The countdown for ‘intrusive data surveillance’ has expired after the 18-month deadline. From this day forward, every ISP and Telco in Australia will be bound to perform meta-data retention of every single customer in Australia for at least two years.
In October 2015, the Australian parliament passed the metadata retention bill. It gave all the ISPs and Telco in the industry 18 months to formulate the strategy to implement and abide by the orders. The orders came as a so-called ‘precaution’ for national security to fight terrorism, which is just a sham in the views of privacy advocates.
Last year, I covered a progressive story on Australian data retention. Going to such length is to keep tabs on every person in Australia through the law-enforcing entities without any warrants. The Federal departments, which are not authorized to access the metadata, circumvent the data retention bill restrictions by asking the Australian Federal Police (AFP) to do their work.
That means over 2500 appointed offices of 21 law enforcement agencies and unauthorized federal departments can access your private information round the clock for drug crimes instead of the security operation, as Dr. Robb Nicholls of the University of NSW claimed.
