Labor to roll over on data retention bill; We are citizens not suspects.

[slothpomba]

Labor to roll over on data retention bill — but with a twist
Bernard Keane | Feb 12, 2015 1:02PM
Labor is poised to back a data retention regime, but protection for journalists and whistleblowers is under consideration.

The government’s mass surveillance proposal, under which communications companies would be forced to keep records of the online and telephone activity of every Australian customer, looks set to go ahead, with Labor poised to back the scheme.

However, legislation establishing the government’s data retention regime may still face a difficult path through the Senate, with Labor understood to be considering following the lead of David Cameron’s Conservative government in the UK and amending the bill to protect journalists and whistleblowers, who face being hunted down as police forces, intelligence agencies and corporate litigants trawl through the vast trove of personal data that will be created.

Labor is expected to back the scheme, currently being assessed by the Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, in order to avoid giving Tony Abbott any opportunity to revive his fortunes by branding Labor soft on terrorism. Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, responding to three questions in Tuesday’s Caucus meeting about data retention, is understood to have flagged the difficulties of opposing it. Since then, the Prime Minister has used the arrests this week of two Sydney men suspected of planning a terrorist attack to insist data retention was necessary to stop terrorism, while Peter Dutton sought to link the planned attack to Labor’s asylum seeker policies.

However, figures on the Left of the party are said to be concerned about the threat of data retention to the media and whistleblowers. Major media organisations and the MEAA both flagged significant concerns that data retained under the proposed scheme would be used to hunt down whistleblowers who contact journalists. The data retained will also be available via civil litigation, meaning not merely security agencies but companies will be able to secure the metadata of journalists for up to two years (some JCIS members want to extend the period to five years), enabling them to track down whistleblowers via litigation.

Under current laws, a vast array of agencies from local councils up can demand the metadata of any person without independent oversight. Under the government’s proposed regime, retained data will be accessible by security and law enforcement agencies and any others the government decides to add. The Australian Federal Police have publicly acknowledged they use journalists’ and politicians’ metadata to pursue whistleblowers, and thin-skinned bureaucrats in the Departments of Defence and Customs have asked the AFP to go after sources for recent media stories.

The issue of unfettered access to journalists’ data to access sources has flared recently in the UK, where a recent investigation uncovered multiple instances of British police using powers to access data in order to track down whistleblowers and sources. A campaign, Save Our Sources, was developed in response to the revelations of misuse. Earlier this year, British Prime Minister David Cameron accepted the recommendation by the Interception of Communication Commissioner’s Office (ICCO) that any accessing of data to identify a journalists’ source would require a judicially issued warrant. Last week, British Deputy PM and Liberal Democrats leader urged the UK Home Office to urgently move on the issue.

The Australian government has repeatedly cited the UK as an example of the direction Australia should be going on data retention. Until recently, a code had been in place regulating British police access to data; after criticism of its weakness, it was recently redrafted. However, statutory protection will now be implemented instead. The British model establishes a tiered approach to journalist metadata, with access for ordinary investigative purposes determined at a junior level, access for investigations relating to journalists themselves determined at a senior police level, and access for investigation of journalists’ sources dependent on a judicially issued warrant.

In 2013, amid controversy over its war on whistleblowers, even the Obama administration moved to tighten the circumstances in which journalists’ metadata could be obtained, and give media organisations the opportunity to contest access.

Agencies like the AFP and ASIO oppose any establishment of independent oversight of metadata access, even for a limited class of individuals, because it would demonstrate that their claim that law enforcement would “grind to a halt” with a warrant requirement is false. Many European countries, including Denmark, Spain and Luxembourg, prohibit any police access to any telecommunications data without a judicial warrant and others like France have independent non-judicial mechanisms for approval.

In a humiliating appearance before the Senate Telecommunications Interception inquiry last week, the Attorney-General’s Department was unable to produce any evidence of a negative impact of a warrant requirement in other countries. AGD sought to reject criticism of the “chilling effect” of data retention on journalism in its JCIS submission by claiming existing laws protect whistleblowers — deliberately ignoring that current legislative protections wouldn’t stop police tracking them down, only apply to a limited class of whistleblowers and offer no protection to corporate whistleblowers.

