Plan to keep search history angers internet freedom fighters
Updated
The Federal Government has just begun talking to internet service providers about how they might retain records of what websites users visit. (ABC News: Nic MacBean, file photo)
If you know the details of someone's online reading and viewing habits you can learn a great deal about them; their politics, their interests, their sexual inclinations, even the state of their marriage.
So the news that the Government is considering making internet providers retain their customers' web browsing history has internet freedom advocates fuming.
It's part of the Government's move to join up to a European Convention on Cybercrime, in an effort to help law enforcement agencies track down and prosecute cyber criminals.
Supporters of the plan say data retention policies have had little or no negative consequence in Europe. But critics say it would treat all internet users as criminals and undermine the values of freedom and individual liberty.
The Federal Government has just begun talking to internet service providers, or ISPs, about how they might retain records of what websites users visit, but already there's alarm.
Director of the Communications Law Centre at the University of Technology in Sydney, Michael Fraser, says keeping the private web browsing data of all internet users is a step too far.
"It would be like the Government listening in on everybody's telephone conversations or opening everybody's mail. It's contrary to the kind of society we enjoy in Australia, where we enjoy freedom as citizens, unless we run into trouble with the law," he said.
"This puts everybody into the guilty until proven innocent basket."
The Government wouldn't collect the actual data, just the sites that have been visited, but Professor Fraser says that's still an invasion of privacy.
"It could show who you were in contact with, your emails and what sites you'd visited and then people would merely have to look at those sites to look at what you've been reading," he said.
"That's nobody's business but your own."
But Associate Professor at Melbourne's RMIT University, Julian Bondy, says he can't understand what all the fuss is about.
"This kind of regime has existed for the last four years in Europe with 300 million people and hasn't led to the kind of agitation or concerns regarding privacy that some people might be fearful of," he said.
"This information is routinely collected by ISPs anyway and certainly if there was a court order, the ISPs would be required to provide that as is.
"So simply what's being suggested is a shift from a more American style of accessing this information to a more European style."
But advocates for internet freedom, like vice-chairman and privacy spokesman for Electronic Frontiers Australia, Geordie Guy, are seething.
"This is certainly startling to us. It's the type of civil liberties infringing power grab that's usually reserved for the period directly after a national security incident," he said.
"We've seen over the last coupe of weeks the Department of Broadband Communications of Digital Economy as well as the Attorney-General's Department talking an awful lot about how bad Google is as a corporation for collecting private data of people.
"It's startling to us to see the Attorney-General's Department turn around within the exact same seven-day period and propose a much broader program itself."
Federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland and Foreign Minister Stephen Smith announced late last month that the Government intended to sign up to the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime.
Satisfying that convention requires a few changes to local procedures, including making it easy for authorities in one country to collect data in another and allowing them to ask for specific computer data.
But Mr Guy says the proposal would involve ISPs collecting a lot of their customers' personal data without the court order that's currently required.
"Enormous, enormous quantities of personal information [would be collected] and certainly [it is] a situation that's utterly unprecedented in this country," he said.
"Dealing with cybercrime is a noble cause but it's important to understand the differences in where our obligations require us to retain data that we collect for certain periods and where we're required to increase the amount of data that we actually collect on private citizens."
Mr McClelland declined to talk with ABC Radio's PM program about the proposal so as not to pre-empt his Department's discussions with the internet industry.
It's understood those talks will be followed a period of public consultation.
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