After Snowden, Australia’s cops worry about crypto use

[rhoenix]

Several Australian law enforcement agencies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) have submitted proposals asking the country's senate for more surveillance power, and state police have even asked that the government move to log its citizens' Web browsing history.

Several months ago, on the heels of revelations that Australian Intelligence had been sharing surveillance information with its partners in foreign nations, the Australian Senate opened an inquiry into whether the country's Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act of 1979 should be revised to better protect AU citizens' privacy. Unsurprisingly, the ASIO—along with Northern Territory, Western, and Victoria state police—has submitted commentary asking for more data retention and offering little in the way of more privacy protection.

In particular, the ASIO said that Snowden's leaks will make it more difficult for the organization to collect meaningful data about a person, so the organization should be given more leeway to perform its surveillance duties. In its proposal, the ASIO asserted that certain technological advances are detrimental to its spying on bad actors (a refrain that is not often heard, as it's generally accepted that technology is making it easier to spy on citizens).

The ASIO said:

These changes are becoming far more significant in the security environment following the leaks of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Since the Snowden leaks, public reporting suggests the level of encryption on the Internet has increased substantially. In direct response to these leaks, the technology industry is driving the development of new Internet standards with the goal of having all Web activity encrypted, which will make the challenges of traditional telecommunications interception for necessary national security purposes far more complex.

In a footnote, the ASIO cites a Sinefa Blog report from August 2013 to substantiate its claim that encryption increased after the Snowden leaks. That report found a 40 percent rise in encrypted Web traffic in the Asia-Pacific region between January 2013 and July 2013.

Smaller state police organizations joined the ASIO in asking that telecom companies be obligated to retain customers' metadata for a substantial period of time. (The ASIO cited as a preferred model President Obama's proposal earlier this year to compel telecom companies to keep customer data rather than having the NSA siphon that data into its own repositories.) But police organizations like the Northern Territory Police and the Victoria Police also went further in requesting that the Australian government require companies to keep IP addresses and Web browsing history as part of its metadata collection.

The Northern Territory Police, for example, argued for a two-year retention of Web browsing history. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the police thought “a shift away from traditional telephony services to Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, and others meant that data may be included in browser histories and was 'as important to capture as telephone records.'”

Currently, certain government agencies in Australia can access metadata kept by companies without a warrant. “Agencies accessed metadata 330,640 times during criminal and financial investigations in 2012-13,” the Sydney Morning Herald reported. “Access to such data, if it is currently stored by a provider, is able to be retrieved by many state and federal agencies, and a small number of local councils, as well as the RSPCA, Australia Post and the Tax Office, without a warrant.”

The US is not alone in dealing with and coming to terms with such things. What concerns me is the lack of oversight on our own programs appears to be a green light for other nations in the "Five Eyes" (which includes the US, UK, and Australia) for their own programs.

On the one hand, I understand and even agree with the capability for these things to be monitored. However, having those things monitored by people without oversight turns a society's security into a society's repression.