Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to follow the remarks of Senator Bilyk, the chair of the Joint Select Committee on Cyber-Safety. I will be fairly brief. First of all, I would like to thank the chair, the deputy chair and the rest of the committee for putting together what I think is a very important and very focused report in a very, very short time frame. As usual when bills such as these come through from the Attorney-General's Department, they are always in an inordinate hurry and they are always on fire for the parliament to urgently to dispose of the bills. I thank the efforts of the chair, the deputy chair and the secretariat for getting a coher­ent report into this bill.

I think the chair, Senator Bilyk, has perhaps undersold the efforts of the commit­tee to the extent that the committee majority report made some very strong recommend­ations for changes to the Cybercrime Legislation Amendment Bill 2011. I hope that the Attorney-General does not simply give the report of the cyber-safety committee a once-over and present the bill unamended to the chamber next week. I strongly advise the government against pursuing that course of action and advise it to read the report and to read the unanimous recommendations that the committee put forward because they actually recommend major surgery to this bill both in terms of amendments and in terms of clarifications.

The Senate is used to dealing with instan­ces of expansions of surveillance powers and expansions of law enforcement agencies in Australia. In my experience, it seems we get amendments to the Telecom­munications (Interception and Access) Act every couple of weeks. This is something a little different because this bill does not just relate to Australian security and law enforce­ment agencies; this bill relates to how data is shared with overseas law enforcement agencies, principally of course because the convention relates to Europe. But obviously if Australia is signing on, other countries around the world are signing on as well. This will allow data to be stored not just about serious crimes but about any offence at all.

If a foreign law enforcement agency wishes to prosecute or pursue an investi­gation, it will now be able to access data stored on Australian servers or in the hands of Australian service providers and that will be able to be used for law enforcement purposes overseas.

Senators may remember the polarised debate on the net filter that occurred over the last couple of years. Everybody who partici­pated in that debate advocated better coord­ination between Australian law enforcement agencies and international agencies, for the obvious reasons—for example, if you are chasing child pornography offences on servers in Eastern Europe or in South-East Asia, or places where it is very difficult for the AFP to execute warrants and so on, you need tighter cooperation to prosecute those offences. I think everybody was unanimous on that.

The underlying intent of the bill to enable that kind of collaboration in a globally networked media is entirely sound. The problem, as often happens with bills from the Attorney-General's Department, is that there is a colossal overreach; there are all sorts of agendas being advanced behind the cover of the ostensibly sensible objectives of allowing law enforcement agencies to collaborate and to cooperate better. This does not just pertain to acts of terrorism, child pornography or child abuse material being stored on overseas servers, or indeed on Australian servers; this relates to everything—any offence and any form of data that is being stored. Keep in mind of course that there are various kinds of data now that did not even exist 10 years ago. Now, as our lives move online, we leave digital footprints everywhere we go, as do other citizens in highly industrialised count­ries. All this material is now up for grabs. For example, the Attorney-General's Depart­ment floated a bit of a thought bubble, and perhaps the public got onto it a bit sooner than they were intending, about data reten­tion. This is about forcing internet service providers to hold not only material from people suspected of major crimes but also all digital material: records of emails; phone calls; GPS records of your tele­phone—in other words, everywhere you have been; anybody you have communicated with; ever­ything you have done online and every eBay purchase. Why don't we retain all of that in case one of us turns out to be a criminal? That agenda was very strongly rebuffed and we did not hear a great deal about it, but then here it comes again, sneaking in under the cover of an otherwise sensible bill about signing onto this European convention.

Do not forget that these police powers in many European countries occur against the backdrop of very strong human rights protections that do not exist in Australia. The Australian Constitution is silent on human rights. Things like free speech, the protection of privacy and so on are implied rights. In Europe and in North America that is not so; those rights are very firmly stated. In Australia we do not have that safety net.

Having to fast-track this bill, the commit­tee was forced onto a very tight timetable and it forced witnesses, who are largely vol­unteer organisations, to pull together submis­sions at very short notice. To the committee's credit, many of those concerns have been picked up. In this instance, I have chosen to draft and submit additional comments. It is not a dissenting report, but material in addition to the work of the committee. For example, regarding recom­mendation six that deals with the death penalty, we had a very interesting discussion in the committee over a couple of days. How do we feel about the potential for Australian law enforcement agencies sharing informat­ion to aid an over­seas law enforcement agen­cy that would then lead to a prosecution and then an execution? I think there is unanimous opposition in this chamber to the death penalty here in Australia, but if you look at the international instruments that we have signed up to they are also about not enabling judicial murder to occur in other jurisdictions either. We have left the door open for that. Read recommend­ation six—we have enabled that. We have allowed the door to remain open for that information to be transferred and then for people to be executed by their states. I think that is completely unacceptable.

The Ombudsman asked that his powers to inspect and audit compliance with the preservation and data retention regime be clarified to ensure that he can check compli­ance with the act and not mere record keep­ing. That is another very important point. Try to imagine the grey areas that we stumble into when a foreign law enforcement agency comes after a warrant or data retention order for something that is not even a crime in Australia or something of which there is no easy equivalent. Some of the language in the bill regarding those ambiguities is gobbledy­gook and will be extraordinarily difficult to interpret.

'Traffic data' is not the words that you spoke on the phone or the content of your email but the metadata about who it was sent to, when it was sent, where you might have been at the time that it was sent and so on. Traffic data is quite well defined in the European convention but it is not defined in this bill. It does not use the same termin­ology as the convention and there are going to be really serious mismatches in the inter­pretation of that. A number of witnesses brought that up. It means that we can accede to the convention, but I think we are going to stumble into a swamp of interpretation when citizens or law enforcement officials wish to know what their obligations are under the law. The Privacy Foundation argued along similar lines. Keep in mind that the actual status of the traffic data or metadata that surrounds communications is not about serious and organised crime, terrorism, child prostitution or anything like that; this is about all of the records of all of the moves that we make, and their imprints in cyber­space, now being accessible to foreign law enforcement agencies.

There are very serious grey areas in this bill. My real plea is that the government read not only the minority report put up by the Greens, which talks about the overreach and goes into some of the specifics that we think should be improved in the bill, but also the majority report that was signed off by all members of the committee this morning. Do not simply serve up the bill unamended just because you imagine that you are always right and that the bill is perfect. This one needs a second thought. Some of these things are probably a bit unusual at the moment—there is not a great deal of this sort of activity occurring—but as we move into the online age, as we move our lives online and as the National Broadband Network rolls out, these things will become routine and we need to get the settings right at the outset. I thank the chamber and I thank the chair, and I look forward to a debate on an amended bill. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.