Police in Australia paid mobile phone companies more than $6 million in the past year for information to help solve crimes, ninemsn can reveal. With more than 24 million active mobile phones across the country, police increasingly rely on the evidence of call charge records and text messages to place a suspect at a crime scene or uncover their role in a criminal plot.
Such information is provided on request by mobile phone carriers — but under the Telecommunications Act, those companies can claim the cost of the research back and charge police.
The same practice exists for telecommunications carriers that search for stored personal data like emails or internet bandwidth use to assist police investigations.
ninemsn could find no other institution that systematically charges police for time to assist in police investigations.
The only exceptions are forensic services, which are sometimes outsourced to the private sector, and commercial credit reporting services, which can reveal personal credit histories. But the latter example is often not as critical to investigations as SMS or phone records and instead is used more for illustrative intelligence, police say.
"Any fees paid to external institutions for access to personal records [other than telecommunications companies] are dealt with on a case-by-case basis and at a local area command level," a NSW Police spokeswoman said.
A civic duty to provide data for free?
Shadow NSW Police Minister Mike Gallacher said: "Building managers and strata corporations don't seek reparation for their time should police need their help to access a house for a legal search warrant — why should phone companies be any different?"
Mr Gallacher said that in serious crimes like murder or where national security is at stake, "accessing the information without paying should be as simple as securing a warrant".
But Australian Mobile Telecommunications Association spokesman Randal Markey said carriers did not charge police in life-threatening situations like kidnappings or suicide threats and that the "nominal" charges they do impose in other cases helped prevent time-sapping "fishing expeditions" for data.
"If carriers footed the bill for police investigations it would mean that the costs for law enforcement were shifted from government to honest law-abiding customers because the industry would have to pass on the costs to customers," Mr Markey said.
A spokeswoman for Optus, which has its own law enforcement liaison unit with staff trained to respond to police requests for information, added that carriers were prevented by law from profiting from the assistance they provide.
Mobile phones as vital evidence
Director of the Australian Research Council's centre of excellence in policing and security, Simon Bronitt, said mobile phone call charge data reveal "whole patterns of who people are communicating with and where they are doing it".
And an SMS may contain "an incriminating image, evidence of admissions or can refute an alibi about someone's presence".
"An enormous number of cases now are based on stored electronic communications," Professor Bronitt said.
Recent ones include:
- A hit-run driver to be sentenced over the January death of a pedestrian in Dandenong, Victoria, after police tracked him down through signals from his mobile phone and arrested him in his four-wheel-drive just hours after the incident;
- A 33-year-old man who was arrested in August at his home in Lakemba, southwestern Sydney, for allegedly using his mobile phone to groom a 14-year-old boy for sex.
Police can access mobile phone records more easily than they can intercept live telephone conversations, because stored electronic communications enjoy weaker privacy claims under the law, Professor Bronitt said.
Whereas investigators always need a warrant to wiretap phone conversations, they only need the consent of either the sender or recipient of a text message to access those stored communications.
"That allows the police some latitude to approach potential victims or even other offenders to encourage them to grant their consent that will essentially allow warrantless access," Professor Bronitt said.
Nor are police limited to targeting suspects in serious crimes — as they are with live phone conversations — when they do need a warrant.
"The category that will trigger a warrant is a belief by the law enforcement officials that a tap into your data would yield information that would be of assistance to an investigation," Professor Bronitt said.
Payments to mobile phone companies 2009-2010
Totals include costs of searching for stored internet records among those mobile phone companies that have internet arms.
| Police agency | NSW Police | Victoria Police | Australian Federal Police | Queensland Police | South Australia Police | Office of Police Integrity | Police Integrity Commission |
| Totals ($) | 2.49m | 1.33m | 966,263 | 930,816 | 203,057 | 170,904 | 59,108 |
Ninemsn lodged freedom-of-information requests with 10 of the country's leading police agencies to find out how much they paid mobile phone carriers in the 2009-2010 year. The NSW Crime Commission and Western Australia Police refused to release their figures. The Australian Crime Commission said it does not record the information ninemsn requested.
This has been going on for quite some time, but as ninemsn mentions, this is the first time it can be legally published.
This is a well known fact within the Telecommunications, Information Technology and Law Enforcement industries.
A method of giving money to mates is under official services, which normally are NOT questioned, is very common.
Another taboo in the mass media is the masonic influence in court cases, to such low offenses as parking tickets all the way to the top of corporate fraud.
This has never been covered in detail, or any cases specific or general been given as examples.
No comments:
Post a Comment