http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,5153729%255E15306,00.html Kate Mackenzie 24Sep02 INTERNET service providers are preparing for a new cybercrime code of conduct that will detail how much data they should keep on subscribers in order to co-operate with police and other law enforcement agencies. The Internet Industry Association (IIA) is about to release the draft of its Cybercrime code of conduct, chairman Justin Milne said. The draft code is the result of more than a year of collaboration between the internet industry and representatives from police and crime authorities. It represents an apparently successful attempt by the internet industry to avoid specific new laws being introduced to specify compliance with authorities. "What the code does is it ties the legislation into the practicalities of everyday life," Mr Milne said. "The legislation is framed in general terms and doesn't get down to the specifics. "If we put that in place, I think we'll be the first country in the world to do that." Mr Milne, who is chief executive of second-ranked ISP OzEmail, said the code tried to strike a balance between law enforcement agencies' preference for indefinite archiving, and ISPs' desire to minimise resources spent on archiving. The length of time agreed on for ISPs to keep data would vary between six and 12 months, depending the type of information. "If we kept all of the information for all the time, we wouldn't be able to build data centres fast enough to hold all the data," he said. Mr Milne said he did not believe compliance with warranties placed an undue burden on ISPs, although he said OzEmail employed a full-time compliance person. Electronic Frontiers Australia chairman Kim Heitman said he believed most ISPs with more than 100,000 subscribers would employ a full-time staff member to comply with requests by police and agencies for user data and intercepts. Much of the Cybercrime Code was developed to head off calls by law enforcement agencies for a legislative approach to ensure ISPs keep data on users and cooperated with investigations. Law enforcement agencies appearing before a Joint Parliamentary Committee on the National Crime Authority last year raised the issue of record keeping by ISPs as one of the key issues it wanted addressed in order to improve the ability of law enforcers to keep up with changing technology. The IIA's legal representative argued that a self-regulatory approach, such as the Cybercrime task force, should be taken, rather than legislating new compliance requirements for ISPs. The code will also cover caller-line identification (CLI). The launch of the code will come soon after it was revealed that Australian intercept warrants had tripled in four years, and outranked the US by 20 to 1 on a per capita basis. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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