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Australia Passes Mandatory Data Retention Law
Bismillah writes Opposition from the Green Party and independent members of parliament wasn't enough to stop the ruling conservative Liberal-National coalition from passing Australia's new law that will force telcos and ISPs to store customer metadata for at least two years. Journalists' metadata is not exempted from the retention law, but requires a warrant to access. The metadata of everyone else can be accessed by unspecified government agencies without a warrant however.
I voted Greens.
Would frequent contributors to Slashdot, like Hugh Pickens and Bennett Haselton, be considered journalists within the scope of this legislation? Or would they be considered to be among "everyone else"?
I like bias... they don't mention that the labor party all voted it through as well. Greens only opposed it after they learned labor wouldn't, so they would get to claim moral high ground, while it sailed through with bi partisan support. The two year data retension has been in place since the first ISPs started as an industry code of practice decades ago. This law is just formalising and making it clearly mandatory. The meta data has been available and used for decades.
People will just use VPNs. Are the law makers really that clueless?
Mandatory Systemd laws, a fight to the death between UNIX philosophy warriors. Jihadists unite and commence WWIII, Chinamen mad from lack of womens' loins attack India. US Government folds, tech bubble bursts. No one doesn't have a day they once want to watch the world burn! Russia drops nuclears and blows up everything. The amazons are destroyed. From the ashes, arise the hackers and the makers of the maker community. Secret underground ruby dojos 3d printing a new day. Mark Zuckerbarg and Larry page emerge from the underground, and build their Utopia of sociopathic free communication Facebook driven based on distributed social netowrks, everyone wears Google glass and all ferried by Self driving EV1's as the left were able to SAVE THE ELECTRIC CAR. The women in tech pick up the sword of their slain evil oppressor manchildren engineers. Alas, a Dicedot Utopia.
Good thing they have all that metadata to parse so it's easy to know who the journalist are, you know, so they can get a warrant before accessing their data.
if the Five Eyes slurp it all up anyway? They already have access to these data, why bother making ISPs keep it too?
If these people were actually conservatives, then they'd try to maintain the status quo, not introduce new controls, etc.
They are not conservatives, but rather progressives, as they seek progressively more authoritarian ends.
Time for literally everyone to become a journalist.
Your vote is not important. What is important is that you're writing the checks that fund the government's activities.
You are funding that for which you protest.
So journalistic meta data requires a warrant but everyone else doesn't? Or am I just reading that wrong? If I am reading that correctly why are journalists marked as special snowflakes when it should require a warrant for anyone's data?
Both the Government (Liberal/National) and main opposition party (Labor) voted for the legislation.
That's about 90% of the parliament wanting to throw us under a bus, so I'm not sure how voting for a non-niche party would have helped.
I activated my VPN after seeing the headline, I keep forgetting to do that.
I should trial configuring it on my router.
My bad.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
is that it also makes warrant canaries illegal.
is a way of life here anyways
why don't you just fuck off
The cost of implementing this is probably going to send us to the wall. I am so glad that the Liberal government is looking after small business!
Isn't it better for people in Australia to know their network data will be retained for two years, than for the people in the U.S. to be unaware data is being retained, but then in actuality have it retained forever by the NSA?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
:)
and I wrote to the politicians as well, bad day for Australia.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
From a quick check of text ISP side retention appears similar to previous failed US attempts. Basically ISP connection "session" level detail.
ISP assigned IP, aggregate data and packet counts, physical connection point..etc. with a uniform minimum retention period... Frankly shit most ISPs keep anyway.
On the Information provider side (websites, email providers) retention appears to be per mail or transaction... an access log or email log file... This is on the hosting side only not ISP side unless of course ISP is hosting.
Thy explicitly seems to not include granular collection on the ISP end... IP flows, DPI/URL type shit.
So while I have nothing to hide, the data retention bit makes little to no difference to 99% of the population, not that I agree with it in the slightest.
What stinks most about this bill is that 100% of the cost of this surveillance measure is to be borne by the consumer.
The government reckons the cost is $4 per person, per annum, so $80,000,000 per year (give or take) while the Telco industry say it will be closer to 10x that amount, meaning everyone's internet/phone bills will increase by around $5-10 per month.
While that may sounds like a trivial amount to some people, consider how much money that will pull OUT of the economy that small business relies on for income; disposable income.
Dan. -- So what if it's spelt wrong, nobody's perfect
.. this was power elite flunkies doing their owners bidding.
Anyone know a decent VPN service that doesn't require some silly non-standards client to be installed on the desktop for it to function?
There was a poll done by essential media, who do regular party polling (not the best), but often ask interesting questions.
