The Australian government has decided to delay a parliamentary vote on data retention bill until 2015. Perhaps, the reason was that digital rights groups warned that the new scheme could create “enormous honeypots” of sensitive data about millions of the citizens.

The bill was introduced to parliament a few days ago, and would require Australian telecommunication companies and ISPs to store information about their customers’ activities for 2 years. However, it was decided that the bill would not be subject to a vote until after a bipartisan committee completes an inquiry.

It is known that the proposed legislation will allow the storage of IP addresses assigned to subscribers and who they emailed. However, it was initially claimed the web-browsing history or the content of their emails would not be recorded. In the meantime, the scheme is supposed to allow the storage of details about people’s calls, including the numbers contacted and the time, date, and duration.

Both the communications minister and the attorney general of Australia argued that such “metadata” was a vital investigative tool for various law enforcement agencies. They were ready to negotiate with Labor on the timeframes for the parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security. Now the government has suggested a 3-month inquiry.

According to the Greens senator Scott Ludlam, the chances are that the government would impose a surveillance tax on people and therefore could expect a serious campaign against such plans. In response, the government claimed it was going to make a substantial contribution to the telcos’ implementation and operational costs, but the figures were not disclosed.

It was also indicated that the government was going to separate legislation to strengthen telecommunications security, and that in fact the security agencies already could access metadata, which was stored by ISPs for their own purposes. Apparently, the need for the new bill was initiated by the fact that the ISPs stopped doing so due to changing business practices and technology. As a result, the government has decided that it needs a mandatory scheme to prevent a degradation of the local counter-terrorism and general crime-fighting capabilities.