The Australian Parliament has passed a series of amendments to the country's Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979, requiring "telecommunications service providers to retain for two years telecommunications data (not content) prescribed by regulations."

The two-year retention period equals the maximum allowed under the EU's earlier Data Retention Directive that was struck down last year by the Court of Justice of the European Union for being "a wide-ranging and particularly serious interference with the fundamental rights to respect for private life and to the protection of personal data." This month, the European Commission announced that it had no plans to introduce a new Data Retention Directive, although Member States are still able to introduce their own national legislation.

Despite that move away from retaining communications metadata by the EU and continuing concerns in the US about the National Security Agency's bulk phone metadata spying program, the Australian government was able to push through the amendments implementing data retention thanks to the support of the main opposition party. Labor agreed to vote in favor of the Bill once a requirement to use special "journalist information warrants" was introduced for access to journalists' metadata, with a view to shielding their sources. No warrant is required for obtaining the metadata of other classes of users, not even privileged communications between lawyers and their clients. Even for journalists, the extra protection is weak, and the definition of what constitutes a journalist is rather narrow—bloggers and occasional writers are probably not covered.

Warrant canaries can't be used in this context either. Section 182A of the new law says that a person commits an offense if he or she discloses or uses information about "the existence or non-existence of such a [journalist information] warrant." The penalty upon conviction is two years imprisonment.

During the relatively quick passage of the amendments, the Australian government made the usual argument that metadata needs to be retained for long periods in order to fight terrorism and serious crime—even though the German experience is that, in practice, data retention does not help. Toward the end of the debate, when concerns about journalist sources were raised, one senior member of the Australian government adopted a more unusual approach to calming people's fears.

Speaking to Sky News, Australia's Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that there were "always ways for people to get around things." As The Guardian reported, Turnbull went on to list a few ways to dodge the new law: "If... I communicate with you via Skype, for a voice call, or Viber, or I send you a message on Whatsapp or Wickr or Threema or Signal or Telegram—there's a gazillion of them—or indeed if we have a Facetime call, then all that the telco can see insofar as it can see anything is that my device has had a connection with, say, the Skype server or the Whatsapp server… it doesn’t see anything happen with you."

Of course, it won't only be journalists that use these and other tools to mask their metadata. Many of the applications mentioned by Turnbull are already very widely used by members of the public, and it's likely to become even more popular assuming the Australian data retention scheme survives challenges in the courts. That means implementation will make it more expensive to go online thanks to additional costs that are passed on by ISPs. The setup puts civil liberties at risk from leaks and theft from the stores of personal metadata or from abuse by officials, all while doing little to provide the security benefits claimed by the Australian government.