Law, Government & Justice: Australia's Metadata Law Analysis (CCJ 13)

This report provides a comprehensive overview of Australia's Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015, also known as the metadata law. It examines the law's introduction by the Abbott government, its key features, and the rationale behind its implementation, primarily focused on national security and preventing criminal activities. The report delves into the concerns raised by individuals and organizations regarding privacy, the role of journalists and whistleblowers, and the challenges faced during implementation, including cost and security issues. It analyzes the impact of the law on individual privacy, the protections afforded to journalists, and the balance between national security and civil liberties, concluding with a discussion of the law's effectiveness and its implications for the future. The report highlights the government's attempts to balance the need for investigation of serious crimes with the protection of individual privacy.

Criminal Law
CCJ 13 Law, Government & Justice
Student’s Name
1/30/2019

LAW, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 1
Contents
Question 1........................................................................................................................................2
Question 2........................................................................................................................................2
Question 3........................................................................................................................................2
Question 4........................................................................................................................................3
Question 5........................................................................................................................................3
Question 6........................................................................................................................................4
Question 7........................................................................................................................................5
Question 8........................................................................................................................................6
Question 9........................................................................................................................................7
Question 10......................................................................................................................................8
References......................................................................................................................................10

LAW, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 2
Question 1
The bill introduced by Abbott government in the year 2014, which established a
mandatory metadata retention regime was Telecommunications (Interception and Access)
Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015. By the introduction of this bill, amendments have been
made in Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979.
Question 2
Both of the houses of parliament i.e. house of representative as well as Senate have
approved the said bill as on 26 March 2015. Further, the bill has received royal assent as on 13
April 2015.
Question 3

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Being on the position of Communication Minister, Malcolm Turnbull has introduced the
bill to the house of representative in the year 2014 (Knott, 2014). He has been the leader of the
Liberal party twice. He submitted his resignation from Cabinet in the year 2015 and afterward
has been elected as 29th Prime Minister of Australia. In his professional career, he has been on
various positions such as Cabinet Minister, Leader of the opposition, Shadow Minister, Minister
of communications and so on. In addition to being a politician, he is also Barrister and a
businessperson. In the year 2018, he has resigned from the post of the post of Australian Prime
Minister. At present he is living in Sydney with his four grandchildren (Malcolmturnbull.com.au,
2019).
Question 4
The lead reason behind the development and introduction of this bill was to ensure the
national security. In the reasoning, Communication Minister Malcolm Turnbull stated that access
to metadata has a significant role in nearly every cybersecurity, counter-espionage, organized
crime investigation, and counter-terrorism activity. He further stated that because of the lack of
access to metadata, many criminal investigations have been hampered in the past. In conjunction
with this, the government stated that the subjective law would prevent the illegal downloading of
music and movies and would make it easy to recognize suspected criminals. Andrew Colvin,
Australian Federal Police Commissioner said in a press conference that the presented scheme
would help to prevent the incidents of online copyright infringement and therefore the bill is
required to pass (Bbc.com, 2014).

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Question 5
The main feature of this law is that the same make the communication service providers
liable to keep the record and data of every Australian internet and telephone users. These
services providers are required to keep the subjective data secure for the term of at least 2 years.
The definition of the data is ambiguous. The manner of collecting such data is not prescribed in
the law. Here this is necessary to state that here data means the sources, destination and other
information about communication and not the context of the same. Following are some of the
major examples of information that will be kept by the communication service providers by the
virtue of the provisions of this law:-
 Contact Number
 Date and time of communication (Lidberg and Muller, 2018)
 Location of the device used in the communication
 Sender and recipient of the communication
 Account holder name and address of the same
Another important feature of this act that nowhere in the law itself it is mention that for
which other activities, the data can be used by the government. Further, Prime Minister Tony
Abbott said that the metadata laws of the nation would not target the internet browsing history of
people (Griffiths, 2014).
Question 6
After the enactment of Australia Metadata law, many of the individuals and organization
have written the submissions to The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security.
The Australian Human Rights Commission, the Australian Federal Police, Australian Security

