The Abbott Government’s plan to require telecommunications companies to store detailed information about the calls and internet use of its customers for two years has been slammed by the commentariat.
The Guardian’s Geordie Guy has written a cracking piece telling George Brandis to get a warrant if he wants our metadata:
If the authorities want to invade your privacy, they should get a warrant. If the federal police want to know what you’re up to, or Asio suspect you’re a terrorist, they should go to a judge, and convince them that their hunch is reasonable. In other words, if they want to exercise powers normal folks can’t, they should get a warrant…
The cost of your Internet provider creating and storing metadata about every click you make and every selfie you fake is astonishing – that data needs to be stored on servers, in buildings, with people to look after it all. Those costs will be passed on to consumers. It’s worse when you consider that ISPs have no business use for all this information, and are storing it for the government-mandated two years just in case Agent Smith wants to flick through it.
This commercial impracticality, along with the fact it’s a bit pervy, are parts of the reason the Court of Justice of the European Union overturned data retention in Europe as contrary to the “right of respect for private life” and the “fundamental right to the protection of personal data”…
Hundreds of dollars per month in passed-on costs for Australian internet users. An unacceptable civil liberties violation, for the authorities to know everything about us – and that’s even before they accidentally out every gay guy in the country, in the inevitable leak of the database containing the date that every Australian Grindr user signed up. This proposal needs to be put away, forever, and quickly.
Crikey’s Bernard Keane is equally enraged, decrying the assault on personal freedoms in the Government’s new war on terror:
Data retention (which overseas experience shows doesn’t work anyway) will have no effect on the threat of potential terrorists returning from conflict zones, since they can be targeted under the existing wide range of interception powers that agencies already have to target suspects for wiretapping and data retention orders (agencies have an existing power to request telcos and ISPs to retain data associated with an individual account). And as Abbott himself insisted on stressing yesterday, “the terrorist threat here in this country has not changed”, and yet some of the most draconian aspects of the Howard government’s counter-terrorism laws will be extended and strengthened.
…the government has lurched into overdrive… strengthening the role of security institutions at the expense of taxpayers and individual rights. It’s the Howard years all over again — only this time, there’s no actual excuse for the rush, only the exploitation of nebulous fears about “Aussie jihadis”.
Likewise iiNet is concerned about the invasion of people’s privacy, in addition to the plan’s outrageous cost:
We don’t think this ‘police state’ approach is a good idea, so we’re fighting moves by the Australian Government to introduce legislation that would force us to collect and store your personal information…
The data collected can be incredibly sensitive – it can reveal who your friends are, where you go and what websites you visit. Indeed, it may even tell more than the content of a phone call or an email. Recent research from Stanford University showed that when analysed this data may create a revealing profile of a person’s life including medical conditions, political and religious views, friends and associations.
Police say “If you have nothing to hide, then you shouldn’t be worried”. Personally I think that if you follow that dubious logic, we’d all be walking around naked. It’s not about being worried, or wanting to ‘hide’ anything. It’s about the right to decide what you keep private and what you allow to be shared. YOU should be the one to make that call, and that decision should stick until a warrant or something similar is issued to law enforcement agencies to seize your information.
Not convinced? Then we suggest you check out the startling website based on information collected on German politician Malte Spitz by Deutsche Telekom over just six months. Zeit Online combined this geo-location data with information relating to his life as a politician, such as Twitter feeds, blog entries and websites, all of which is all freely available on the Internet. It’s really worth a look and illustrates just how informative and personally invasive metadata can be – it is truly scary stuff.
Experts in the US have some equally frightening things to say about metadata. According to NSA General Counsel Stewart Baker, “…metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life.” General Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, called Baker’s comment “absolutely correct,” and frighteningly asserted, “We kill people based on metadata”…
The focus of this data retention proposal is not crooks; it’s the 23 million law-abiding men, women and children that will go about their daily lives without ever bothering law enforcement…
We should all be very concerned about the assault on civil liberties and the costs associated with the Government’s draconian plan. Push back any way that you can.
