ADVOCACY, POLICY & NEWS
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Data Retention Vote This Week: Call Your MP Today!
The government is pressing ahead with its plans to rush the data retention legislation through the Parliament, with a vote due in the House of Representatives this week. This is despite them having not yet published their amendments resulting from the Intelligence & Security Committee’s recommendations. That Committee has also…
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Data Retention – Its Not Where You Go, But Who You Talk To
This article, by Luke Heemsbergen was originally published at The Interdisciplinary Internet Institute. It has been edited slightly to better address a domestic audience. See the original article. Data retention may well be a valuable resource to fight serious crime and terrorism, but it’s not, when, if you decide to be a terrorist, you…
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CitizenFour: Why it’s already the movie of the year
By Alex Schlotzer, EFA Board Member Less than two weeks after its Australian release, CitizenFour today received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The film had previously won the British equivalent (BAFTA) as well as a long list of awards from film festivals and critics societies. I was fortunate…
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Ludlam demolishes data retention bill
At the end of January, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) held two days of hearings into the government’s data retention legislation (transcripts here and here). These hearings were at times a testy affair, with a number of Coalition members particularly being openly antagonistic to privacy advocates,…
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George Brandis still struggling with metadata
While it is perhaps unsurprising, the Attorney-General’s latest attempt to use the Sydney siege and recent events in France as justifications for the government’s mandatory data retention laws is as distasteful as it is misleading. It’s difficult to know whether he is being deliberately disingenuous or whether his understanding of…
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Five things we learned about the Government’s data retention regime in 2014
By Alex Schlotzer, Board Member – Electronic Frontiers Australia Right now the Government is proposing to introduce a mandatory, society-wide regime for the retention of communications data (‘metadata’) for two years. In the latest public hearing into the Government’s proposed legislation a number of important matters were revealed by the…