LAW, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 5
Intelligence Organization (ASIO), and many other organizations were included in the same. If to
talk about their primary concern, this is to mention that the same was the privacy of individuals.
As mentioned above that by the virtue of this new law, communication service providers became
eligible to access the private date of individuals, it was an issue for such individuals. Individuals
who have raised their concern stated that by accessing their personal data, the government was
breaching their right to privacy. They were feeling under surveillance all the time and therefore
made the PJCIS inquiry.
On the other side, above organizations that have raised their concern were worried about
the issue of lack of clarification in the bill. Before the enactment of this law, ASIO and
enforcement agencies could access the telecommunication data. Many of the submitters believed
that there was no use of metadata in the national security investigation. Nevertheless, the main
concern of these organizations cause of which inquiry has been raised was the absence of an
independent body to administer the new law. Parties who have developed the law were
administrating the same. While discussing the PJCIS inquiries on this matter, this is also
necessary to state that only negatives have not been written, but many of the organization also
written positive considering the law a useful and significant one.
Question 7
Individual privacy is a significant matter to discuss. The new metadata law affects the
data privacy of individuals in a significant manner. Access to someone’s phone and internet use
details is a terrible imagination to imagine. Metadata can be highly revealing and give a
comprehensive depiction of communications, daily activities, and movements of individuals. In
such a manner, this would be wrong to state that the Metadata Law does not provide any harm to

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the privacy of individuals. Government while introducing the bill stated that the law would not
breach the privacy of individuals in any manner but in actual, this is not a true situation. E-mails
call details, details of sender and receiver are enough to hurt the privacy of a person.
In the world full of technology and digital communication, individuals are used to sharing
even the most significant details of their business and lives via these modes. In a situation where
communication service providers can access the metadata related to such communication,
privacy does not seems to be secure. This law makes interference in the privacy right of
individuals. At present, the Privacy Act 1988 and Australian Privacy principles are there to
protect the privacy of individuals. These privacy principles are provided in schedule I of Privacy
Act 1988 and prescribe the manner in which personal information of individuals can be collected
and can be deal with. Further, these principles provides the obligations, rights and standards for
use, access and correction of personal data (Oaic.gov.au, 2019)
Question 8
In the capacity of a member of ‘four estates’ Journalist had some additional protection in
respect of them as well as with respect to their sources. Journalist and whistleblowers are the
people who report the crimes and wrongdoing of the society. They always have a risk to be
attacked by such criminals and this is the reason that identities of such people are required to be
hidden always. Nevertheless, with the development of metadata law, this is not possible. By the
virtue of this new law, the provided protection to journalist seems to be in danger. The
government can access the information of people and in such a manner, their identity gets
disclosure. These lead many direct and indirect results. It demotivates the practices such as
whistleblowing. It has also been reviewed that metadata scheme could affect the capability of

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media journalist to provide accurate information and news (The Parliament of the
Commonwealth of Australia, 2015).
However, the federal government has taken some steps to provide the protection to a
journalist as well as whistleblowers. In order to protect the interest of a journalist, the
amendment has been made to the legislation in the form of Journalist information warrant. After
such warrant being mandated, now every government agency that wants to access the data of
journalist or their employees, need to request for a warrant to either a member of the
Administrative appeals and a judge of the federal court. However, ASIO is not required to
request any court or tribunal (Brevini, 2017). The same can apply directly to the Attorney-General
for the issuance of Journalist information warrant. In such a manner, the limit has been put on the
access of information of journalist.
Question 9
While implementing this law, the government has faced many of the challenges and
difficulties. One of the major issues was the status of telecommunication service providers. At
the time of implementation of this law, these providers were not ready for the new regime. It was
held in the survey conducted by industry group the Communications Alliance, around 2/3 of the
service providers were not ready and confident to meet the requirements of the new law. Another
major issue was related to the cost. Data retention scheme contained a huge cost and it was not
clear that who is going to suffer from the same. The total of government for this scheme was
$128 million, which was not enough to implement and administer the whole scheme (Bogle,
2015). According to the joint submission made by the Australian Mobile Telecommunications
Association and the Communications Alliance, the cost of the overall scheme has been estimated

