Internet Australia (IA) has called for a new parliamentary inquiry into the Data Retention Act, which it says could be used in civil court cases.
The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 compels telecommunications companies to retain a particular set of telecommunications data for at least two years.
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The Act requires the archiving of information about a communication, such as an email, but not the content or substance of a communication. This is called "metadata" - data about data.
A copy of the data set required to be retained and secured by Australian ISPs can be viewed here (PDF).
By April 2017, every ISP in Australia will need to have implemented a system to retain their customers’ metadata for a two-year period.
Internet Australia has been critical of the scheme before, stating it was fundamentally flawed. With the threat of metadata being used in civil actions, it's now even become a bigger mess says IA CEO Laurie Patton.
"The only way out of it now is to go back to the beginning, back to the parliamentary inquiry that looked into it in the first place and get them to run the ruler over it," he said.
IA is particularly concerned that it's not known who specifically was the agitator for the proposed expansion of the Data Retention Scheme - and why.
“It hasn’t even come into effect and yet the Attorney-General’s Department apparently wants to see it expanded."
In addition to obvious concerns regarding the potential for civil litigation applications, expansion will also increase the costs of data retention compliance for internet service providers.
The Data Retention Industry Grants Programme (PDF) consists of up to $128.4 million to assist eligible telecommunications service providers meet their data retention obligations.
"The government funding is already nowhere near enough. ISP’s are out of pocket and they’re unhappy. This exercise has been a disaster from the start and by the looks of it things are only going to become more controversial."
IA also claims there are potentially hundreds of ISPs not known to the Attorney General’s Department.
In December, IA criticised a move by the Government to call for submissions for what IA called a " radical expansion" of the scheme using Christmas as a "cover".
Compliance for the scheme was meant to occur by October 2015, but many Internet Service Providers were granted an extension until April this year.
