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Australia Passes Mandatory Data Retention Law

Posted by timothy on from the what's-in-the-box dept.

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.

5 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. That's handy by LessThanObvious · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  2. Re:Why not? by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re: Don't blame me. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You do know the greens today are pretty much labor a couple decades ago? And labor is what liberals were, with liberals now being conservatives and having nothing to do with liberalism.

    If you didn't just vote for your favourite colour but actually voted based on your beliefs you would either vote for different and new parties over the years or rapidly change your beliefs and values to keep up with the decline of the two major parties.

    Also I've been busy, set up 3 new VPNs last night. Going to be a busy 6-12 months!

  4. Re:Don't blame me. by currently_awake · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If an undercover cop follows you around the city without a warrant it's stalking, but if they use the cellphone system (without a warrant) to do the same thing it's not?

  5. A bit more for US etc readers by dbIII · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.