Australian Government Will Bear Expenses for Metadata Retention Bill

The country’s government promised to make “substantial” payments to Australian telcos and ISPs under a new scheme that would require them to store information about their customers’ activities for 2 years.

However, the local communications minister said he couldn’t accurately estimate the cost of mandatory data retention. He also claimed that the companies, not the authorities, were responsible for ensuring the safety of subscriber data.

The minister has recently introduced a bill to parliament that would require “telecommunications service providers to retain for 2 years telecommunications data”, claiming it was necessary for police and security agencies. The Australian Federal Police confirmed that the information called metadata had application in a wide range of investigations, including pursuing unauthorized downloaders and file-sharers.

The suggested legislation will allow the storage of IP addresses assigned to a customer and details of communications, including the time, date, duration, sender or recipient, and phone numbers contacted. The government stressed that the law wouldn’t require to store “the contents or substance of a communication” or users’ web-browsing history.

The minister also said he expected “to make a substantial contribution” to the companies’ implementation and operational costs. However, he noted that the government didn’t have a final figure at the moment.

In the meantime, Labor has indicated it will consider its position, but the Greens have already claimed they are against data retention. They believe that the high costs would likely to be met through higher phone and Internet bills and government taxes.

In the meantime, the attorney general pointed out that law enforcement agencies already could access metadata, but only if telcos were voluntarily storing the data. Changing business practices and technology led to the situation where some metadata was no longer being stored, so the proposed bill was necessary to enhance the Australia’s counter-terrorism and general crime-fighting capabilities.

The chief of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, when asked whether metadata could be used to target unauthorized downloads, said yes. In the issues of illegal downloads, piracy, cyber crimes and cyber security, the ability of the agencies to investigate them is absolutely pinned to their ability to retrieve and use metadata.