LAW, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 8
at nearly $400-$500 million which is high from the prepared budget. As there was a significant
gap between the budget and actual cost, the industry will be going to tolerate the whole cost or
say the customers in actual.
Security was also another concern while bringing the Metadata laws in practice. In the
inquiries and submissions, the security of the proposed collected data has been questioned.
Service providers were expected to collect such large data and the issue was the security of the
same as large data is always an attraction for the hackers. In the year 2014, one of the internet
providers, iiNet stated the vast amount of data would soon be a new target for the hackers. In
conjunction to this, as mentioned above privacy breach was another concern while implementing
this law as data was expected to be used abusively.
Question 10
Many of the criminal activities have reported there, that generated the requirement to
develop a more effective system in place. To meet out these requirements and to reduce the
criminal and terrorist activities in the nation, the federal government introduced the Metadata
Law. By reviewing the above discussion, this is clear that the law had certain issues related to
the privacy of individuals. In addition to the privacy breach of individuals, certain other issues
such as risk to collect data and to track down the criminal activities were also there. The data,
which is required to be collected is related to the whole population and inform the government
more about personal information more than the names and address of the related person. When
the law came into force, communication service providers only instructed with what needs to be
done and not the manner in which the data was required to keep safe and secure from the access
of external factors. Further, the manner of use of such data was also not cleared.

LAW, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 9
Nevertheless, another side of the coin is also required to check. The development of
subjective law was also necessary as the government could prevent the 130 deaths in Paris attack
if had access to metadata. For any government, national security is a prime concern and the same
must be. The federal government has developed the new law in order to enhance the national
security. In addition to this, Section 187AA of the Telecommunications (Interception and
Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015 prescribe the kind of information that
communication service providers need to access, in such a manner law limits the unlimited
access to the private information in the individual. To conclude the issue, this is to mention that
federal government tried to make the good balance between the measures of investigation of
serious crimes and individual privacy; however, certain more steps are required to be taken in the
area of security of private information.

LAW, GOVERNMENT AND POLICY 10
References
Bbc.com. (2014). Australia: Data retention bill introduced to parliament. Retrieved From:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-29828677
Bogle, A. (2015). 5 massive problems with Australia's metadata retention regime. Retrieved
From: https://mashable.com/2015/10/12/australia-meta-data-problems/#1HVAlICaTZqT
Brevini, B. (2017). Metadata Laws, Journalism and Resistance in Australia. Media And
Communication, 5(1), 76. doi: 10.17645/mac.v5i1.810
Griffiths, E. (2014). Data retention laws: Tony Abbott says Government 'seeking metadata', not
targeting people's browsing history. Retrieved From: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-
08-06/security-laws-abbott-browsing-history-not-collected/5652364
Knott, M. (2014). Malcolm Turnbull introduces legislation for metadata retention scheme.
Retrieved From: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/malcolm-turnbull-introduces-
legislation-for-metadata-retention-scheme-20141030-11e101.html
Lidberg, J. and Muller, D., (2018). In the Name of Security Secrecy, Surveillance and
Journalism. UK and USA :Anthem Press.
Malcolmturnbull.com.au. (2019). Biography. Retrieved From:
https://www.malcolmturnbull.com.au/meet-malcolm/biography
Oaic.gov.au. (2019). Privacy law. Retrieved From: https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy-law/
Privacy Act 1988

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Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979
Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act 2015
The Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia. (2015a). Telecommunications (Intercept and
Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015: Revised explanatory memorandum.
Parliament of Australia. Retrieved from:
http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/
Result?bId=r5375