Snowden's effects have been snowballing, so to speak, as, months after the massive leak, several Australian law enforcement and intelligence agencies are now seeking approval for increase surveillance powers, which includes the ability and authorization to decrypt information.
On February, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) has submitted a document to the Senate Inquiry into the comprehensive revision of the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act of 1979. In the submission it clarified that the ASIO operates under many different layers of accountability, all of which apply to ASIO's current operations pertaining to telecommunications interceptions and monitoring of telecommunications data.
"Information derived from telecommunications systems plays a central role in many national security and law enforcement investigations. It represents a key source of intelligence to prevent harm. In the modern age the ability to save lives and protect our national security would be severely limited without these tools. For example, intelligence from telecommunications interception under warrant and telecommunications data has been critical to the identification and disruption of all the planned mass casualty terrorist attacks in Australia since 2001," the document read [PDF].
There is also the question of what type of telecommunications data is to be stored and subsequently analyzed. The ASIO paper mentioned that more people are now in the bait of encrypting their web communications after the Snowden leak, which requires a significant adjustment on ASIO's current authorization levels to decrypt intercepted data, specifically the necessity to require telecommunications providers to store all customers' metadata for a certain time period.
These metadata can reveal information about the parties to any particular phone call, call locations, time, and duration, but will exclude what has been said verbally. Web metadata, on the other hand, will show information on the IP addresses of the customer and those of the web sites he visits, times and dates of visit, and the subject, for email metadata.
The document does cite the Edward Snowden leak for ASIO's efforts to seek permission to amend its legal authorities for surveillance. "These changes are becoming far more significant in the security environment following the leaks of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden," the ASIO stated in its submission.
The ASIO submission highlighted the fact that current stipulations in the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act of 1979, was actually hindering their current investigations, at a time when information encrypting was already becoming much more prevalent, especially after the Snowden leak.
During criminal and financial investigations conducted within the years 2012 and 2013 alone, surveillance, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies accessed metadata over 300,000 times. If such data has been stored by a provider, these can be retrieved by state and federal agencies, local councils, the RSPCA, the Australia Post, and the Tax Office, without needing any warrant.
Edward Snowden is a former contractor for the National Security Agency. In 2013 he disclosed to several media corporations thousands of classified documents. The documents revealed details on surveillance operations being run by the NSA and the Five Eyes. The Five Eyes are composed of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, bound by a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