Question + Result here http://essentialvision.com.au/...
The voters of both major parties dont want this legislation, but both parties negotiated so there is "bipartisan support on national security".
No effective opposition mean no effective democracy.
Next up is the censorship bill, or three strikes or whatever which will likely go the same way.
Because the more people who vote for the non-colluding parties the sooner change will occur. Doing nothing, surprise, surprise, surprise achieves exactly fucking nothing. Want change then start working towards, don't have to win, you just have to try and who knows you might have some fun annoying the crap out of them.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Or try to elect people in the majority parties who support your position (or are at least are closer than the ones in office). Evolution versus revolution.
Sung to the tune of Steve Ballmer:
Encryption,
Encryption,
Encryption,
Encryption
The ALP want to appear to offer a "united front" on anything related to security or terrorism because of the "if you are not with us you are with the enemy" approach the government has pushed on occasion. Also the individuals in the ALP don't know enough about the issue to think it's important enough to pick a fight over. That's a bit of an artifact of many Australian politicians starting their career from student politics and having little exposure to anything else outside politics, so metadata to them is just "computer shit" and nothing of importance.
Very disappointing but not unexpected since Conroy of the ALP was pushing for similar things when he had the power to do so.
Now that the NSA has all your secrets, I bet your politicians agree to Corporate Sovereignty in the TPP treaty, the main diplomatic thing going on right now.
Watch and see, Australian rejected corporate sovereignty, Australian Free Trade Agreement FTA, doesn't permit it, and Tobacco giants like Philip Morris want to challenge anti-smoking legislation. The new TPP treaty (negotiated in secret) is trying to make a lawyers tribunal that can overturn national law if it interferes with corporate profits, this would permit them to overturn that anti-smoking law and others.
So watch how surveillance data is used against opponents of TPP:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140829/03425628359/corporate-sovereignty-debate-heats-up-australia.shtml
MPs will be kept 'on-message' , so anyone who speaks against Corporate Sovereignty will have their surveillance data examined closely. Watch for "Minister X watched porn, we are shocked, he should resign immediately." style smears.
Sad to see how quickly 5 eyes states have descended into fascism. This mass surveillance has only been going for a few years now. 2010 was GCHQ's full take, NSA only gained basic access in 2007.
And yet there is a clear and distinct swing to oppressive almost fascists states by each one of the 5 eyes countries.
sectokia: "I like bias... they don't mention that the labor party all voted it through as well. Greens only opposed it after they learned labor wouldn't, so they would get to claim moral high ground, while it sailed through with bi partisan support. The two year data retension has been in place since the first ISPs started as an industry code of practice decades ago. This law is just formalising and making it clearly mandatory. The meta data has been available and used for decades."
Do you have any verifiable citations for that? What part of timothys' synopsis do you deem biased? Please provide specifics.
"Despite hearing months of evidence that the mandatory data retention proposal is dangerous, expensive and open-ended, the Labor Party appears to have caved", Scott Ludlam
Because it makes sense once you get the ignorance and emotion out of the debate.
Up until now the Telcos kept the metadata anyway; for billing, research, performance testing etc. How long they kept it and what they did with it was pretty much their business.
There were no regulations covering how the data was used or who had access, privacy aside. The police could just ask and, if the Telco felt like it, the data was handed over.
Journalists had no special status. The Telco probably had no idea which phone numbers belonged to which journalist - if anyone can agree on what constitutes a journalist. Even under the new regeime many a journalist will probably have an "undisclosed" phone or two for special projects. Do the Telcos break the law if the hand over data on one of these phones?
Under the pretext of protecting us from the Islamo-Fascist bogyman and other such phantasms, the Aussie gov legalized warrentless spying on its own citizens. And this will be totally ineffective against organized crime, arms dealers, drug smugglers and state sponcered versions of all three.
__
"A watched population is a compliant one"
Australia Passes Mandatory Data Retention Law
Passes like a bowel movement?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Democracy - the system whereby you vote for people to represent you and and up with no representation.
Want to bet there will be cron jobs running every few minutes that purge any politicians meta data.
ISP's should make this an explicit surcharge on people's bill. Something like "fee to store your personal browsing info for eternity, for more info contact your government representative". It's probably the only way to get the general public to pay attention to this
+1 Agree ... look at Federal parliament: the independents have grown in the senate (and often influence outcomes), and neither major party has a majority in the lower house, either.
I never vote for the major parties, yet they always win, and many people say I'm a fool.
But hold on
And that's precisely due to people like myself voting for those smaller parties / independents.
If more people voted for smaller parties / independents, we could heavily weaken the major parties, and finally make them represent voters instead of political donors.