When a company or government practises data austerity, the burden is on them to demonstrate a need for the data they store. They must make the case for sharing their data, rather than routinely collecting and storing it for policing, intelligence, or commerce. Germany has evolved laws that embrace this principle, not least due to the use of surveillance by former regimes. Lindy Stephens is global director of people operations, ThoughtWorks. A recent report from Human Rights Watch interviewed 46 journalists and 42 lawyers in the US to examine the impact of surveillance on their work in sectors that form part of any functioning democracy. The report outlines how confidentiality between journalist and source, and between lawyer and client is undermined and compromised by surveillance and is leading to lawyers declining cases and journalists reporting less on issues that are vital to public discourse. As technologists we are concerned that technology is being used to invade privacy in ways that courts have found to be unnecessary and disproportionate, and in ways that are undermining the work of journalists and lawyers.

Perhaps if the Attorney-General understood it better, he would be less inclined to enact data retention given that other countries have found it to be inconsistent with universally recognised human rights. The data retention regime in Europe created real costs for internet service providers (ISPs) and telcos in the administration and labour required to collect, store, maintain and transfer data onto new or evolving systems. These costs are hardest on small companies, with a competition and market impact, and ISPs are forced to pass on some of the costs to users. As iiNet has made clear, data retention costs everyone. Advances in technology means data about telephone calls, emails, information accessed online, and detailed information about the location of mobile telephones, can be used to deduce very intimate details about a person’s associations, interests and activities. As technologists, we believe it would be misleading in the extreme to minimise the significance of what can be learned through metadata; it is not trivial either in the quantity or quality of information contained.

One wouldn’t need to hear the conversation to make deductions about a phone call between a private individual and a divorce lawyer, or a cancer clinic, or a journalist. Indeed, the US NSA’s former General Counsel Stewart Baker said in 2013, “metadata absolutely tells you everything about somebody’s life. If you have enough metadata, you don’t really need content.” Blanket communications data retention was found by the European Court of Justice in April to violate the Charter of Fundamental Rights. The Court stated that data retention was a "serious interference with … the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data". Many states across Europe, including Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Belgium, Austria, Sweden and Greece, have found mass data retention to be superfluous, harmful or even unconstitutional.

Loading A US federal judge, Richard J Leon in December 2013 ruled that a lawsuit challenging NSA bulk metadata collection had a “substantial likelihood of success”. Lindy Stephens is global director of people operations, IT consultancy ThoughtWorks. The company is actively involved in moves to enshrine universal access to the internet.