Your online activity a target of increased surveillance
On the 5th August 2014, the federal government announced its plan to implement new laws by the end of the year that will require telco’s to capture and store information about your online activities via your metadata.
The amendments to the existing telecommunication interception laws is justified by the government’s perceived need ‘to combat home-grown terrorism and Australians who participate in terrorist activities overseas’.
So what is metadata? Essentially “metadata” (or “communications data”) is defined in two ways:
- Information that allows a communication to occur
- Information about the parties to the communication
In other words, it includes sender and receiver information and the type of media used to make a communication (eg phone call, text messages, email) but excludes contents or the substance of a communication. However, the definition of metadata is still ambiguous and whilst URL’s are arguably intended to be excluded from the definition, evidence suggests that some telco’s are in fact providing URL use data to the extent that they deem the information to exclude the ‘content’ of the website.
Whilst the government being able to obtain metadata is not new, what is new is that there will now be a mandatory period of 2 years during which telco’s will be required to retain metadata. This new right of government agencies to be able to conduct mass surveillance, regardless of whether or not they suspect wrongdoing by a particular individual seems wrong to me. Even if the ambiguity as to what constitutes “metadata” is resolved, arguably metadata can be more telling about you than the content of communications themselves. A study by Stanford University students demonstrated that metadata can reveal vast information about an individual “including medical conditions, financial and legal connections, and even whether they own a gun”.
How do you feel about the government’s right to be able to conduct mass surveillance? Does the threat of terrorism justify it?
