Online Tutoring on Data Retention Bill

Abstract

Australia is one of the advanced and developed countries of the world. It has several friends and enemies as well in terms of individual and country. Data retention bill is the development bill regarding security of the data. This bill analyzes about those entities that can access the data of the country through advance networking systems. This bill has been contrasted and compared with other countries data retention policies and it is found that Australia needs to fill the gaps which are still available in this bill. In this respect, the data retention policies of United States of America and UK have been studied and compared with the retention policies of Australia regarding online data access and interception.

A big problem of a particular part of the world is constant increase in crimes related to computer and internet. This part is known as Western Countries and the countries such as UK, USA and Australia are very much affected due to constant increase in these crimes. There are so many issues such as soft cybercrimes laws, improper agencies, inappropriate steps, inadequate implementation of laws and particularly systems to record and report cybercrimes in this country. Another problem is the non-serious attitude of victims regarding reporting and recording crimes and support to crime investigations. There is almost no user-friendly system prevailing to report and resolve crimes so that victims are not much concerned to report about these crimes. There is a big loss of money due to the existence of criminals in these countries. In this respect, this paper is representing reporting system, highlighting issues related to crimes, amount of loss and impact of computer crimes much deeply. With the help of a proper, less costly data retention bill, there will be help for authorities and researchers to stop and prevent computer crimes and proper investigatory support in finding cybercrimes.

Introduction

Security was always a matter of concern for every country but the nature of security and investigation facilities have been changed with the passage of time. The major change regarding investigation and evidences have been enhanced after the attack on world trade center in United States of America in September 11, 2001. That one incident clearly changed the nature of security of the country.

Emma (2015 states that countries have been more conscious regarding all type of secrets and assets. For advancements in the systems, countries have passed several regulations and Australia also passed a data retention bill which was revised from time to time. Currently, the retention bill of 2014-15 is prevailing in Australia. This data retention bill has been introduced to record the voice calls through telecommunication medium. When any type of investigation starts by any agency then it can have access to the telecommunication record of individual and companies. With the help of this record, these law enforcement agencies and companies want to find the terrorists who are planning against the interests of Australia any time.

The report will contain few debates and arguments that whether this retention bill is helpful or not. Many people claims that this bill is not helpful for the purpose claimed by government. People are not satisfied with the step taken by government towards the legislation and access of telecommunication to the agencies. They are against this retention bill for several reasons and one of them is privacy of the people. Secondly, the major effect will be on the economy of the country. it will be helpful to first analyze that how much incidents have been observed related to terrorism and to extent data retention bill has helped. On one side, people are against this retention bill but there are several public, government and private official who are in favor of this specific bill.

With this report, an effort has been made to understand the benefits of this data retention bill and what are disadvantages of this data retention from the point of view of:

Privacy disruptions from an individual’s perspective
Confidentiality breaches between participating organizations (eg ISPs) and government
Privacy disruptions from a participating organization’s perspective
Privacy disruptions from the perspective of other nations
Security risks (Retention, 2015).

Some people also claim that this bill is totally wastage of time, disturbance to individual, companies and other nations and there will be just increase in the cost due to retaining so much data (Allie, 2015). In comparison to this retention, a brief overview of UK and European bill has also been studied. It has been observed that the Australia bill is specifically not able to meet the complete needs and requirements of avoiding terrorism but it has given much hope to people to some extent.

Privacy disruptions from an individual’s perspective

There are many angles through which we can analyze this retention bill but the first and the foremost is privacy disruptions from an individual perspective. Many experts have given their opinions such as previous committee of 2013 cautioned that after the incorporation of data retention and access towards individual telecommunication record, issues of fundamental privacy will be raised (EVA, 2015). Further, this bill can also be misunderstood as the extension of powers over the citizen by state. For any extra power, proper notifications and justifications should be addressed to the public to avoid privacy concerns of individuals. The Australian human rights commission also supported this argument that there is no law who gives any authority to anyone interfering in the privacy matters of any person for the purpose of accessing terrorists (Daniel, 2015).

Several arguments have also been stated to bring the attention of people towards the alternatives to this retention bill. Experts have also stated that the benefits and cost of the data retention bill should not kept in isolation but everyone should be able to access the reasons of data retention bill. Government should be able to clear to the people that retention bill has been tested with other alternatives and that it is the right option for the national security of the country.

