Turnbull to rush metadata retention legislation through parliament

The Coalition government has introduced its mandatory data retention legislation into the House of Representatives, rushing through a process that could cost ISPs hundreds of millions of dollars and record the data of every phone call made and every website visited in Australia.

The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014 will be immediately referred to the Coalition-dominated Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security before being up for vote, despite both Labor and the Greens calling for it to be published first for public consideration.

The government's sudden move means the legislation, which will see Australian telcos and ISPs forced to collect and store users' metadata or 'non-content' for up to two years, could become law this year with just two parliament sitting weeks remaining.

"Modern communications technologies have revolutionised the ability of people to communicate, collaborate and express themselves. Sadly, however, these same technologies are routinely misused and exploited by serious criminals and people engaged in activities prejudicial to security as a core part of their modus operandi," Mr Turnbull said in parliament this morning.

"Telecommunications data (often described as metadata), which is information about a communication, but not its content, therefore plays a central role to almost every counter-terrorism, counter-espionage, cyber-security and organised crime investigation. It is also used in almost all serious criminal investigations, including investigations into murder, serious sexual assaults, drug trafficking and kidnapping.

"Existing powers and laws are not adequate to respond to this challenge. [...] This Bill will allow regulations to prescribe a consistent, minimum set of records that service providers who provide services in Australia must keep for two years."

It comes after a motley crew of crossbench senators, telecommunications companies, lobby groups and non-for-profits met at Parliament house on Wednesday to protest the legislation, with Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm describing the proposed laws as "fundamentally wrong," and independent senator Nick Xenophon telling the meeting, "This is not going to make Australians safer. Our democracy will be weakened irreparably if we do not do something about this."

iiNet chief regulator officer Steve Dalby said iiNet would be forced to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in added costs if the legislation passed.

"There's a complete lack of a business-like approach. There is no case made, no evidence presented, there are no facts provided. It's simply the suggestion that it will save us all from death and destruction, and 'just trust us, we're from the Government and we're here to help you'," he said yesterday.

"[The petabytes of data generated] will never get utilised, it's a totally wasteful process. If it's going to cost us $500 million, $600 million to put this process in place, the Government is going to have to spend as much as that again to extract useful information out of the metadata."

Mr Dalby told the meeting if the industry was forced to comply with the program, it would look for the cheapest cost option, which he said would be cloud storage hosted out of China.

The government will need Labor's support for the bill to pass, and its position at this stage is unknown. "The Australian public should have as much opportunity as possible to consider the proposed regime and provide their views before this proposal becomes law," Shadow ministers Jason Clare and Mark Dreyfus said in a combined statement on Tuesday.

The government is pushing to pass the laws on security grounds, with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop drawing a link between data retention and terrorism at a speech at the National Press Club yesterday.

"The retention of metadata is going to be absolutely essential for us to carry out the kind of work that is required to ensure that we can keep Australia as safe as possible," she said.

The government's telco metadata collection agenda has also been linked to a crackdown on piracy, with Greens senator Scott Ludlam drawing a parallel between the government pushing to store and retain telecommunications metadata in the name of national security and its moves to curb online piracy.

"The government would never admit this, but I think the very fact that they want service providers to track and store data volumes, tells me that maybe part of what's driving this is that whole copyright or anti-piracy agenda," Ludlam told Business Spectator in an interview.

"They want to know who's hitting BitTorrent sites and how much they're bringing down, so that they can force service providers to choke the internet or potentially knock them offline. I think there's a number of different agendas, including that one, that are kind of piggybacking along under this cloak of national security. But actually it's got nothing to do with it.

"From the government's point of view you've got George Brandis and Tony Abbott prosecuting really steep and expensive regulation of technology that they barely understand. And I think that's partly just a desire to stand up and look as though they're doing something tough. It's just a desire to look as though they're strong and tough on national security, but actually they're quite illiterate as to the basic technology itself.

The government is yet to define metadata, with Attorney-General George Brandis "failing spectacularly" at an explanation on Sky News, though it's expected the introduced bill will spell that out. Mr Brandis had said the government wanted telcos to store "web addresses" under the scheme, but this was later contradicted by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull who ruled it out.