Data retention laws have been reinforced in Australia to figure out a suspect’s possible involvement in terrorism activity, child exploitation, cyber attacks and several other crimes.

According to a gizmodo.com.au Web report, the data such as - who you called, who called you, both parties' location as well as the duration of the calls - will be accessed without prior notice or a warrant. The telcos and ISPs will have the right to retain metadata on their customers for about two years. The collected data would then be checked by law enforcement agencies to catch bad guys and home-grown terror threats.

The same applies for emails and only the list of Web sites accessed will be excluded. The IP address allocated to one’s modem by the Internet service provider will be stored so that law enforcement can figure out the suspect's involvement in cyber attacks, child exploitation, terrorism activity and other crimes.

Politicians too have different ways of dealing with the matter. Either the person does not mind having his/her data snooped on by the cops or one should be annoyed and outraged at the massive breach of privacy being forced upon Australians.

However, spooks might tell one that the metadata does not contain any identifying information about the contents of calls, messages, emails or traffic sent over Web connections; rather it just stores the data on the duration spent on a particular site, or a specific call, or when one sends a particular message and to whom. But the privacy advocates believe that metadata actually does more than that to a user.

In the 2013-14 financial year, there were 563,012 disclosures relating to more than 330,000 authorisations by the government agencies. This means that an individual’s records can be accessed in secret, even if he has not committed a crime, said the Sunday Morning Herald report.

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