Global tech giant Amazon may not be able to protect Australian Government data including COVIDSafe app data from US subpoenas, say legal experts and crossbenchers.
Global tech giant Amazon may not be able to protect Australian Government data held in its Australian servers from US subpoenas, according to legal experts and crossbenchers, including data gathered by the COVID-19 tracing app released on Sunday.Data from the Government's new COVIDSafe tracing app may be currently obtainable by US law enforcement via the CLOUD Act
The CLOUD Act is a 2018 US law which requires American cloud services to produce, under subpoena, data held by them regardless of where in the world that data is stored. "I think the application that has been proposed by the Government, and that is now available for download, is a useful application and it will help to save lives, however there are certainly still some grey areas in respect of privacy," federal crossbench senator Rex Patrick said.
The Government rejected the concerns, saying its data held by AWS would be protected because of a provision in the CLOUD Act that allowed US companies to apply to refuse or modify US subpoenas seeking the data of foreign governments, if providing such information violated the law in that foreign country.
Negotiations for that agreement were first made public during a meeting between Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton and US Attorney-General William Barr on October 7 last year. ABC News can confirm the legislation to give effect to the agreement was only put before the House of Representatives in early March and, crucially, the bill — theThat means Australia has no enforceable protection under the CLOUD Act until the bill is passed, which can occur at the earliest in the middle of next month, when Federal Parliament returns.
"The fact that it would be an offence under the Biosecurity Act and a breach of our domestic laws is likely to be a relevant consideration to the enforceability of any US-issued warrant in relation to data held in Australia, and Australia's compliance with any mutual legal assistance request by the US for such information," Ms Wright said.
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