blog Well, we knew Australia’s law enforcement and government agencies were keen on accessing Australians’ metadata, but until this week we didn’t know quite how keen they were. According to ZDNet (we recommend you click here for the full article), the number of requests made to Australian telcos for customers’ data almost tripled in the year to mid-2015. The site reports:
“More than 820,000 customers had their account details revealed to law-enforcement, emergency services, and national security agencies by telecommunications providers during 2014-15, according to a report published by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) … By comparison, the 2012-13 financial year saw government requests to all telecommunications companies total 319,874.”
To call this a substantial jump is to massively underestimate the case. And it’s not clear why all of this data was requested. Did crime or issues of national security jump by a factor of three in a single year in Australia? Is the nation suddenly harbouring three times more miscreants? Hardly. What appears to be happening here is that Australia’s law enforcement and government agencies have simply replaced a lot of their internal processes with cheaper and easier processes that involve trawling vast amounts of Australians’ private data in order to track down bad behaviour.
It’s extremely disturbing to think that the use of this data could expand so rapidly and that the habits of our law enforcement and government agencies could change so rapidly. But there it is. One wonders how much further the figures will jump in 2016. Does anyone think this figure is not going to skyrocket further, once the Data Retention legislation is fully implemented? I certainly think it will.
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It also comes down to the fact that previously, LEO were charged $72 (??) by Telstra for metadata, so unless they were sure it was going to help they never bothered asking for it due to cost constraints. Now (to my knowledge) it’s free.
Who is auditing this to make sure all of these requests were legal?
And that, Detective, is the right question. Program terminated.
Are they counting TIO complaints?
In before 50% of the requests were from a foreign entity hacking into a local system and using it for corporate espionage against Australian Companies.
Think, if our intelligence can be hacked to retrieve Obama’s passport scans when he was here this year* … you think a log of IP meta data is going to be hard to get? (especially if it is more widely available).
Security sometimes can be insecurity, and I think we f*cked up with this.
Grant them the powers and they will use it. Next the stories of abuse (always happens).
OT following Renai’s request of g.fast info BT announced 5gbps over two pairs copper at 35m. 1gbps at 100m. Speeds continue to improve (despite unsupported claims to the contrary):
“If you look back 10 years ago we were still playing with ADSL at scale, and if someone said you’d be looking at shipping 1Gbps services you’d be told you were crazy, but there’s definitely more road to go on [with copper]”
http://m.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2431337/bt-hits-5gbps-copper-broadband-speeds-with-xgfast-trials
Gfast is only useful for FTTdp or FTTB. To make it useful for FTTN you would have to install and operate vastly more node cabinets than is financially justifiable considering the cost of simply running fibre up to the building.
But I hope Renai simply deletes this post and yours – you don’t need to go hijacking every comments page, Richard.
You don’t get out much do you Richard. A couple of us worked out how many node cabinets you would need to run G Fast all over Australia.
Our answer: approx 2 million. That is over 4 times how many node cabinets even Bill Morrow says is the upper limit in terms of costs and practicalities.
So good luck with that Richard. Happy to shoot you down in flames as usual. Just the kind of guy I am. Bring us some facts some time. You might enjoy the fact feeling. Facts don’t hurt. I promise.
Richard how fast is g.fast over 500m or 1km? you always say speed is improving over distance.
Yay, so that’s one in every thirty Australians had their metadata accessed. Good job guys!
This is what happens when police have unfettered access to this information without judicial oversight as do local councils who may use this information to see if your phone was in an area if you ever dispute something.
This information can be used for personal vendettas or stalking even more easily than individual police officers can and have in the past.
I know someone whom life was ruined because of metadata mishandling
Whoops. This is a howler of an error. The Fairfax report is comparing the figures from a 2012-13 AGD report to figures from a 2014-15 ACMA report. So, first of all, it’s a 2-year gap, not a 1-year gap. Second of all, the data sources are mismatched. Comparing data from different sets is usually a bad idea. Third of all, if you actually compare the right data sets and years, it’s a bit over 1% increase in requests (AGD), and a 3.7% increase in disclosures (ACMA).
So, there goes the premise of both articles, really.
I will look into this — it did strike me as strange.
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