October 13, 2015 – The Day Digital Privacy Officially Dies in Australia

At least in America, the authorities feel a need to lie to the public while engaging in invasive and tyrannical warrantless surveillance. In Australia, a nation in which you are more likely to die by hitting a kangaroo with your car than in a terrorist attack, government officials have no qualms with doing it right in your face.

We learn from the Sydney Morning Herald:

The digital privacy of Australians ends from Tuesday, October 13.

On that day this country’s entire communications industry will be turned into a surveillance and monitoring arm of at least 21 agencies of executive government.

The electronically logged data of mobile, landline voice (including missed and failed) calls and text messages, all emails, download volumes and location information will be mandatorily retained by Australian telcos and ISPs.

Intelligence and law enforcement agencies will have immediate, warrantless and accumulating access to all telephone and internet metadata required by law, with a $2 million penalty for telcos and ISPs that don’t comply.

There is nothing in the Act to prevent investigative “fishing expeditions” or systemic abuse of power except for retrospective oversight by the Commonwealth Ombudsman. That’s if you somehow found out about an agency looking into your metadata – which is unlikely, as there’s a two-year jail sentence for anyone caught revealing information about instances of metadata access.

Pretty soon, the penalty will be beheading. That’ll show ISIS!

Over time, your metadata will expose your private email, SMS and fixed-line caller traffic, consumer, work and professional activities and habits, showing the patterns of all your communications, your commercial transactions and monetized subscriptions or downloads, exactly who you communicate with, and how often.

People are being asked by the Federal Parliament to accept that this regime of agency access is vitally necessary for national security at a time of geo-political tension, jihadi recruitment and the war on terror. But in a country where the biggest terrorism threat comes from lone wolves and random acts of terror, it’s a system that appears singularly ill-equipped to catch terrorists. What it does is render privacy a thing of Australia’s past.

In the US the recently passed Freedom Act constrains security agencies’ access to call records not considered essential for preventing terror attacks. In Israel, facing far more immediate security concerns than Australia, there is no mandatory metadata retention law as it is not seen as a proportionate response to the security threats the country faces.

Can people really be so completely stupid to think this has anything to do with terrorism?

But not everyone is convinced that scooping up everyone’s metadata is the way to catch terrorists. Former National Security Agency analyst Thomas Drake, who preceded Edward Snowden in blowing the whistle on unconstitutional surveillance in the US, last year told a Walkley Foundation seminar in Sydney that the NSA’s massive data surveillance vacuum cleaner had not exposed or thwarted any terror plots.

Eh, just a minor inconvenience. Move along serfs.

In Australia, a policy launched in confusion – infamously catching out Attorney General George Brandis who was unable to explain exactly what metadata was – is still crammed with contradiction and obfuscation now it’s written in law. Web browsing history – the record of actual sites visited – is excluded from the metadata to be stored: a strange omission, from a national security perspective.

“For many telcos, they will likely start storing destination IP addresses from October 13 because it will be difficult for them to remove (this data) in many cases, especially for mobile carriers due to the way their systems are designed,” Grubb said.

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