Jason Wood (La Trobe, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens contribution from the member for Melbourne is very good but it is not quite what we are after. As a former member of the Victorian police force, I had the great pleasure on Monday night to meet with their current serving presidents and secretaries of all police associations across Australia. In particular, I had a great chat with the President of the Victorian Police Association, John Laird, and the Secretary, Ron Iddles. For those who do not know him, Ron Iddles is a bit of a legend in the Victorian police force because he has worked so many years in the homicide squad and done such great work. We had a conversation about the bill and about metadata. As Ron said, we have been using metadata for 20 years. As a former police officer, I have been heavily involved in using what we call metadata.

Most police detectives across the country would know about CCRs and reverse CCRs, terms which most members of parliament and most members of the public have never heard of. A CCR is a call charge record. When a person makes a phone call, there is a call charge record that identifies who they have called. And then we have a reverse call charge record, which obviously identifies who has been calling that person. The legislation in this country has required telecommunications providers to keep this information for six months. Police forces and law enforcement around the country have been using this information for years and years. The difference now is that we are looking at changing to two years the period they have to hold onto that information. The reason for this, when I speak to law enforcement, is the complexity with, in particular, terrorism cases—for example, September 11. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was one of the instigators and planners of September 11. It was not something that happened overnight, it was planned for a number of years. That is why police and law enforcement need this information.

To give you an example of how valuable I personally have found CCRs, I will go back to my time in the organised crime squad. Our unit received a file relating to drug crops discovered at Mount Disappointment. The file came from the internal investigations department. They had made a big investigation believing, sad as it may be, that there were some corrupt police officers involved in this crop. Why? Because a week or two before the special operations planned to arrest people on site, no offenders ever came back. So we got the file. The first thing they did was supply the internal investigations department with a list of their potential suspects et cetera. Our analyst, Tracy O'Neill, a very good analyst, went through that list and we tried to work out potentially who could be involved in this. As I said, we had our targets. So we started looking at call charge records to see who potential suspects had been calling. Interestingly, a government department came up, and that was the park rangers at Mount Disappointment. So we then looked at reverse call records for a park ranger and found that almost everyone potentially involved had been calling him. It was at that time that we realised he was our main suspect. What then happened was that other police tours went on—surveillance and all those other issues. That ended up with people being imprisoned and the breaking up of a drug cartel.

The member for Melbourne spoke about warrants. Well, I have taken out warrants for telecommunications interception devices. It is not easy to take out a warrant. You have to provide a hell of a lot of information when it comes to an affidavit to prove the case. The member for Melbourne would say people are innocent until proven guilty—and I accept that—but all the CCRs and reverse CCRs are looking at is potentially a link to whether a person has made a phone call. Everybody should realise that their own telecommunications provider keeps on record who you have been making telephone calls to. The difference, especially for this, will be that the information about telephone calls is retained for two years instead of six months.

Sadly, Australia is now in the grasp of a terrorism threat. The government has raised our national terrorism public alert level from medium to high. The advice is based not on knowledge of a specific plan but, rather, a body of evidence that points to an increased likelihood of terrorist attacks in Australia. The Criminal Code Act 1995 defines a terrorist act as an act, or a threat to commit an act, that is done with the intention to coerce or influence the public or any government by intimidation to advance a political, religious or ideological cause and that act causes death or serious harm or endangers a person, causes serious damage to property, causes serious risk to the health or safety of the public or seriously interferes with or disrupts critical infrastructure such as a power supply.

It is interesting to note that since we first wrote this speech, sadly, we have had two incidents. We had the incident in Melbourne where police officers were stabbed by a terrorist—sadly, a very young man who had been influenced by extremists. We also saw what happened at the Lindt Cafe in Martin Place in Sydney. That was a classic example of putting fear and anxiety into the public. We go back to days gone by, when in 1978, the bomb exploded outside the Hilton hotel—and that was an awful incident. Two garbage collectors, Alec Carter and William Favell, were killed, along with police officer Paul Birmistriw, who died later from injuries he received.

