ASIO Chief Explains Why he wants unprecedented access to meta data, and that he doesn't understand the concept of Fair, Just and Legal

there's nothing to fear about forcing ISPs to collect all your phone and internet data for the government to pore over whenever it wants. Why, according to the reassuring words of ASIO chief David Irvine and deputy federal police commissioner Andrew Colvin, they're just asking to have access to the stuff that telcos are already keeping. Oh, good!

Irvine explained that “We don't rake over bundles of metadata, we seek to access metadata on very specific cases where there is a very specific security intelligence purpose to do so." You might think that in those cases they could perhaps do the obvious thing and get a fucking warrant.  

They did confirm that they couldn't access social media sites (which, to be fair, they could just look at anyway) but did get adorably coy about whether or not they could access things like Skype.

They also confirmed that our terror threat level remains at "medium", which is where it's been since the terror threat level system was introduced in 2003. So just to be clear: when the PM Tony Abbott announced earlier this week that Australia was now facing a medium terror threat, he could have said the less-dramatic "precisely the same level of threat that we've faced for eleven years".

But hey: as Yoda so rightly said "fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to a bump in the polls for conservative political parties".

Or something like that. I didn't really care for the prequels.