Australian government hiring guardians of retained metadata
The metadata retention scheme dreamed up by Australia's federal government may be stalled and in a shambles, but the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security isn't waiting for things to go wrong: it's recruiting specialists to watch over the scheme.
Turned up by Crikey (which Tweeted it as a search for “contractors”, which it's clearly not*), a job ad seeks “telecommunications intelligence analysts” with experience handling metadata.
The latter will surely draw from a fairly narrow pool, since the legislation mandating telecommunications data retention only passed this year and only came into legal effect in October. Moreover, most of the country's telcos aren't yet ready to actually start data collection, and are madly requesting extensions out to 2017 from the Attorney-General's Department (AGD).
