Right. Time for a look at the final report of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) review of Australia’s mandatory data retention regime, which was tabled in Parliament yesterday. https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Joint/Intelligence_and_Security/Dataretentionregime/Report

This will be a slow thread...

Before I start, I should mention that there’s stories at ZDNet and iTnews...
https://www.zdnet.com/article/pjcis-stops-short-of-recommending-warrants-to-access-metadata-as-scheme-is-tightened/
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/pjcis-slams-loophole-used-by-councils-others-for-telco-metadata-access-555292

... and threads by @jpwarren and @mslods.
https://twitter.com/jpwarren/status/1321369346875158530
https://twitter.com/MsLods/status/1321356021810409472

Justin is more cynical than Leanne, as you may know.

I will skim those four things before continuing this thread. Stand by.

Right. Done. So some background. Current law required telcos to keep records for two years of, basically, which customers used which IP addresses at a particular time; the sender, recipient, time, and size of emails and messages; time and duration for phone calls...

Law enforcement and intelligence agencies can access that data on their own say-so without a warrant. It just has to be approved by any officers above a certain rank — and there’s thousands of them.

The one exception is if the person whose data is being requested is a journalist, in which case a Journalist Information Warrant is needed, from a judge or magistrate or AAT member and the like. This doesn’t work for two reasons.

1. Don’t bother getting a warrant for the journalist’s data. Get the data of all the people you think might have leaked to the journalist, and see if the journalist turns up in *their* data. Journalists had a last-minute sook and this half-arsed “protection” is what resulted.

2. Cops sometimes forget (or is it “forget”?) that they need a warrant in these cases. Oopsie. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/apr/28/federal-police-admit-accessing-journalists-metadata-without-a-warrant