One of Australia’s largest internet providers has attacked federal, state and territory governments over their continued push to harvest metadata for security purposes.

But as government bodies of all sorts push for more access to the highly revealing information, it appears that the age of the government data centre is only just beginning.

A chief officer at iiNet, Australia’s second-largest ISP, says people are being lied to by governments saying they ‘only’ or ‘just’ want metadata.

For the chief regulatory officer at iiNet; authorities appear to want much more than ‘just’ data.

“Our concern is the commentary that we've seen from Northern Territory Police and other police forces - including the Attorney-General's Department in the previous government - was that we should keep everything on everybody,” iiNet’s Steve Dalby has said in an interview with the ABC.

“At the moment they can get a warrant or a court order or some other appropriate instrument and request us to record information on people of interest.

“It's a long way from recording information about a person of interest to recording everything about everybody in Australia,” he said.

Estimates hearings and government probes have shown that security agencies already frequently intercept Australia's telecommunications data.

Figures show at least 40 government departments and agencies made around 300,000 requests for metadata and other information last year, requested for a “law enforcement purpose”.

Reports say even the RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) and local councils have pushed for access to more data.

“I don't disagree with the argument that law enforcement needs the tools to do their job properly,” Dalby says.

“There's got to be a bit more evidence about people misusing telecommunications infrastructure to commit crimes or do something illegal, and then you focus in on those people. It's just an overreach and an overkill to store the calls and the website activity of my 12-year-old niece.”

The Federal Government does not appear to be considering mandatory data retention at the moment, but it has been flagged as possibility now from most sides of the political arena.

Most recently, Labor's shadow foreign minister Tanya Plibersek told Sky News that much more data should be kept.

“We always need to balance the expectations people have of living in a democratic and open society, but I certainly want to make it as easy for security agencies to do their job of protecting Australians from threat as we can,” she said.

“I think there is a misconception in the Australian public about the sort of data that's retained in these circumstances. I think some people imagine that security agencies can go back and listen to the phone call you made to your mum 18 months ago about what time you're going to be home for dinner.

“The information that is kept in these circumstances is basically, you could describe it as the envelope that the message comes in; who called whom and when,” she said.

“People describe it as keeping the haystack so you can go back and look for the needle afterwards.”