Open government: By the people, for the people

Renai LeMay
Monday, 19 July 2010 16:00

IT Policy - Government Tech Policy

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opinion On a rainy Friday in June this year, I sent an email to the media liaison team at the Attorney-General’s Department of the Federal Government.

The email was to ask a handful of basic follow-up questions after the department had confirmed that it was considering whether a similar regime to Europe’s controversial Directive on Data Retention should be implemented in Australia.

To say that this issue was – and continues to be – explosive is a severe understatement. As Ben Grubb at ZDNet.com.au conclusively documented at the time, the European directive requires that telcos and internet service providers compulsorily record data such as the source, destination and timing of emails and telephone calls for all of their customers.

The aim of such a proposal is laudable – to aid law enforcement agencies in upholding Australia’s security and stopping the bad guys – terrorists, high-end criminals and the like, from being able to get away with whatever they like. But the proposal’s privacy implications are monstrous, especially for journalists (or for anyone who doesn’t want people to know all their contacts).

How can the press keep sources confidential, if data about all of our phone calls and emails are logged and made available to the police?

Considering the seriousness of the proposal, I would have expected the Attorney-General’s Department to answer some basic questions about it. So this is what I asked in my email (after a phone call and another initial email):

• Can the Attorney-General’s Department confirm that the data regime being considered would require ISPs to maintain records of customers’ web browsing history and/or email data?
• Does the Attorney-General’s Department consider this behaviour a privacy risk?
• Why or why not?
• If such data is to be stored, what would the terms be around the storage of data?

This is the response I got back:

“The Australian Government is still considering and consulting on the subject and as such it would be inappropriate to comment at this stage.”

It was a similar situation when I called the press secretary for Federal Attorney-General Robert McLelland. Despite repeatedly placing calls over the weekend, it was only late in the long weekend that I was able to get through to them – they didn’t call me back, to my knowledge. And even then I was only able to confirm the bare essentials of the data retention proposal, which by then was being referred to online as ‘OzLog’.

I describe this example here, not to bemoan how hard the job of a journalist is – nor even to give readers an insight into the inner workings of the press. Instead, I describe it here to consider how laughable I consider the Declaration of Open Government that Minister for Finance and Deregulation Lindsay Tanner so pompously made last week.