Now that the completely disproportionate data retention law has been rushed through the Australian Parliament, politicians are suddenly realizing that their metadata will be collected too. And so, as was perhaps inevitable, they have asked for an exemption, as reported here by Crikey: An in-camera meeting of the high-powered Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security last week agreed to task the Department of Defence's signals intelligence arm, the Australian Signals Directorate, and the new Australian Cyber Security Centre with ensuring politicians' metadata is not captured by the government's new data retention regime while they are at work in [the Australian capital] Canberra.
The argument was that: given Parliament House is supposed to be the centre of Australian democracy, they shouldn't be, you know, tracked while at work there
Well, many people would argue that they shouldn't be tracked either, but obviously politicians are special. It seems that there were two options for achieving this carve-out. One required officials personally identifying and deleting the metadata of politicians, staffers and senior public servants -- a manual process aptly dubbed "handwashing". The other, cheaper, approach -- the one chosen -- was simply to remove metadata from all communications generated within Australia's Parliament House.
Problem solved -- except that some 680,000 visitors enter the building annually, and while they are there, their metadata will not be collected either. Ironically, then, the new exemption for politicians from a scheme allegedly to help the fight against terrorism and crime will turn Parliament House into the perfect location for plotting precisely those things in relative safety.
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