The Australian Crime Commission (ACC) has launched a strong pitch for telecommunications companies to collect data on the private communications of ordinary Australians and store it for two years to assist intelligence and police investigations.



Appearing before a Senate inquiry into telecommunications interceptions prompted by disclosures by the former National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden, the ACC said on Tuesday that wide data sweeps were essential to effective policing of organised crime.

The acting chief executive of the ACC, Paul Jevtovic, acknowledged there were both privacy and security risks associated with the practice of telecommunications companies amassing and storing comprehensive data sets on ordinary citizens in the event they went on to become persons of interest.

As well as acknowledging that data retention by some private companies was currently executed “imperfectly”, he also acknowledged the exercise would be expensive. “There will be an expense and we need to think about how that expense will be met.”

But Jevtovic argued that those concerns should not stop the Australian government from requiring telcos to retain personal data, because data retention would allow agencies tasked with keeping the community safe to carry out their functions.

“I can understand the concern, but I hope people understand why we need it,” Jevtovic told the Senate hearing in Canberra. “Without it we will be fighting organised crime not with one arm tied behind our backs but with two.”

Both the ACC and the law enforcement bodies that make up its board argued in their evidence on Tuesday that metadata – the information we all generate whenever we use technology, from the date and time of a phone call to the location from which an email is sent – was critical to modern investigations.

The importance of metadata is often downplayed – with advocates of more extensive surveillance regimes arguing it is simply an “envelope”, not the substantive communications. But law enforcement officials on Tuesday argued that metadata collections were critical, often providing the necessary building block for warrants to access the content of private communications.

Yet they played down the capacity for agencies to routinely invade people’s privacy. The argument was that law enforcement agencies simply did not have the budgetary capacity to go on elaborate fishing or snooping exercises.

The attorney general’s department used its appearance before the committee on Tuesday to argue for changes to Australia’s interception regime, which was first established in the late 1970s.

The departmental secretary, Roger Wilkins, told the committee that his minister, George Brandis, and the Abbott government was yet to develop a settled policy on overhauling the Telecommunications Interception and Access Act, or on the wide-ranging recommendations of a separate inquiry by parliament’s powerful joint intelligence committee in 2013.

That 2013 inquiry recommended reform of the interception framework to bring it into line with contemporary expectations, including the insertion of a new objectives clause into telecommunications legislation which makes explicit the dual objectives of the regime – namely “to protect the privacy of communications” and “to enable interception and access to communications in order to investigate serious crime and threats to national security”.

It also recommended a reworking of legislative “proportionality” tests allowing people’s communications to be intercepted. The substantial recommendations were not addressed by the former Labor government before the 2013 federal election, and the Coalition is yet to signal its intentions.

Wilkins told Tuesday’s hearing there was a need to modernise the current legislation to aid law enforcement operations and to ensure the privacy protections in the act were coherent.

Brandis’s departmental head flagged potential policy and legal changes that would see fewer agencies given access to intercepted data, and greater oversight mechanisms put in place to ensure there weren’t abuses – but also a significant expansion of the current capacity for law enforcement agencies to share material amongst themselves.

Wilkins said it was imperative for agencies to share intercepted information, and the law currently prevented them from doing so as a matter of routine.

“We are in the process of a revolution in communications technology, but the act remains founded on assumptions dating back to 1979,” Wilkins told Tuesday’s hearing, adding that “the antiquated nature of the act presents real and very pressing challenges” for law enforcement agencies.

Australia’s domestic intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, has used a submission to the inquiry to argue for mandatory data retention. Asio wants intercepted data stored for two years, or five years in some complex cases.

Jevtovic during his evidence on Tuesday rejected a suggestion from the Greens senator Scott Ludlam that law enforcement agencies were using the current inquiry to achieve “a foot in the door” on data retention – that the current request that data be stored for two years would soon turn into a request for unlimited retention of personal information which could be tapped by police and intelligence agencies.

The ACC boss said the request for two years’ storage reflected both the needs of law enforcement and the capacities of the telco industry.

“What about the public?” Ludlam inquired.