Australia to retain telecommunications metadata

Australia will enact laws that compel telecommunications providers to retain metadata about their customers' online activities for two years. Attorney-General George Brandis today indicated that the laws have been approved, conceptually, and that legislation will emerge later in 2014 and come into effect not long afterwards. …

[Winkypop]

Attorney-General George Brandis

The same Attorney-General George Brandis who today had his pro-hate speech amendments tossed out - by his own party!

More fail ahead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Secure storage

Not that I'm advocating this type of data collection, but it should pretty easy to store securely if they wanted. Every person/number would have its own key, with the public key used to encrypt that person's communications. The private keys would be held on an isolated system, and only the key for the specified person would be loaded to allow decryption of their communication, subject to a court order.

Of course no government would go for this, as it would prevent wide ranging fishing expeditions over a large number of people (or everyone) and the court order requirement would stop officials from being able to snoop on their girlfriends or stalk their wanna-be girlfriends.

[Gray Ham]

Why?

Apart from the expense, inconvenience, security and privacy issues, etc, etc, ... I just wonder what the point of all this is.

I mean, if it's really about stopping terrorism, you'd hope that the security services would be a bit more on the ball than 2 years. Not to mention that any competent terrorists will find alternative means of communication to avoid the whole scheme.