@icyfroth wrote:
Metadata thus far has uncovered two terrorist plots and a child porn ring.
During the week Shorten was spruiking that Labor had a good record on security in Australia, it was his party that allowed fifty thousand illegal’s to enter the country.
The Australian Federal Police cases were revealed as Prime Minister Tony Abbott pushed to pass controversial data retention laws as early as mid-March.
Mr Abbott was briefed by officers at the AFP’s Melbourne headquarters yesterday and said authorities needed better laws to track criminals who were adopting new technologies.
Labor is blocking the legislation in the senate. We must remember when Labor wanted to introduce their draconian laws they were more interested in watching us normal people online than watching terrorists.
Terror plots uncovered with metadata
In that case why the huge rush to push through further legislation?
The existing laws were obviously adequate if the existing laws aided with the arrest of whoever.
It's interesting to note what some LNP members think about data retention.
For example, one new power is a data retention protocol which would require ISPs to retain data on their customers’ Internet and telephone activities for up to two years, and changes which would empower agencies to source data on users’ activities on social networking sites.
Turnbull said out of the package’s many proposals (PDF), it was the data retention issue which was the most far-reaching, but “least clearly explained”. “Internet companies will apparently be required to store parts of everyone’s data, although there is no clarity as to which material will be kept or why,” said Turnbull.
“While the purported intent is that only metadata – data about data – will be available to law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies, there is no explanation of how metadata will be distinguished from data (the two are often commingled, as in the ‘subject’ line of emails), why both would not be readily available once a message has been handed over and decrypted, and indeed how readily in an IP world it is possible to keep a record of the time, date, size, sender, receiver and possibly subject of an email without also retaining the contents.”
Neither, said Turnbull, had there been any explanation given by the policy’s backers (principally the Attorney-General’s Department and law enforcement agencies) as to what costs and benefits have been estimated for what the Liberal MP said was a “sweeping and intrusive new power”, or how such costs and benefits were arrived at, what (if any) cost was ascribed to “its chilling effect on free speech”, and whether any gains in national security or law enforcement outcomes would be monitored and verified, should the proposal be enacted.
“The German Federal Constitutional Court has recently struck down a similar data retention law noting that “meta-data” may be used to draw conclusions about not simply the content of the messages, but the social and political affiliations, personal preferences, inclinations and weaknesses of the individual concerned,” said Turnbull.
“Leaving aside the central issue of the right to privacy, there are formidable practical objections. The carriers, including Telstra, have argued that the cost of complying with a new data retention regime would be very considerable with the consequence of higher charges for their customers.
Nick Ross had a good article about data retention yesterday.
http://www.abc.net.au/technology/articles/2015/02/19/4183553.htm
If politicians talking about metadata storage bore you to tears, perhaps you'd be interested in seeing how the tedious talk translates into reality? Thanks to Google, we can see exactly what's in store for all Australians because it's been doing this - often without people knowing - for years already.
For many people in Australia, clicking the following link will make them gasp.
https://maps.google.com/locationhistory/b/1/
For the increasingly few of us who haven't used a Google account on a smartphone (or who currently haven't signed in), what you'd be looking at is your Location Historyplotted on a map. Unless you've actively taken steps to stop it, Google has been automatically recording of your location every 45 seconds and time stamping each coordinate.
This is what mine looks like for the past 30 days:-
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