Telstra gets extension approval to comply with the data retention law

“The Government is assisting, particularly the smaller industry participants, by providing, as I said, $131 million to enable them to adjust their business practices to be compliant”, Senator Brandis said.

In their explanation page, the Australian government said that fears that have been raised for a “Big Brother”-like state where all its citizen’s activities and conversations are monitored is un-true”.

The Communications Alliance sent an anonymous survey to Australian ISPs, and found that a whopping 84 per cent say they aren’t ready to start collecting metadata from today, according to the ABC. The maximum amount of time for a DRIP is 18 months, until April 12 2017.

Meanwhile, 58 per cent of most survey respondents said they had lodged a data retention implementation plan. Just 19 percent said they had not. On the other hand, 81 percent surveyed companies informed that they have submitted implementation plans and only 10 percent of those have been approved.

The United Kingdom adopted similar data retention laws past year following advice from MI6 about an increased terror threat in Europe.

Fifty eight per cent of providers estimated that their one-off set up costs to comply with the Act would cost between $10,000 and $250,000.

Most ISPs weren’t “at all” confident they correctly understood what data they needed to retain and encrypt under the scheme.

“I think the obligation is expressed very clearly in the legislation”.

Communications Alliance CEO John Stanton said the results highlighted how challenging compliance was for the industry. “It would also lesson the risks of security breaches leading to unlawful disclosure of people’s personal and private information”, said Patton.

“This is especially unfortunate for regional and remote internet consumers who rely on local ISPs because they offer a specialised and personalised services”.

Where will the data be stored and will it be secured properly? There is a requirement that the data be “encrypted”, but no detail surrounding how. A parliamentary committee recently recommended the Australian Tax Office be added.

For service providers, non-compliance with the metadata retention will cost them AUS$2m while a two-year jail sentence will be handed down to anyone caught revealing information about instances of metadata access.

Metadata is essentially the data about your data.

But requiring internet providers to store IP address will mean copyright holders will be able to use the courts to try to obtain access to this data.

But public consultation does not yet appear to have begun, and no draft legislation has been published. The government agreed to that recommendation, and said it would introduce legislation by the end of 2015.

A few data was already being retained but the new rules expand on this.

Who is going to see my data?

The ALP passed a resolution at their national conference supporting a review of the mandatory data retention regime so we have a real opportunity to roll back the worst parts of this bill.

The bill was introduced by Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull while he was still communications minister. Given that authorities will no longer be required to obtain a warrant to access metadata, experts have expressed fears that the new laws could be abused to investigate even minor crimes.

VPNs vary in their cost but can be bought for less than $5 a month.

“There are always ways for people to get around things, but of course a lot of people don’t”.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam has been a vocal opponent of the legislation all along and remains so.

Today he said Turnbull’s use of such technologies was indicative of the way the Prime Minister treated the security of his own information “as opposed to the rest of us”. When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner said there had been “some discussions” with the Attorney-General’s department on the issue.

Critics of the data retention scheme question its necessity given the likes of ASIO has said nearly all of the collected data will be useless.

Today, the new metadata retention law comes into effect in Australia.