ACTPOL has filed a written submission with Parliament’s Committee on Communications on the draft Cybersecurity (Amendment) Bill, drawing on the Centre’s research across cybersecurity regulation, data protection, and surveillance oversight. The submission supports the Bill’s core modernisation aims while urging the Committee to repair three defects that would otherwise follow the amended Act into force.
First, warrant requirements. The Bill expands investigative powers, including access to stored communications and subscriber records, but attaches judicial authorisation unevenly across them. Our submission recommends a uniform rule: any power that reaches the content of communications or a detailed pattern of a person’s associations should require a warrant from a superior court judge, granted on sworn application and limited in scope and duration. Consistency here is not a formality. Fragmented authorisation standards are precisely how exceptional powers become routine ones.
Second, data retention. The draft would oblige service providers to retain traffic and subscriber data for extended periods for law enforcement access. We ask the Committee to weigh the growing comparative jurisprudence holding blanket, indiscriminate retention regimes disproportionate, and to substitute a targeted preservation model: rapid preservation orders against identified accounts, coupled with strict access controls, rather than the warehousing of the entire population’s communications records.
Third, institutional design. The amendments enlarge the mandate of the Cyber Security Authority without a matching enlargement of its accountability. The submission proposes annual public reporting on the exercise of intrusive powers, a statutory complaints channel independent of the Authority itself, and clearer boundaries between the Authority’s regulatory functions and the operational activities of the security agencies.
The full submission, including clause-by-clause drafting suggestions, is available from the Centre on request, and ACTPOL has indicated its readiness to appear before the Committee. Engagement of this kind sits at the core of the Centre’s mandate: research is written to reach the people who write the law.