This article is more than 1 year old

Australia's PM says data retention laws think of the children

Don't disarm plod in the age of Skype, says 'no tech-head' PM

Australia's Federal Government, and its agencies, are working to drum up political support for the nation's controversial data retention legislation.

Prime minister Tony Abbott offered favoured outlets early access to a speech to child protection charity Bravehearts, in which he said the data retention regime is needed to battle child pornography.

Abbott followed this with an informal interview with Bravehearts founder Hettty Johnson during which he revived the “name and address on the envelope” metaphor, and described any failure to pass the bill as “unilateral disarmament” in the face of criminals.

The PM claimed that when Australia's telecommunications industry was populated by a “small number” of carriers, they kept “very comprehensive records for quite some considerable period of time”, something he says is no longer the case.

“A lot of people don't even use mobile phones that much these days, they use Skype and things like that,” he continued, “so metadata and its retention is more important than ever if we are going to be able to track what criminals are doing, whether it be criminals who want to commit terrorist offences, whether it be criminals who are committing corporate offences, whether it be people who are committing child abuse offences … so much of this kind of activity is being conducted online, and that's why we need to keep this data, this metadata, this data-about-data.

“The information that the system generates rather than the user generates, we need to keep it for two years in order to protect our community against a whole range of crime.”

In what looks like a barb back at the Labor opposition, which has flagged the cost and funding of the scheme as a concern (while remaining supportive of the bill), the PM said: “The cost of losing this data is an explosion in unsolved crime.”

He cited a child abuse investigation in Europe, saying that in the UK around 25 per cent of suspects were convicted but in “Germany, which doesn't have metadata retention legislation, almost none of them were successfully prosecuted.”

“If we don't get it, it will be a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of criminals,” he added.

The highest estimate of cost put to the government industry-wide is about one per cent of Australia's $AU40 billion telecommunications industry, the PM said.

His comments come after the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions briefed News Limited that a recent drug case, a 4.4 tonne ecstasy bust, rested on metadata.

He was supported by Australian Federal Police commissioner Andrew Colvin who said the agency's access to metadata (under, Vulture South notes, the country's current regime) meant more people were convicted over the 15-million-pill haul.

In other and surely unrelated news, The Register notes that an Essential Report poll published yesterday (Tuesday February 18) found that public disapproval still outweighs approval for the move.

Since August 2014, approval for the move has remained barely changed (from 39 per cent to 40 per cent can be regarded as noise). Disapproval has fallen from 51 pre cent to 44 per cent, Essential found, but most of that change went towards “don't know” (up 5 per cent to 16 per cent). ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like