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Telco veteran unloads on Oz data retention laws

Reg Coutts fears misuse of Brandistan's metadata

Reg Coutts, long-time telecommunications consultant and academic, has dropped a bucket on what he sees as a big danger in Australia's data retention regime.

Writing in Canberra insider magazine The Mandarin, Coutts says it's clear that the lawyers and natsec types that decided what should be collected have a misplaced faith in the accuracy of mobile phone geolocation.

Worse, the scope creep already visible in agencies seeking data access will put it in the hands of bodies that don't need to meet the standards of criminal evidence.

Coutts, whose CV includes years of experience as an expert witness in cases involving telco evidence, says the “Cell ID” field a phone captures during a call is a very coarse location indeed, since tower footprints and phone behaviour are far less predictable than is popularly believed.

For example: if a user is near to tower A but shadowed by a building, they might be logged into Tower B which is in line-of-sight but further away – a scenario most likely to play out in a CBD where the buildings are crowded.

“In mobile systems cell coverage from adjacent cells overlap and a mobile does not necessarily use the closest cell site. Two mobile users on the same network standing right next to each other can register on different cell sites”, he writes.

When that data is used by law enforcement agencies to bolster a prosecution, it at least can be challenged.

However, there's a long list of non-law-enforcement agencies queuing up to demand access to retained data for their investigations.

That worries Coutts, since “reasonable doubt” may never apply to the actions of those agencies. Their decisions and their evidence might only be challenged after a ruling is made, and bodies like the Administrative Appeals Tribunal don't necessarily work to the standards of criminal proof.

“At least in our courts there is the opportunity for the interpretation of metadata can be contested by informed litigants,” he notes. ®

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