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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.

9 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Don't blame me. by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 5, Funny

    I voted Greens.

    1. 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?

  2. Not new by sectokia · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Re:Hugh Pickens and Bennett Haselton: journalists? by youngone · · Score: 4, Informative

    Australia has a couple of big media companies that dominate the media landscape, just as most Western economies do. Those media companies and the two big political parties make use of each, once again just like most western countries. ChunderDownunder has the right idea, but Rupert and the rest won't let the Greens, (or any other disrupters) get any power.

  4. 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.

  5. A bit more worrisome... by Letophoro · · Score: 5, Interesting

    is that it also makes warrant canaries illegal.

  6. Re:What difference does it make by GumphMaster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Making the ISP keep it too:

    1. Makes it reliably available for litigation by big media over copyright infringement and removes the ability of ISP to defend customer privacy with inconvenient legal actions or by simply not holding the information. Hosting privacy protecting proxy/VPN services has essentially be outlawed on Australian soil... or will be as the holes in this legislation become evident and the scope creep continues.
    2. Makes it reliably available for abuse by political parties: want to know who leaked the embarrassing x? Simple warrantless search with no oversight.
    --
    Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  7. Re:Hack for a shitty law by GumphMaster · · Score: 5, Informative

    The law tightens the definition of "Journalist" over that in the existing Evidence Act so that this is impractical.

    Evidence Act

    Journalist means a person who is engaged and active in the publication of news and who may be given information by an informant in the expectation that the information may be published in a news medium.

    This law:

    (i) a person who is working in a professional capacity as a journalist; or (ii) an employer of such a person;

    If you are not being paid to be a journalist or paying someone to be a journalist then you are not a journalist, and warrants are not required, under this law. A subtle and deliberate difference.

    --
    Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  8. 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.