The Australian has revealed today that the Attorney General’s Department is seeking a wide array of powers in its bid to require telecommunications companies to store detailed information about the calls and internet use of its customers for two years:
Confidential consultations with the companies — including Telstra, Optus and iiNet — commenced late last week with the circulation of a paper that has been obtained by The Australian…
The paper, prepared for “preliminary discussions”, reveals the companies should retain records that would identify the names and addresses of individual internet and telephone account holders as well as information to trace and identify the source of a communication and the device used.
Data including when and where communication services originate and terminate have also been included in the wishlist as well as information that would reveal users’ upload and download volumes.
In a sign the government could be widening its net for what type of data is retained, the paper suggests the scheme should be able to capture “any current or historical supplementary identification”, which it says could include “date of birth, financial, billing and payment information, other transactional information, or contact information”…
Regular readers will know that I strongly oppose the Government’s data retention plan, which I believe would unnecessarily impede upon users’ freedom, would be overly expensive to set-up and administer, and would be largely ineffective.
Regarding cost, the Communications Alliance has estimated that data retention could cost up to $700 million to design and build the systems to support the scheme, plus a further $100m a year to run. Whereas iiNet claims that the policy could lead to customers paying an additional “internet tax” of $5 to $10 extra per month for their services.
The plan is also likely to be ineffective, unfairly targeting the 99% of law abiding citizens while the real targets – terrorists and crooks – slip past the net. I mean seriously, how hard is it for terrorists or criminals to use a public Wi-Fi hotspot to coordinate their activities? More importantly, anyone with even a basic understanding of the internet can set-up a “virtual private network” (VPN) in about 20 minutes, thereby evading the metadata net. As noted in Business Spectator today:
Talk of internet filtering and metadata retention has civil libertarians concerned, but you can easily bypass government mandated Australia-wide internet monitoring by connecting to a VPN server in another country. With the click of a button you can tunnel to the other side of the world, emerging in the US or UK to avoid Australian restrictions and surveillance. There’s nothing the government can do to stop Australians using VPNs this way, unless they attempt to block all VPN traffic – which would be a major disruption to legitimate business users.
So why bother, when all the Government’s data retention policy will do is force-up everyone’s internet costs and reduce civil liberties, while the intended perpetrators continue on their merry way?
