, Funny

      copyright infringement is 'Terrorism' or 'Pedophilia'

      Let's see...

      By copying music, you are creating more playable media.
      Therefore the copied music will be played more often.
      Which means more people will be exposed to the copied music.
      This will result in more people bying the music they just heard.
      By definition, copied music is music that has already been released in some original form.
      People are now buying music by artists that already released music.
      They don't equally increase spending on artists that have yet to release music.
      It is within reason to assume current children will want to make and release music in the future.
      Therefore, copying music is basically screwing children.
      Copying is pedophilia! It is logically proven.

      Now as for terrorism...

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    4. Re:Wow! Teetering on the edge! by tnk1 · · Score: 1

      Just, for God's sake, don't wake the Sheeple!

  2. Conclusion of the report... by hey_popey · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We see an increase in SSL connections to Sweden.

    1. Re:Conclusion of the report... by Sorthum · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Or tor. Or VPN endpoints overseas. Or ssh tunnels.

      I don't really see how legislation can reasonably expect to keep up with technological innovation.

    2. Re:Conclusion of the report... by Joce640k · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Nah, what we really need is a program that just sits there all day doing random DNS lookups and loading the web pages...let 'em try and store exabytes of data and try to find anything useful in it.

      --
      No sig today...
    3. Re:Conclusion of the report... by djsmiley · · Score: 5, Funny

      Average facebook user tbh.

      --
      - http://www.milkme.co.uk
    4. Re:Conclusion of the report... by ciderbrew · · Score: 2

      They'll only throw a lot more tax at it to beef up the system and then make those programmes / programmers illegal. You need TRON to fight for the users.

    5. Re:Conclusion of the report... by k(wi)r(kipedia) · · Score: 4, Interesting

      But this can be done. Ban all encrypted traffic not specifically authorized by the authorities. This way, the first SSH/VPN connection to somewhere, and the cops come knocking at your door. Those using Wifi will be limited to plain HTTP, enough for the feeble (Facebook people) to post and check their accounts.

      The big "trusted" media companies can be granted exceptions for their DRM in exchange for having server-side monitoring software (backdoors) installed in their systems.

      The passive Pirate Bay-style of trying to run circles around government Internet policies will fail in the long run, unless accompanied by some sort of active political resistance, be it Net-only site "black outs" or flesh-and-banner street protests.

    6. Re:Conclusion of the report... by lightknight · · Score: 1

      Hmm. DOSing the program with too much data. I like that idea.

      Does anyone know (roughly) what their storage capacity is? I mean, just how aggressive do we want this thing to be?

      --
      I am John Hurt.
    7. Re:Conclusion of the report... by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      They'll only throw a lot more tax at it to beef up the system

      Nope, the ISP will be paying for it.

      If the ISPs have to put their prices up you can bet a few more people might hear about this stupid law. The average Joe/Bruce will accept this in the name of saving the babies so long as it doesn't directly cost him more money. Tell him it's an extra five dollars a month and he might start saying "no".

      --
      No sig today...
    8. Re:Conclusion of the report... by lightknight · · Score: 1

      They're already working on it in the US. See Google vs. Oracle, and CISPA.

      --
      I am John Hurt.
    9. Re:Conclusion of the report... by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      I agree - random ISP lookups all day long and random , plausible emails to random names.

      Back in the old days, when HTTP was just a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee's eye, email programs used to randomly add trigger words (eg. 'bomb', 'nsa', 'plutonium') to all outgoing mail then automatically strip it off again at the other end.

      I assume it was done as some sort of hacker joke but we should start doing it again. Any sort of government fishing expeditions through user traffic needs to be made completely futile.

      Unfortunately most people send their mail via large corporate software so the chances of it happening are null.

      --
      No sig today...
    10. Re:Conclusion of the report... by tlhIngan · · Score: 1

      Or tor. Or VPN endpoints overseas. Or ssh tunnels.

      I don't really see how legislation can reasonably expect to keep up with technological innovation.

      Easy way is to limit "overseas" access. Australian limits on Internet were quite ... low - think 10GB-ish. But the catch was that if it was within country, it was "free" and "unlimited" (hence a lot of local mirrors and Steam and other services being colocated there). So any attempts to use an outside VPN mean that you're just using up your quota faster.

      The old reason was technical - the only way to get Internet access was either satellite or someone laying a cable, and the cable was the bottleneck...

    11. Re:Conclusion of the report... by ghostdoc · · Score: 1

      I haven't tried it, but I don't see any immediate technical hurdles to writing a web service to do torrent-like file transfer over HTTP

      No, if they wanted to control this, then they'd need to lock down the client properly. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing would be the way to do it, ensure that only 'proper' commercial organisations could write software that could be installed on the average PC.

