Stream: Blog

Privacy International has urged the Australian Parliament to ensure that rigorous legal and judicial safeguards are at the heart of future reforms to national security legislation. In a submission to the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security, Privacy International gave its full support to the objections raised by the Australian Privacy Foundation in its submission to the Inquiry into Potential Reforms of National Security. The Inquiry is considering a discussion paper published by the Australian Attorney-General's Department which envisages a number of draconian reforms to Australian national security and communication policies, including increased powers to monitor and intercept communications. 

The Home Office constantly insists that trafffic data is not about the content of the pages you look at, but about the sites you visit.

This would have made some sense in 1999 when RIPA was first being debated, but technology has moved on and new open data sources are now available. This allows for vastly more invasive tracking in 2012 than was envisaged in 2000. We’ve done a little bit of work on how…

The English Wikipedia contains 4 million articles, which contain 18 million links out to other websites.

We’ve run an analysis on those articles and links, and looked at how many of the outbound hostnames uniquely identify the page that you were looking at (a hostname is the www.privacyinternational.org part of a web address). Of the 4 million articles on Wikipedia, 1.3m of them - i.e. one in three - contain a link that is enough to identify the wikipedia page you were looking at, simply because only one page on wikipedia contains a link to that domain.

Modern communications surveillance policy is about gaining access to modern communications. The problem is that the discourse around communications policy today is almost the same as it was when it was simply a question of gaining access to telephone communications. "Police need access to social network activity just as they have access to phone calls" is the politician's line. We use Facebook as an example here, but most internet services will be similar in complexity and legality.

The reality is much more complicated, and modern communications surveillance policy hides far greater ambitions. Telcos usually have physical offices in the countries in which they operate and will comply with the law of the jurisidiction in responding to law enforcement requests. Social networking service providers tend to be based in just a few countires, despite having users all over the world, and are not therefore necessarily obliged to comply with domestic legal regimes.