Cops broke snoop law
Tasmania Police violated rules on data collection, report says
TASMANIA Police breached the rules governing access to telecommunications data on multiple occasions, the Commonwealth Ombudsman has found.
The Commonwealth Ombudsman examined law enforcement agencies’ access to stored communications and telecommunications data — such as email, text and voicemail messages — in the 2016-17 financial year.
Under federal law, 20 agencies are able to access individuals telecommunications data or stored communications when investigating offences such as murder, kidnapping, serious drug crimes, terrorism, child pornography, money laundering and organised crime.
Tasmania Police made 49 applications for access to stored communications data during 2016-17, resulting in no arrests, no court proceedings and no convictions.
They also made 150 requests to telecommunications companies to preserve data.
The Ombudsman found that Tasmania Police accessed data without proper authority on three occasions during the time period.
It also found that data was received outside the parameters of the authority on five occasions.
And police received data outside the authorised period on two occasions and continued to receive data after an authorisation was revoked on three occasions.
Deputy Commissioner Scott Tilyard said the contents of the report had been noted.
“While there was room for improvement identified across all jurisdictions, the Commonwealth Ombudsman’s 2016-17 report found that agencies were generally exercising their powers to access stored communications and telecommunications data appropriately.
“As a result of the report, Tasmania Police has reviewed its policies and procedures and taken steps to develop and improve more robust authorisation processes.”
The Department of Home Affairs figures also show that Tasmania Police made 30 requests for warrants for realtime telecommunications intercepts in 2016-17 which resulted in 21 arrests.
Of those, 13 warrants related to murder investigations, nine to drug offences, six were conspiracies to aid or abet unspecified serious offences and two related to property damage or arson. Those intercepts were conducted at a cost of $664,000 — an average of about $22,000 each.
According to federal government figures, Tasmania Police also used 9162 authorisations to access telecommunications metadata relating to criminal offences in 2016-17 — information such as the phone numbers of the people who called each other, how long they talked to each other, the email address from which a message was sent and the time the message was sent.
There were an additional 1124 authorisations for the purposes of imposing a penalty or protecting public revenue — 43 per cent of the national total — and 1092 authorisations to help with missing persons investigations — 24 per cent of the national total.