Mandatory Data Retention Weaknesses

Several institutes have raised questions on the mandatory requirements of the data retention scheme and in this respect; Law Council of Australia has given several observations. It has questioned that the data retention bill is not limited to the purpose of avoiding terrorism and serious crimes at all. There is no such evidence proved that such kind of data retention bills have contributed towards conviction. For example, Germany has only 0.006% increase in the number of convictions with the help of data retention schemes. Furthermore, there is a lack of quantitative and qualitative date to indicate the necessity of telecommunications data in securing convictions. These strong arguments clearly indicate and present weak and vague reasons of data retention by the Australian Government in the country (Retention, 2015).

Confidentiality breaches

It is the right of any company and government to keep the data secret from illegal persons at any cost. As the information retrieved through data retention bill will be confidential and no internet service provider and government official will be allowed to misuse the data for any wrong use. This preservation has already been raised by several experts and law agencies that the data may be misused and if there will be any evidence of confidentiality breach then proper punishment will be rewarded as per Privacy Act 1988 (EVA, 2015). Every single internet service provider needs to keep 2 years data of internet usage of customers safely and at any time, information may be required by the government for national security agencies usage. Internet service providers consider it a big burden on them instead of increasing cost and storage of safe data.

Privacy Disruptions from Participating Organization Perspective

There are several stakeholders of this data retention bill and one of them is individual organizations. The participative organizations like Telstra itself is not satisfied fully the way things are planned to implement in the country (EVA, 2015). It clearly claims that data storage always require standard for encryption and good security requires more than encryption. Instead of providing good encryption, the existing standard for encryption is not fully standardized. Organizations believe that the current data scheme should not be promoted at this stage because there are a lack of IT skilled people in Australia. When there is lack of Information technology people then how can anyone think of securing data in the hands of non-Australians? Obviously, when Australians are short in this field then foreign skilled staff supply will definitely be required to handle all the data storage and functionality safely (Emma, 2015).

Privacy Disruptions from perspective of other Nations

The data retention is not an internal bill of the country because it will have strong impact on other nation’s operational interactions as well most of the time. In fact, the browser data, internet chat data and any type of data will be retained by the individual companies or internet service providers then the reference and information of other nations’ people will also be included and retained automatically. Therefore, government of Australia should develop which cannot disturb the privacy of other nations as well. In case, any company tracks any foreign website data without permission from the said website then that will be an ethical violations of international laws. Therefore, before proceeding towards data retention bill, the privacy issues of other nations should also be considered. In the current bill, less focus has been given to this area specifically.

Privacy Analysis of UK and United states

The government of UK and United States of America has also introduced same nature of bill in the different time durations. Both of these countries have developed same nature of legislation for the protection of assets of the country and save country from any kind of upcoming terrorist and cyber attack. They have also suggested acquiring same information like suggested in the data retention bill of Australia. The companies will save telephone record, number durations, and other detail of the callers and net surfers for the period of up to 2 years. That information is accessed by the higher authorities such as FBI of United states of America as per their requirements (Shalailah, 2014).

Medhora (2014) Claims that the situation is same as in the scenario of Australia as well, because with telecommunication information these countries are also proposing to get security camera surveillance information storage by companies as well. The countries believe that this type of advance information help to right against terrorism and minimize the risk of security of the country as well. Data can be used for the protection but the data service providers as well as people who are the owner of that data have strong concerned in these countries as well. They also rightly state that with the introduction of this type of bill, their fundamentals rights of privacy will be died completely. They state that no country can force any bill on them and if any bill is forced then they have the rights to appeal against that bill in the human rights department of the country. Therefore, the rights and privacy issues for individual and companies are also same as in Australia.

In comparison to several countries such as UK, USA and Australia, all these countries are just scared of big terrorism activities. Because of these big threats, they have developed and implemented data retention bills in the countrywide. The major problem to all of these countries is the implementation of the data retention scheme. There are several lobbies who are against this data retention bill (Shalailah, 2014).

Now, the question is clear that why these lobbies are against this bill, there may be other reasons than privacy, cost, time wastage, excess of work, care, safety of data and so on. The reality can also be something else as well. The people who oppose this legislation can be involved with the terrorism activists too. Anything can be possible because right amount of money can do it anything. Mostly, this is not the case but if it is the case then this bill should definitely be implemented and operational in the country at broader level. The responsible and caring people of the country should take steps and favor this data retention bill in each country.

