More data mining in a so called democratic state
http://www.cnet.com/au/news/a-honeypot-to-chase-pirates-data-retention-committee-hearing/Proposed legislation requiring ISPs to retain metadata for two years could have implications beyond criminal investigations, with the Attorney-General's department advising that data could be used to pursue piracy.
In a wide-ranging hearing that covered topics as broad as warrants, terrorism and torrents, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security heard from representatives of ASIO, the Attorney-General's Department, the AFP and the Australian Crime Commission, each outlining their case for requiring telcos and ISPs to retain metadata for two years under proposed legislation.
While the Attorney-General's department said data would be made available to government agencies involved in enforcing criminal law, Shadow Communications Minister Jason Clare questioned whether there might be implications for "civil litigation, and particularly the sticky issue of piracy".
The only sticky issue here is the self proclaimed right of the govt to even hold such data, most folks are aware that Australia is one of the countries that share data with 4 others the primary one being the US govt as part of their global data gathering initiative. This deal suits the hawks and the war mongers in the military etc but in fact undermines democratic privacy and in the long term damages the economies of those involved as theres always the abuse in seeking economic advantage from the retained or even one time intercepted data. People might say this aspect is uncertain but one only has to look at the Snowden documents to see that this is in fact a key area of data interest for most nation states, we can go even further back in history to the pearl harbour attack, much is made of a critical delay in deciphering a Japanese message but one has only to ask why they where decrypting the Japanese messages at all at that time, historical records show is was simply to gain information of value to the US Trade negotiating team that was in talks with Japan at that time and the subsequent poor deal the Japanese from those negotiations got may even be said to be the cause of their decision to turn to war, we will never know but the fact of spying on your neighbour for fun or profit undermines trust is not open to dispute.
