Mass surveillance comes to Australia

March 2015 — We lost the battle but we can still bear witness to what the legislators have said versus what the experts on data security have said and hold both sides to account. Time will tell, it always does.

Proponents of Australia’s mass data retention legislation have argued:

The data is essential to catching terrorists.
The data will only be used to catch terrorists.
The data will never be accessed improperly by a rogue employee.
The data will never be accessed improperly by a rogue public servant or security agency employee.
The data set collected will be in the legislation, not defined by regulation.
The data will be safely secured and will never be compromised.
The data cannot and will never be used to tell which web-pages and web-services your computer has accessed.
The law will never be used to expose whistle-blowers.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
That overseas rulings that mass surveillance violates human rights are irrelevant in the Australian context or are flawed or wrong.
The law applies to everyone equally.

Opponents of Australia’s mass data retention legislation have argued:

The data will be used in non-terrorism investigations.
The data will be used in civil litigation (ie non-criminal cases).
Terror suspects will be known to security agencies without needing a collection of data from 25 million people.
The data set collected will grow over time.
The data will be accessed improperly by rogue employees at the hosting companies.
The data will be accessed improperly by rogue public servants within the security agencies.
The data will be expensive to secure, driving up internet bills.
The data will be a honey pot for third parties, such as foreign governments, hackers, kidnappers and unscrupulous companies.
If a data breach occurs, the affected citizens will not be informed in a timely and useful fashion, leaving their personal data exposed without their knowledge.
The data will be used to model social and political movements, which will then be targeted by security agencies.
Whistleblowers and even journalists will be affected by the new law.
The rich and powerful will begin to exempt themselves from the mass surveillance regime, either through legislation or through technological means.
That similar regimes overseas have been ruled in violation of human rights to freedom of speech and privacy.
The indiscriminate collection of data on citizens inverts the core principle that people are innocent until proven guilty.