[AusNOG] Assistance and Access Bill moves to PJCIS

[Narelle Clark]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2018 at 10:58 AM Paul Wilkins <paulwilkins369 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> The Bill was introduced into Parliament by Peter Dutton. His speech to
the House makes for interesting reading.
<snippage of good points>
> I think we're entitled to ask, what exactly constituted this extensive
industry & public
> consultation, because people in the industry don't seem to know anyone
who's been
> consulted. As to amendments, there has been the removal of "protecting
the public
> revenue" as an objective of the Bill, which was probably illegal anyway..
>

There have been some real improvements, for example:
- ability to use the courts (though not at all clear)
- ability to use a third party to assess whether a capability is 'systemic'
- reinforcement that requests are 'voluntary'
- not being required to break the laws of another country
- removal of protection of public revenue as justification
see:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/crypto-bill-adds-pub-test-for-warrants-drops-revenue-justification-512886

However if you look at some of the rest of the commentary, the major
problems with the bill still exist. My biggest issue is how do we possibly
estimate what this takes given we've barely got time to read it, let alone
take advice, formulate a response and submit it? The limited time frame is
outrageous.

Protecting public revenue was one of the major loopholes in the metadata
access previously that led to entities like the Taxi Council, local
government and the RSPCA being able to get at retained data. It is
certainly not illegal, indeed the big issue that many of the lawyers had at
the Comms Alliance forum last week was that we have no mechanism in
Australian law to challenge this type of legislation. Unlike Europe, whose
Court of Justice recently threw out the UK surveillance bill as being
counter to the human rights basis of European law.

But hey, once a penal colony, always a penal colony, right?

-- 


Narelle
narellec at gmail.com
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