Security Risks

As this bill is related to keeping computer, telecommunication and internet transaction records by the law enforcement agencies, therefore this bill can also be against cyber criminals as well. As internet transaction record is involved then there should be proper record keeping of all the transactions carefully by the concerned companies and officials. The internet and computers have changed working, communication, meetings and business requirements and conditions all over the globe. Due to this high profile technology, everyone can share any activity that was unexpected and unimaginable few decades back. It was the imagination of people that they will live their lives like this and do their business as fast and the imagination and dream has come true with the introduction of internet only. Modern society is now associated with internet and related technologies, almost 25% of the world’s populations is using internet and there is constant increase in this number from every single growing day (Grossman 2000).

It is a big advantage of internet that users can enjoy full time secrecy, with little danger of being traced and identified. On other side, internet is a sort of magnet for all type of common cyber criminals. Recently, in a survey conducted by Symantec found that 65% of internet users had victimized phishing attacks, malware attacks, hacking of social-networking profiles etc. Now, Cybercrime has become a wide lucrative criminal industry and it is generating almost US$ 100 million annually. With this figure, it can clearly be imagined that internet crime is increasing with an alarming rate of growth (Tadjer 2000).

Hacking is a very common cybercrime in this contemporary era pertinent to terrorism. It is referred to as gaining of unauthorized access to the personal data, information, and programs. For example, snooper can easily read the personal information of a person from his computer or take over his computer’s data. A saboteur may delete the important files from the computer by getting access through latest hacking software. A professional hacker can hack and get secret information from any company information system. So there are so many example in which hacking can take place these days by hackers (Fallows, 2011).

i. Viruses and Other Malicious Programs

Some viruses are harmful to human body and some viruses are harmful to the body of computer. These viruses can be intentional or unintentionally attack to a wide range of computers. Unintentionally viruses attack to those systems that come under the range of those same viruses (Samosseiko, 2009). Some significant viruses are Trojan horse and love Bug, these viruses are harmful in a manner that they hack username, passwords, erase important file, destroy whole hardware and so forth. It is harmful to human body in a way if it erases the medical records of a hospital (Samosseiko, 2009).

Conclusion

Every individual, company, intelligence and lay man has different set of opinions regarding data retention bills. Several analysts have said against this retention bill implementation and development but depending upon the situation looking at the reality, some kind of development is necessary to take place to stop all kind of terrorism and other types of crimes activities. Therefore, this data retention bill is most suitable and reliable at this particular period.

Works Cited

Allie, C., 2015. Australia passes data retention into law. [Online] Available at: http://www.itnews.com.au/News/402127,australia-passes-data-retention-into-law.aspx
[Accessed 28 5 2015].

Daniel, H., 2015. Mandatory metadata retention becomes law as Coalition and Labor combine. [Online] Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/26/mandatory-data-retention-becomes-law-as-coalition-and-labor-combine
[Accessed 28 5 2015].

Emma, G., 2015. Data retention laws pass Federal Parliament as Coalition and Labor vote together. [Online] Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-26/data-retention-laws-pass-federal-parliament/6351278
[Accessed 28 5 2015].

EVA, G., 2015. Data Retention Law Passes in Australia, but the Fight Isn’t Over. [Online] Available at: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/data-retention-law-passes-australia-fight-isnt-over
[Accessed 28 5 2015].

Retention, D., 2015. Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2015. [Online] Available at: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislation/Bills_Search_Results/Result?bId=r5375
[Accessed 28 5 2015].

Shalailah, M., 2014. Data retention bill’s human rights limitations are over the top. [Online] Available at: https://www.google.de/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CCQQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Ftechnology%2F2014%2Fnov%2F18%2Fdata-retention-bills-human-rights-limitations-are-over-the-top-report-says&ei=mj1nVfnFAcWgsgG
[Accessed 28 5 2015].

Lev Grossman 2000, Attack of the Love Bug, Time Europe, viewed on August 31, 2012, available at:http://www.time.com/time/europe/magazine/2000/0515/cover.html.

Dmitry Samosseiko 2009, The Partnerka:what is it, and why should you care? Bulletin Conference, viewed on August 31, 2012, available at: http://www.sophos.com/security/technical-papers/samosseiko-vb2009-paper.pdf.

James Fallows 2011. Hacked! The Atlantic, viewed on August 31, 2012. Available at :http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/hacked/8673/.

RivkaTadjer 2000, Detect, Deflect, Destroy, INTERNET WEEK, viewed on August 31, 2012, available at: http://www.internetweek.com/indepth/indepth111300.htm.