Legal experts say neither the Federal Government nor the Opposition have given a proper justification for new data retention laws.

The Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Bill 2014 has passed the lower house, and will be in the hands of the Senate this week.

But with the bill on its way to becoming legislation, the Law Institute of Victoria (LIV) says none of its supporters have made a case that mass mandatory data retention is necessary, reasonable or proportionate.

The LIV and the Law Council of Australia have many concerns.

Within their own sector, there are strong fears that the bill will undermine the vital protections and confidentiality between a client and a lawyer.

“Much can be discovered from metadata – including the identity and location of the client, lawyer and witnesses, the number and type of communications with the lawyer and client, witnesses and the duration of these communications,” LIV president Katie Miller wrote in a piece for Fairfax Media this week.

More broadly, the legal community wants to know why the government does not think warrants are required.

“Government has not demonstrated why a warrant regime is not appropriate to access data of all citizens,” Miller said.

“Overseas, 11 countries in the European Union have some form of judicial oversight.

“It is naive to argue, as some ministers have tried, that the bill is just a continuation of the status quo, retaining data ‘already currently being retained’.

“It is also a data-creation regime. There will be data that service providers will need to capture and retain to comply with the bill, such as location information, that they have no business need to retain for two years.”

Lawyers and legal experts say the government has told them that the laws are needed to tackle terrorism and serious crime.

“There has yet been no cogent explanation of why access to data is not limited to serious contraventions of the law, despite the government's justification,” Miller wrote.

The legal community is not the only one with serious concerns about data security.

Telstra's chief security officer recently said the scheme will create a ‘honeypot’ for hackers.

“The issue here is that now we're advertising that for a customer of Telstra, there's a whole range of data... that we made available,” Telstra’s Mike Burgess told the ABC

“If I was... that way inclined as a hacker, you would go for that system because it would give you the pot of gold, as opposed to working your way through our multitudes of systems today to try and extract some data.”

The fear of setting up a honeypot for swarms of hungry hackers is exacerbated by the revelation that ASIO virtually never deletes a piece of data it has obtained.