Recently the federal Attorney-General has declared that Australian law enforcement “would grind to a halt” if the police and other law enforcement authorities were compelled to apply for a search warrant every time they wanted or required access to the telecommunications data of Australians (see article published in delimeter.com.au).
Figures released in the federal Budget Estimates hearing sessions recently (Monday 27 May to Friday 7 June 2013) indicate that the Australian Federal Police made more than 40,000 internal requests for telecommunications ‘metadata’ (being defined as data pertaining to the numbers, email addresses, time, length and date involved in phone calls or emails, but not the content) in the past financial year. At present no warrant is required to support these requests.
Given this increasing access to metadata by Australian law enforcement it is no surprise that civil liberties groups and political groups have sought to have such activity controlled and called for he introduction of laws to control this.
Adding to the debate in recent times has been the fact that the US spy agency the NSA (National Security Agency) has been reported to have gained backdoor access to the data servers of major technology companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft - raising concerns among many of what might be made of such information and how it might be used. To this might also be added he use hat might be made of such information by media outlets who, if the News of the World scandal is any indication, seem to be able to obtain this information at will.
This issue of access to the mountains of collateral data produced by the Internet is one that has been attracting more attention and firing debate. It catches my attention because I constantly marvel at how all free societies argue vociferously against a "big brother" like totalitarianism yet seem uncannily to find ways to create it or empower it. The issue of law enforcement and metadata warrants seems to be yet another instance of where unintentionally, even unknowingly we could be delivering information to government which could easily be abused by a government minded to do so at some point in the future.
