The Attorney-General's Department (AGD) has argued in favour of extending Australia's telecommunications interception laws from telcos to over-the-top providers.
Speaking before the Joint Committee on Law Enforcement on Friday, AGD Assistant Secretary Andrew Warnes said this expansion would help combat the "challenge of encryption".
"The obligations that sit under the Telecommunications Act under Section 313 for reasonable assistance to law enforcement only applied now to those subset of telecommunications providers that are carriers, and not to the over-the-top providers and the social media platforms and things," Warnes said.
"So when you now put on an intercept, that communication may be potentially encrypted, and you may not get information back that is in a usable form, or you may get information that takes some time for you to be able to decipher and use, and sometimes in circumstances of urgency.
"That's one of the challenges we're looking at; it's one that government has come out and said that we're actively working towards legislation on."
Section 313[1] of the Telecommunications Act states that carriers and carriage service providers provide law enforcement with help via interception services, including the execution of an interception warrant under the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act, for the purposes of criminal law enforcement, protecting public revenue, and safeguarding national security.
Also speaking during the hearing on Friday was Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) CEO Michael Phelan, who said the process of telco interceptions is becoming increasingly difficult due to new technologies, with 5G mobile networks to make this even harder.
According to Phelan, as of a year ago, around 60 percent of the traffic that law enforcement was dealing with in interception orders was data rather than voice, which he said will