However, the sort of amendment pushed by the Labor Left that established a protection for journalists (and, potentially, for other sensitive classes like doctors and lawyers), would address one of the key sources of potential criticism of the regime from the media. It would also be easy to draft, given journalists are already defined under existing Commonwealth shield laws.

The first threshold for such an amendment will be obtaining support for protections in the JCIS report. If it is unable to do so, Labor may seek to press the amendments in the Senate, challenging the government to defy the concerns of the nation’s media outlets and throw them out.

Source: Crikey

[slothpomba]

Deeply disappointing news coming out of the Australian Labor Party. They look likely to roll over on mandatory data retention, making them absolutely indistinguishable from Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party in this regard.

Every man, woman and child in this country will have all their internet browsing metadata retained for two years, without a warrant. This will transform every citizen into a suspect, every citizen into a presumed criminal. It will also add $130 to your internet bill every single year.

Every single website you visit, every single click. There will be no warrant and no crime but they want to spy on you anyway. In other countries this data has been significantly abused and even ended up accessible by authorities such as the local council. It's been used for petty revenge by low ranking authorities with access to it. It's totally unacceptable.

The only party with a significant parliamentary presence to take a stand against this is the Australian Greens.

[Aaron]

To be fair there are still ways one can go about concealing their website 'clicks' or 'visits' from ISPs such as encrypted traffic or tunneling. I don't think such laws will be effective in the long run. As Australia builds on the laws and as a result making it more difficult for would-be terrorists, I can't help but think that IS and other organisations like this will advance in their knowledge as well.

[99.90 pls]

The government doesn't care what movies you downloaded off PirateBay or who you shagged on Wednesday night. If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried.

School: West Side is Best Side

Left side is best*

[slothpomba]

To be fair there are still ways one can go about concealing their website 'clicks' or 'visits' from ISPs such as encrypted traffic or tunneling. I don't think such laws will be effective in the long run. As Australia builds on the laws and as a result making it more difficult for would-be terrorists, I can't help but think that IS and other organisations like this will advance in their knowledge as well.

There are ways to protect your privacy, i agree. There are two issues with that though:

(1) Attempting to protect your rights by using things like a VPN may cast suspicion on you or mark you for special attention. If they cant extract metadata out of you, they will naturally be suspicious. For example, there have been court cases in the USA legally classifying encryption technology as a munition (a weapon) and preventing it's export. Snowden's revelations has shown us that encryption may not be as unbreakable as we thought, especially with organisations being able to tap into the very backbones of the internet.

(2) You shouldn't have to. We should have a right to privacy. The government should not conduct dragnet, warrantless surveillance against every innocent man, woman and child in the country.  I understand they need this data. Want the data? That's fine. Get a fucking warrant first.

I also agree with the second part of what you say. If you are a terrorist or other malcontent organisation, you are likely knowledgeable about how to sidestep surveillance. This is likely to not impact terrorists, it is most likely to impact the rights of innocent citizens. Either way, the current laws are sufficient. The police were already aware of people like Monis in the Sydney siege. They didn't need these laws to be aware of him. Furthermore, this will do nothing to stop lone wolf terrorism which is the most prevalent form of terrorism we have recently witnessed in the west.

[slothpomba]

The government doesn't care what movies you downloaded off PirateBay

Evidence from the minister responsible and the architect of this scheme says they actually do care:

Worried that your metadata could be used to prosecute you in a piracy case? You should be: the Australian Federal Police Commissioner thinks that metadata could be very helpful to prosecute pirates.

When asked if stored metadata could be used to combat piracy, Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Andrew Colvin, replied at a press conference that the stored data of Australians could be used for a whole number of things, including anti-piracy:

“Absolutely. Any interface or connection someone has over the internet, we need to be able to identify the parties to that collection. Illegal downloads, piracy, cyber crimes, cyber security. Our ability to investigate them is pinned to the ability to retrieve metadata,” Colvin told journalists.

Source

or who you shagged on Wednesday night.

