Australian Government to Store All Online Communications
The Australian Government has been planning to force ISP's to capture and store all online communications, such as VoIP calls, and emails, the times, sources, and destinations of these communications, and according to an industry source, all browsing history. However it is difficult to say exactly what is being planned, as the document outlining the proposed policies has been 90% censored, and the Australian Government is refusing to talk.
“I have never heard of this proposal,” said Exetel CEO John Linton. “My personal view is that it is an insanely difficult and expensive process to implement that serves exactly no purpose whatsoever — in other words nanny state gone totally insane one more time by the current government.”
The Government aims to store all communications of everyone - even those who are not suspected of doing anything illegal. Aside from the fact that this is stupidly (and I mean, really stupidly) easy to circumvent (anyone say SSH tunnel?), it is going to be an insanely high cost that will simply drive the majority of ISP's out of business, or make Internet connections unaffordably expensive.
“Internode can confirm it has participated in discussions with the Attorney-General’s Department about the data retention proposals referred to in the ZDNet story, but is unable to comment on these discussions due to confidentiality issues,” said a spokesperson for Internode.
The document outlining the Government's actual plans (linked at the start of this document) has been 90% censored, supposebly for fears that it will cause "uneccesary and premature debate". The Government is taking a "rush the policy" approach to this as well, giving industry ISP's only a month to respond (less time for the public to find out). Claudia Hernandez, legal officer of Attorney-General Robert McClelland's Department, said that the public has a right to "participate in and influence the processes of government decision making and policy formulation(, however)... the premature release of the proposal could, more than likely, create a confusing and misleading impression". It would seem that not releasing the document has possibly caused even more of a confusing and misleading impression.
"To refuse disclosure of material that had already been circulated among stakeholders, on an issue of intense current political debate on the ground that it might provide unnecessary discussion, shows that the Gillard government has become beyond satire," Brandis said. Colin Jacobs said that the onus was now on government to "explain what data they need, what problem it solves and, just as importantly, why it can't be done in an open process. We have to turn the age-old question back on the government: if you don’t have anything to hide, then you shouldn't be worried about people having insight into the consultation."
One spokesman for the Attorney-General's Department had this to say:
"These consultations have involved identifying the parties to a communication, where and when that communication is made and the communication's duration," the spokesman said.
"It does not include the content of a communication such as people's conversations or contents of an internet banking session, for example."
Quite evidently, this is an extremely astounding policy proposal, which, in conjunction with the proposed Internet filtering policy (Great Firewall of Australia, as it's affectionately known) and the general secrecy of this Government, should have all concerned. Privacy and Freedom of Information are both being lost (as well as, progressively, Freedom of Speech), and they're leaving those with legitimate privacy concerns little-to-no choice about encrypting all communications, whether via PGP, or SSH tunnels, and risking being accused of being criminals.