And so it begins: Australian government quietly expands access to retained data

This is exactly what civil libertarians and privacy advocates in Australia tried to warn the public about.

Josh Taylor reports that less than two months after the government passed a hotly debated data retention law for ISPs, the Department of Immigration and Border Protection has been added to the list of agencies that can access Australians’ telecom data:

Under the mandatory data-retention legislation, only a select number of government agencies can access the stored call records, assigned IP addresses, location information, and other telecommunications data for the purposes of investigating breaches of the law.

When the Australian Labor Party announced that it would side with the government and pass mandatory data-retention legislation in March, the support came with a number of amendments to the legislation, designed to increase oversight and improve accountability over government access to the stored data.