Monday, July 01, 2013

They want to see your phone and internet records. Here's what they do


Did you know that the Australian government accesses someone's phone or internet records on average once every two minutes, every day,  every hour of the year?

The Global Mail reports:

"It happens all the time – roughly 800 times a day, on last year’s records.

Somewhere in Australia, a government bureaucrat – no-one especially senior; say, a Centrelink agent – fills in a form, gets a signature from someone else in the department, and becomes authorised to check out a member of the public’s phone records (which numbers that person has called, how long they spoke, and where they were when they placed the call), and then their email history (who they’ve emailed, and when, and the IP addresses used).

No warrant required, no notice given. It’s all legal – and has been happening since 2007.

In fact it happened more than 300,000 times in 2011-12. It may have happened to you – and in most cases, you wouldn’t know."



But what does one of the requests look like?

The NewYorker provides a clue.

The US dolcument is so extraordinary that I have published it as a pdf below.

I find it chilling. Especially the bit about the phone company admitting to no-one it has betrayed its customers:









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