The Australian government released the annual report on the operation of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 for the 2016–17 time period, Computerworld reports. The TIA report found that by the end of the fiscal year 2017, Australian telecommunication providers spent more than $176 million on efforts to comply with the government’s mandatory data-retention regime. The report also found that eligible enforcement agencies accessed telecommunications data on 300,224 occasions, with a majority stemming from criminal investigations. The data retention scheme, which took effect in October 2015, limited the number of agencies able to access warrant-free metadata to 20, down from 63 in the 2015–16 period.
Full Story