We have had other incidents such as the Bali bombings and the planes flying into the World Trade Centre, and I will just take up a point made by the member for Melbourne. He is half-right: not every criminal is the smartest criminal around. For example, in the Australian Embassy bombings in Jakarta, the video footage shows a person driving a truck laden with explosives. He actually drove around two or three times—why? Because, sadly for him and for those present, he was the mule who did not even know how to drive a car, so he drove round two or three times before crashing it.

Terrorism attacks are still occurring and, since 1978, communications have dramatically improved. The internet in all its forms plays a big part in garnering groups of radical and disenfranchised people to terrorise others. Some of their tools of terror have become more sophisticated, although the beheadings of people with a simple knife still have the desired impact. We have all seen public beheadings in the media, and it is absolutely disgraceful and tragic.

One of the roles of law enforcement is to ensure that we have all the tools to protect Australian citizens and also in the case, God forbid, of another terrorist attack in Australia to ensure that the police have the ability to track down those responsible. If you look at al-Qaeda, for example, they spend years planning most of their terrorist attacks. It is crucial that metadata is stored in this country to ensure the police have those tools.

Tragically, we now have young Australians travelling to Syria and Iraq, joining Daesh and becoming terrorists, and at least 60 of these fighters have returned to Australia. This puts great stress and pressure on police to monitor these people.

The bill we are looking at today is about metadata—and I will explain a bit about metadata. The best way to explain it is a telephone call between two people. The metadata of this phone call could include the following information: the two telephone numbers, the time and length of the phone call, and the locations of the people making the phone call. The actual conversation is not recorded. To get that information, the police must take out a warrant and, as I have said before, in order to do this they have to go before a Supreme Court judge and write an extensive affidavit. I have sat down at the Organised Crime Squad and put these warrants together: it takes weeks and weeks.

That brings me to another point: when detectives all of a sudden understand that they may have potential suspects in a case, they cannot wait two weeks to get information. Unless this process has changed in the Victoria police, members put in a request that goes before a detective inspector, who looks at the information, why it is required and who makes the order if appropriate. At the same time, if someone is charged, it goes before the courts where everything comes out about how the police got that information.

On the internet, every machine has a unique number, just like a telephone number. The number is called an internet protocol address, or the IP address for short. For machines on the internet to talk to each other, they need to have a unique IP address, similar to a telephone number. In this case the metadata, the data on data, on the internet connected machines could include: the two IP addresses of machines communicating with each other; the start and length of the internet connection on the machines; the location of the machines connecting via the internet; the names of the people who are allocated to the IP address of the machine; the email addresses used on the two machines, if there is email; and internet connected machine visitor logs for chat room sessions.

Metadata on chat room sessions is important because paedophile groups and others involved in terrorism go into a cyberworld where communications take place. It does not mean that everyone involved in chat rooms is going to be a terrorist or a paedophile but, at the same time, this information may be vital to a police investigation down the track, when they are looking at who has visited certain chat rooms. It gives them a start to an investigation, and that is just so vital.

The email content or subject, the chat room conversation and the input or output data to the software application, is not captured. So the conversation is not captured; just when someone has been in a chat room. It does not disclose what they browsed either. It is also important to remember: this bill expressly includes information relating to web browser activities being stored as metadata.

Summing up, Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in his second reading speech, spoke about the impacts of keeping appropriate metadata not being limited to law enforcement agencies in Australia. During the recent Europol child exploitation investigation, investigations relied heavily on access to telecommunications metadata, because perpetrators primarily shared information online, meaning that physical evidence was rarely available, and 371 suspects were believed to be in the United Kingdom. Using related metadata, UK authorities were able to positively identify 240 suspects, leading to 121 arrests and convictions. At the same time, in Germany, 377 suspects were believed to be involved, but because they did not have metadata, sadly, they were not able to track the offenders. And when it comes to issues of paedophilia and terrorism, I am sure every member in this place believes that those people should be imprisoned, and to make that happen the police need the tools to ensure that this takes place. Finally, they do already have access to metadata. It is just an extension from six months to two years. So, I fully support this legislation. Thank you.

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