But then, I'm not lawyer. You're probably not either. Which is why I keep telling people to get their own legal advice if they're concerned about it.
Needless to say I was staggered at the scope of the powers granted. Forget about transparency, justice and the rule of law. If you receive one of these you can be compelled to give evidence or documents in secret, without judicial oversight or public scrutiny.
A year of incarcerating someone is only worth $3,400 to the government? Strange, considering that if you're going to be pedantic about money, the cost of incarceration is surely at least one order of magnitude more than that.
It seems to me that this kind of thing is for investigations where they don't want suspects to know they're being investigated, which is fair enough. It doesn't seem like they're doing it to keep secrets for "National Security".
- ACC has judicial oversight
- its unclear how this interacts with the Telecommunications (Intercept and Access) Act
With my boss throwing in:
- law is a giant mess
- until you have two extremely well-funded parties disagreeing vehemently about the interpretation, you'll never get a final answer
We're still happy with our publicly-stated position. You might disagree, and I'm not really in a position to argue with you. Its my corporate masters with their necks on the line, and they seem relaxed about it. That's good enough for me :)
But these laws have been active and in common use for over 10 years without a single public challenge. I also know that the ACC's interpretation of their own powers has been used to prevent suspects disclosing certain matters even to their own lawyers.
The fact that no high-profile judicial decisions have placed limits on what the ACC does indicates to me that the law is fairly settled in this area.
I just wanted to point out that the original statement "Australia does not have any equivalent to the US National Security Letter, so we cannot be forced to do something without being allowed to disclose it." does not seem well-founded.
But now reading this exchange I now see that your company doesn't actually know the Australian law any better than it knows the US law, and now I feel that fastmail might actually be WORSE than a US company in terms of privacy. Thanks for letting us know.
The title of this post should be changed to:
FastMail’s servers are in the US – what this means for you -> absolutely nothing.
I'm not calling you a liar, btw, I just think you're naive/oblivious, and considering you just now discovered what ACC is and had to check with your lawyer (who isn't even sure how it interacts with other laws), I wouldn't use your service to send any critical information. Ever.
We have no doubts either. The privacy policy clearly states we will give your data to the Australian authorities if supplied with the proper supporting documentation.
I didn't just find out about the ACC, though I wasn't aware of the details. But I'm not a lawyer, just a sysadmin, so I don't need to be. The "its not clear" bit is simply that there are two laws that appear to be in contradiction with each other. Its never been tested in court. And thus, its not clear. But we have confidence that what our position is legally supportable or we wouldn't be here.