The surveillance state in Australia grows apace. This morning, the Attorney-General’s Department slipped out the annual Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act annual report for 2014-15. If you’re confused, you’re forgiven — AGD only released the 2013-14 report in June this year, in order to ensure it wouldn’t influence the debate about data retention by showing how intensively surveilled Australians already were.
The 2014-15 report shows an 8% rise in the number of requests made by Australian security agencies, regulators, bureaucracies and NGOs for warrantless access to your communications data, with nearly 372,000 requests made over the year. And the number of bodies asking for that data also rose from 77 to 83.
This year, more data is being kept about you than ever before, with communications companies forced to store all your phone and internet data for two years under the government’s data retention scheme. The number of agencies that can access your data has been reduced, but as Josh Taylor points out in Crikey today, over 40 agencies have demanded that they be allowed to get your data under the scheme.
But while AGD has got this year’s TIA report out on time, it has been strangely tardy on the issue of a mandatory data breach notification scheme. The government promised for most of the year that it will legislate such a scheme — so that companies would be required to tell you if your personal data, whether kept under the data retention scheme or for commercial purposes, was stolen or lost. And AGD had already drafted a bill in 2013 that was ready to go. But Parliament rose last night with no bill having been introduced. Instead, late yesterday afternoon, AGD snuck out an “exposure draft”.
Having badly botched both the development and implementation of a data retention scheme, AGD seems determined to delay one of the crucial safeguards on such a scheme. Its contempt for consumers, for industry and the democratic process is profound but, sadly, unsurprising.
Sadly our government seems much more interested in collecting and retaining our personal data than it is in protecting it. History shows that without a legal requirement to do so we cannot be confident that we’ll be told when there’s been a breach. We need a law to force organisations to do the right thing in this respect.
So far at the data retention scheme is concerned. It is such a total stuff up that this ‘urgently needed’ facility is realistically another two years from being fully implemented, with some observers suggesting it will never cover more than about 80% of ISP’s. As Internet Australia has maintained from the outset the drafting of the legislation is “fundamentally flawed”.
We cannot uninvent the surveillance state, which has grown, since Ur, almost total now.
That so many of us pay big buck$ monthly to be part of the web is simply irony played as tragedy.
Our only defence, given that spooks & cops will always do what they do, is to enshrine the right of every citizen to all information held on them, with vanishingly rare exceptions for security reasons.
As advocated by SilverMal, FoI should be automatic unless demonstrably inappropriate.
Isil hate us for our freedoms according to Turnbull..soon they will love us because the way we are surrendering them we wont have any left..
JayB – as intended by binLiner and every other terrorist going back to the Zealots of Massada.
@AR It’s also a way for them to force us to adopt expensive and time consuming “remedies” like airport security etc..