Displaying items by tag: AttorneyGeneral

ASX-listed Canberra-based cyber security firm archTIS has signed a 12-month contract to supply its Kojensi Gov SaaS platform to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the company says.

The Australian Federal Police has told the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security that it has used technical assistance requests issued under the encryption law passed in December 2018 on three occasions in the financial year 2019-20, to obtain assistance from companies or individuals in breaking encryption to gain access to information needed for investigation of crimes.

The United States has called for the creation of backdoors in apps that use encryption, arguing that consumers should accept this risk to allow law enforcement access to encrypted communications.

The Australian Federal Police says it is in the process of issuing technical assistance requests under the recently passed federal encryption law, and is discussing with the communications providers concerned what kind of assistance should be offered to them after the orders are issued.

The Communications Alliance has urged the federal government to go easy on telecommunications service providers as they attempt to meet a 13 April deadline for complying with the data retention regime.

Internet Australia, the peak body representing Internet users, has criticised a move by the Federal Government to call for submissions over the Christmas period for what it describes as a “radical expansion of its controversial data retention scheme”.

The federal Department of Health has been forced to remove a dataset made available to the public on the data.gov.au website after a researcher at Melbourne University found that service provider IDs could be identified.

Telstra, Optus and Vodafone have together been apportioned about 65% of the funds allocated for companies to implement the data retention scheme that the government voted into law more than a year ago.

Australia’s Attorney-General, George Brandis, seeks to impose metadata collection on the citizens of Australia, but doesn’t want his own metadata seen by Australians as it is ‘not relevant to democracy’.

Data retention is a hot topic, so much so that the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights has included several pages examining the proposed legislation in its fifteenth report of the 44th Parliament. Suggestions put forward are that TIA Amendment Data Retention bill invades privacy, doesn’t properly define data, goes too far and needs further amendment.

Australia's second biggest ISP, iiNet, has broken ranks with other ISPs and refused to join their calls for a graduated response scheme to battle piracy.

Chinese communications giant Huawei has had its dreams of an NBN tender thwarted, with the Attorney-General indicating he wouldn't be overturning the Labor government's ban.

Just months after Australia introduced an R18+ rating for videogames, South Australia's Attorney-General has reopened the debate around the classification rules, citing excessive violence and sexual content.