The politics of data retention
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Law enforcement agencies pitch data retention by internet service providers (ISPs) as extending their power to conduct phone intercepts to the internet, but it isn't that clear.
Is giving the police access the logs of people's internet activities really the equivalent of giving them your phone records? Or is the internet something different? And what are the implications of ISPs storing months or even years of data?
On this week's Patch Monday podcast, we dig into the politics of data retention in Australia. It's in the news because it's one of the ideas being floated as part of the inquiry into potential reforms of national security legislation, being conducted by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security.
Putting the case for data retention is Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, national manager of high tech crime operations for the Australian Federal Police.
"The majority of the communication is now encrypted, and the majority of the communication now, obviously, is passing over IP [internet protocol]... If someone from the Anonymous group is hacking into a company in Australia, through a telco that isn't keeping IP data, we can't start an investigation." he said.
Putting data retention into its political context is Bernard Keane, Canberra correspondent for independent news site Crikey.
"This is a proposal that, certainly amongst the Anglophone intelligence community, there is a real desire to put in place data retention," he said.
Keane rejects the view that data retention is simply the internet equivalent of the telephone interception powers outlined in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979.
"What we use the telephone for back in 1979 is fundamentally different to how we use the internet. We didn't put vast amounts of personal information on the telephone. We didn't put our financial data on the telephone. Companies didn't put all their intellectual property and their most critical data on the telephone... It is far more fundamental to our entire life, than the phone was.
And network engineer Mark Newton explains the implications data retention would have for ISPs.
Data retention is also in the news because it's the reason Anonymous gave for hacking AAPT. As ZDNet's Suzanne Tindal wrote, it's unlikely to affect government policy. Is it an example of what Barrett Brown described on a previous episode of Patch Monday as Anonymous losing focus?
To leave an audio comment on the program, Skype to stilgherrian or phone Sydney +61 2 8011 3733.
Running time 50 minutes, 35 seconds.