      --
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  3. Money Quote by Namarrgon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    “Crooks and terrorists will just use encryption or secure services to provide nothing but meaningless data - it's Mr or Mrs Average whose lives could be turned upside down by data breaches or bureaucratic spying.”

    Now if only that quote had come from the Attorney General, instead of Electronic Frontiers Australia...

    --
    Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
  4. What's the problem? by cheekyjohnson · · Score: 3, Funny

    If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. Why is your bathroom door shut, anyway? What are you hiding in there?

    --
    Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
    1. Re:What's the problem? by ciderbrew · · Score: 2

      Nothing, come in and enjoy the smell.

    2. Re:What's the problem? by lightknight · · Score: 1

      To which we respond: "Silly, why are you wearing those clothes? Do you have something to hide? Must be drugs / pirated software / Korans. Now off with them, put on some of this baby oil as we get the camera (for your mugshots, and we will be taking a number of them today) ready."

      --
      I am John Hurt.
    3. Re:What's the problem? by AngryDeuce · · Score: 1

      Everyone loves their own brand.

  5. How could they even begin to do this? by Sorthum · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't see where it stipulates what would need to be retained. Is it merely header information? A list of URLs (SSL will break this)? A copy of the data itself?

    No matter which direction this goes, it seems to me that it would be very, very easy to overwhelm them with data. Fire off a perl script that connects to $giant_list_of_random_URLs 500 times a minute. Turn it down when you need to do work, crank it up when you go to bed... and you're suddenly costing them an enormous amount of storage while turning their signal to noise ratio into crap.

    1. Re:How could they even begin to do this? by Barefoot+Monkey · · Score: 1

      Better make that $giant_list_of_random_nonincriminating_URLs just to be safe

    2. Re:How could they even begin to do this? by jez9999 · · Score: 1

      Actually that would be @giant_list_of_random_URLs :-)

      --
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      Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
  6. Insufferable ALP by Dracophile · · Score: 1

    These tools are virtually daring us to vote for "that other little man".

    --
    Athy, athier, athiest.
    1. Re:Insufferable ALP by jonwil · · Score: 2

      If you think Tony Abbot wouldn't give the AFP and other law enforcement agencies the same deal (i.e. mandatory data retention by ISPs so they can catch the "bad guys"), you clearly dont know Australian politics.

  7. Looks like... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm voting Greens again.

    1. Re:Looks like... by crafty.munchkin · · Score: 1
      ... because that did so much last time! :P

      I too voted greens. And will probably vote that way again, in the vain hope that somehow, in this safe Labor seat, it makes a difference. Sadly, I doubt it will.

      --
      ... wait, what?
    2. Re:Looks like... by LordLucless · · Score: 1

      So, Labour then. It's getting to be like voting against the Liberals by going National.

      --
      Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
    3. Re:Looks like... by daktari · · Score: 1

      I love the way you start your post with utmost respect... Such a charming enlighten'd brain you must have -- you definitely make me want to vote for whomever you are supporting.

      --
      A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. -- Willam Blake
    4. Re:Looks like... by catprog · · Score: 1

      *means test the first home owners grant.

      Good. it will bring down the cost of housing for the people who can't afford it.

      *ensure truth in political advertising

      Sounds like a good idea

      *end subsidies and tax concessions to environmentally harmful industries.

      Why should the government provide money to them?

      I particularity like the policy

      *make the workings of the Australian Classification Board and OFLC more transparent and subject to public review.

      --
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  8. It doesn't cost the government much by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Yes, costing the ISP a packet for storage (which they will pass on to you) while the government is free to go on and makes more pointless laws to tinker with the net.

  9. Odd world you live in by dbIII · · Score: 1

    It appears you think that when law enforcement seizes items for evidence that they pay full retail price for the goods instead of just taking it away. The only "charges" in your example above would be the fines or time served for contempt of court or some sort of obstruction.

  10. "in the event of"? by Rogerborg · · Score: 1
    • Say, Bruce, got any crimmos that we need to convict?
    • No, Bruce, can't say as I have. Shall we make some?
    • Bonza idea, Bruce, just toss this month's copy of the Statue book over and let's see who's been up to something that we've just decided is a bit naughty.

    And that's how funding works.

    --
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  11. SPIDERS! by Bigsquid.1776 · · Score: 2

    Time for everyone in Australia to run a 24/7 web spider that surfs random sites.

    1. Re:SPIDERS! by dcl · · Score: 1

      We would, but we don't have large enough data caps :-p