back to article Australian universities drop tech services to dodge metadata retention obligation

When Australia's federal government finally revealed who had been given money to help pay for metadata retention efforts The Register was surprised to see eight Universities on the list. So we've asked around and figured out why. Universities have a metadata retention obligation thanks to the Section 187B(a) of the …

  1. corestore

    You know a point I've never seen in discussions about data retention anywhere in the world? How a *lack* of metadata can be used - or rather misused.

    Let's say you're very privacy-minded. You always use TOR and other end-to-end secure protocols - riseup.net for email etc.

    So you have no - or virtually no - 'data retention' footprint. There's no metadata; just encrypted traffic to obfuscated destinations.

    "OK boys... give us a list of everyone who's using your system but *doesn't* have any metadata... let's take a real hard look at them to see what they're up to... that's our list of suspects right there..."

    1. Steven Roper

      Almost everyone I know uses a VPN these days, precisely because of this metadata retention law. All that fuckhead Brandis has achieved with his meglomaniac idiocy is sending the entire country underground. Good luck trying to profile everyone with a lack of metadata because of extensive VPN usage, that's most of the country now by the looks of things.

      Notwithstanding all this, I'm already onto that possibility. I use a VPN service (Private Internet Access) for most of my browsing but I disable it when using my bank*, online grocery shopping and ordering food from EatNow. I also have a set of sites, such as the Bureau of Meteorology, ABC News and SmartTraveller that I regularly visit sans VPN, specifically to create an innocuous metadata trail for the spooks to hoover up. But all my politically incorrect commentary, and various other interests are all masked by VPN.

      Likewise, I run two sets of emails; one lot "public" that I use for business, and another lot "private," hosted on my own server that I use for friends and family. Since said friends and family also have addresses on my server, and everyone connects to it via their VPNs, there's zero metadata (or even email interception or scanning) relating to emails passing through that server.

      So I actually have quite a sizeable "metadata footprint" - enough that my VPN usage can be readily explained as business-related activity.

      *My bank doesn't like PIA's VPN, as it complains and starts sending me warning SMSes about my account being hacked if I try to log in with the VPN active, so I have to use my bank without it.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Trust Is A Two-Way Street

        Well, exactly! And about the comment before you, I'd just say, somethings that are hidden in the plain sight are the hardest to spot. Anyone can make use of anything to fulfill their wants, be they business, personal, good, bad, moral, immoral, legal or illegal. And it actually goes beyond that. not everyone who actually uses a vpn, does so to search child p*rno or to know how to cook bombs. you gotta understand that. in a time like this, you can't even enter a query of a case of bad breath over Google without informing everyone in the loop before that.

        http://www.geektime.com/2017/04/20/5-things-that-aussies-and-americans-need-to-stop-doing-online-immediately/

        I know good and bad people do exist today and i also acknowledge that there is certain level of trust involved between a citizen and the authority (government or the isp) but i think at least 44% of Australian citizens effectively implied it's not them who have crossed the line when they didn't support metadata.

  2. frank ly

    How far does this go?

    If I rent a simple lower tier service from a hosting provider and provide an email address to my cousin and to an old friend (neither of whom live in the same town as me) and also maybe let them have a bit of ftp server space, am I a service provider under the meaning of the act?

  3. This post has been deleted by its author

  4. mark 177
    Headmaster

    Writing course for El Reg?

    Never seen an article on this site with so many typos...

    "we are going to change who we are providing the services too"

    "did our best to broaden our broaden definition of immediate circle"

    ....plus the odd grammatical error. The word "university" does not have a capital letter.

    You're getting almost as bad as the Grauniad or BBC, El Reg!

  5. JJKing

    Crow call the metadata, as per Graham Kennedy.

    I am going to assist my ISP by reducing my metadata footprint by adding a VPN to my router so every Internet capable device in my house only passes encrypted packets. Problem is that I am still going to get whacked by an increase in my plan due to nosey fucking pollies, ASIO, AFP, ASIS, RSPCA, all American music and film organisations, local council, various Australian horse racing clubs (seriously!), Con the Fruiter and the million and one other organisations who want free access to the retained metadata.

    Negative apologies to any TLAs that weren't mentioned. Rot in hell you scum sucks.

    Australia, the cuntry that has passed more terrorism laws since 2001 than any other one in the world, INCLUDING surprisingly, America. Now the bloody cops want even more laws to "fight" crime. I think they want these new powers so they no longer have to do actual police work to catch real law breakers and can spend more time catching those heinous, fiendish criminals who exceed the speed limit by 5kph.

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