I wouldn't be so sure about this either. A similar law in the UK, RIPA, is routinely abused and used for petty or vindictive purposes. A list of the agencies able to access your data includes Royal Mail and the BBC.

Public bodies have sought to use the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (Ripa) on nearly three million occasions in the past decade to snoop on people.

The list of cases includes a council which spied on a family to make sure they were not cheating on school catchment area regulations, and scores of households suspected of flouting bin rules.

Campaigners warned that plans to curb council snooping do not go far enough and the UK's surveillance laws should be overhauled to stop "unnecessary, unwarranted and unchecked state intrusion”.

More than 20,000 warrants for the interception of phone calls, emails, and internet use have been issued since the Ripa came into force in 2000, the human rights group Justice said.

The group said so-called directed surveillance, where someone can be followed or have their house watched, had been authorised on at least 30,000 occasions in the past decade.

In August last year, Poole Borough Council admitted it spied on a family using laws passed to track criminals and terrorists to find out if they were lying about living in a school catchment area.

Source
 

Edward Snowden also reported that the NSA routinely pass around private, nude pictures of innocent citizens that they intercept:

Edward Snowden has revealed that he witnessed “numerous instances” of National Security Agency (NSA) employees passing around nude photos that were intercepted “in the course of their daily work.”

If Snowden’s allegations of sexual photo distribution are true, they would be consistent with what the NSA has already reported. In September 2013, in a letter from the NSA’s Inspector General Dr. George Ellard to Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the agency outlined a handful of instances during which NSA agents admitted that they had spied on their former love interests. This even spawned a nickname within the agency, LOVEINT—a riff on HUMINT (human intelligence) or SIGINT (signals intelligence).

“You've got young enlisted guys, 18 to 22 years old,” Snowden said. “They've suddenly been thrust into a position of extraordinary responsibility where they now have access to all of your private records. In the course of their daily work they stumble across something that is completely unrelated to their work in any sort of necessary sense. For example, an intimate nude photo of someone in a sexually compromising position. But they're extremely attractive.

Source.

These similar cases point out just how open to abuse these laws are.

It's not about having nothing to hide. It's about rights and freedoms. The government has absolutely no right to violate your privacy in such an unnecessary and massive manner. I would have thought as someone who seems to be on the right, you would be all about small government and personal freedoms.

Left side is best*

Your joke is so hilarious that it almost made me spill my leninade.

[chasej]

The government doesn't care what movies you downloaded off PirateBay or who you shagged on Wednesday night. If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't be worried.

PM me your account names and passwords so I can go through it all, just to make sure you aren't doing anything wrong, after all, you seem like an honest guy so there is no reason for you not to let me take a peek (trust me, I don't care about who you've been fucking, or talking to, or what you're homework is, or your plans for the weekend, I just want to double check you aren't a terrorist).

By giving permission to the government to go through your stuff you are doing the equivalent of giving me all your usernames and passwords, after all, I'm a nice guy, I won't abuse it, I'll just make sure everyone is doing the right thing.

You know you care and you know you don't want to give away the key to your private life. You are drastically understating your own personal self worth by stating you are comfortable with this.

I've had enough with the constant risk of terror and useless knee jerk responses which don't do anything to resolve the problem, I'm going to move to a much better and safer place for me once I finish uni. There is no unity nor plan to actually fight the issue in Europe and Australia, goes for both internally within Islam (forcing Islamic leaders and Muslims generally to 'condemn' violence is deeply racist and useless) and among government and wider society.

[Russ]

Just so you all know, various security agencies can literally already access your metadata without a warrant. All this bill is doing is giving the ISP a formal requirement to store it for at least two years. The law is a dumb waste of money, but they're not trying to do something they can't already do. The real issue is who is allowed to access data without oversight, not whether it's allowed to happen.

By giving permission to the government to go through your stuff you are doing the equivalent of giving me all your usernames and passwords, after all, I'm a nice guy, I won't abuse it, I'll just make sure everyone is doing the right thing.

Don't be deliberately obtuse, they're two different things no matter how much rhetoric you lay onto them.

[Professor Polonsky]

I was going to post something

Then Russ said it in far fewer words than I would have (and possibly far better, too).