[LINK] ZDNet: Senate passes net interception Bill

[rene]

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010 10:35:00 +1000, James Collins wrote:

Stilgherrian wrote:
>> Reading the story, it seems there's a bunch of untidy legislation
>> here...

I don't think it's that bad. Also fwiw there's an EFA submission on the 
Senate Legal Committee site re their inquiry into the Bill, and EFA 
generally supported the Bill. There had previously been a draft Bill issued 
for public comment, which EFA had found various problems with and submitted 
to the A-G, and most/all (can't remember offhand) issues they raised got 
fixed before the Bill landed in Parliament (according to EFA submission).

> Listening to them talking about it in parliament yesterday, it's an
> amendment of the 1979 legislation and is obviously angled towards
> ensuring that system operators can continue to operate in a role as
> net guardians, without falling foul of the law. 

More specifically it's amendments further to amendments made in 2004. The 
2004 amendments established exceptions for the Aust. Federal Police and 
some other /(all) Commonwealth agencies to enable them to protect their own 
internal networks without breaching interception laws, e.g. intercepting a 
spam email containing a virus before it reached the intended recipient in 
e.g. AFP office would otherwise arguably have been an illegal interception. 
This situation arguably existed before, but appeared to be more likely as a 
result of other amendments made in 2004 concerning 'stored communications' 
such as email (as distinct from phone calls). At the time, the issue was 
also raised that this difficulty also applied re ISPs and any business 
trying to protect their own internal networks and the govt said, more or 
less, too hard to deal with that right now, so we'll fix it up later. And 
it's taken years for that to be done.

>The amendments which the
> greens wanted to make are not really that important in my view. It
> just means that if someone who has monitoring of packet logs from the
> distant past, that they don't have to delete them, and things like
> that. 

Actually imo, the amendments the Greens tried to get made to s79 of the Act 
about deleting copies, were important. Those amendments are really 
unrelated to the rest of the Bill and would have addressed an issue that's 
been criticised/complained about for many years.

That is - if/when police have intercepted a phone call and made a recording 
of it, or obtained copies of emails under a warrant, there are provisions 
in the Act requiring deletion of same when it is no longer needed for a 
'permitted purpose'. However, the deletion requirements do not apply to 
"copies" of the of material obtained a warrant, and that is what the Greens 
were trying to achieve, that copies also have to be deleted. In the past 
when this issue has been raised, interception agencies argue along the 
lines that they may have made multiple copies that are stored in different 
places and really it's just too much trouble to try to find them and delete 
them, or something much like that. I've no idea what excuse, if any, was 
given yesterday.

Irene