Police commissioners have
called for access to people's telecommunications data for at least five
years, saying the longer telcos hold such data the easier it will be to
solve and prevent crimes.
But speaking at a federal parliamentary inquiry reviewing national security law, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Tony Negus, NSW Police Commissioner Andrew Scipione and South Australian Police Commissioner Gary Burns all lobbied for a retention of five years.
Mr Negus said the AFP would ideally like indefinite storage of the metadata - which does not deal with the contents of a communication, but rather the location, duration and time of any communication.
However, he admitted the cost of long-term storage would be prohibitive for telco companies, and while the AFP had called for a five year period, federal police "could live with" a two year timespan.
"We would like to have it indefinitely ... we could go back and reconstruct issues or crime scene events that happened many many years ago," Mr Negus told the inquiry in Sydney on Wednesday.
"But from the AFP's perspective, most of the cases we would look at, one to two years would suffice."
Mr Scipione said NSW would also like a five-year data retention period, saying "two years we would say is a bit shy from a NSW Police perspective".
"The longer you keep it, the more it grows particularly in terms of importance - it's a bit like a bank deposit, the longer you leave it in the more interest you're gaining," he said.
"We do understand the amount of cost associated with it, we fully recognise the privacy issues, but ... it may well be that one piece of information that just gives us the ability to go in there and stop that dreadful thing from taking place."
The SA Commissioner said two years was "a little bit short ... but we understand there is a limit".
"Australian businesses have to keep financial records for between five to seven years, and that is the period we would look at," Mr Burns said.
Commissioner Peter Singleton, of the NSW Crime Commission, said the mandated two-year period fell short of what investigators needed.
"We need the data and ... if the law does not provide for that there will be murders and other serious crimes that go unsolved," he said.
But Vice President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, David Bernie, questioned why communications data had to be retained on all people "whether they are innocent, guilty or suspect".
"It's treating everybody, every citizen, like they are some sort of criminal," he told reporters.
Mr Scipione also called for the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act to be "rewritten almost from scratch", saying it had failed to keep up with rapid technological change.
"Increasingly we're trying to deal with crimes that are so new that we're still learning on a daily basis," he said.
6 Sep 2012 Whilst corruption and abuse of power in Australian governance is widespread, the new era of a Draconian society is upon the masses (and not the corporate giants or the rulers).
New laws will be put into place with the help of catalyst events that society will be:
"Guilty until proven innocent",
Whereas the official slogan today is innocent until proven guilty, which is not the case in reality, under Australian law.
The key word used here by the police is prevent crimes, meaning people will be detained for whatever reason the authorities see as being the future committing of a crime, even be it a public demonstration.
The civil rights of individuals are being eroded at blinding speed with the help of the sheeple.
Information currently on all citizens is stored INDEFINITELY by authorities.
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