[clug] The biggest mass surveillance scheme in Australian history

Bob Edwards Robert.Edwards at anu.edu.au
Fri Feb 27 06:17:12 MST 2015


On 27/02/15 23:01, Bryan Kilgallin wrote:
> {Parliament’s Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security has ticked
> off on the government’s proposed mass surveillance scheme, with some
> minor amendments.
>
> Once legislated, the scheme will require communications companies to log
> and retain data about all customers’ usage of their services for two
> years.}
>
> http://www.crikey.com.au/2015/02/27/committee-recommends-data-retention-with-some-half-baked-protections/
>
>

Without wanting to be seen to be supporting this in any way, one
important difference between this scheme and PRISM is that each ISP
keeps it's own customers (meta)data, whereas in the U.S. it was all
being slurped up by the NSA into a single central govt. owned/controlled
database.

What this means is that the law-enforcement officers still need to ask
a particular ISP to provide the (meta)data for a particular IP address.

The ISPs can already legally keep this (meta)data for lengthy periods,
but they don't want to (ie. have no need to).

So this legislation is really about requiring the ISPs to retain the
(meta)data for 2 years.

I'm happier that the (meta)data is remaining distributed amongst the
ISPs rather than being aggregated into a single Govt. database.

Of course, some U.S. Govt controlled private company will come along
and offer to host the data on behalf of the ISPs for a dollar and they
will find it hard to resist. Then all bets are off...

Bob Edwards.


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