AUCKLAND (The Fiji Times / Pacific Media Watch / Fiji Village / Bloomberg /The Independent / The Guardian): Government agencies in Australia, New Zealand and Fiji are putting their citizens under surveillance, according to Vodafone's international Law Enforcement Disclosure Report .
The report says Australian government agencies issued a massive 3389 requests for content and 685,757 requests for metadata, outstripping all other countries that Vodafone reported on.
New Zealand government agencies were involved in only 34 cases of content interception.
Journalist Shalveen Chand of the Fiji Times reported yesterday that Fiji government agencies had made 760 requests for phone data.
But Vodafone Fiji managing director Aslam Khan insisted that the court sanctioned surveillance did not amount to wire tapping, saying that Vodafone Fiji did "not have technical capability in its network to either listen to a telephone conversation or record a phone call or a text message".
For this reason, Vodafone Fiji had not yet received any agency or authority demands for lawful interception assistance, the Vodafone report revealed.
The type of surveillance being practised by governments ranges from warrants for communications metadata (phone numbers, device locations, times of calls and messages, and web browsing records) right up to legally sanctioned interception of content (what was said in a text or call), The Guardian reported.
Direct bugging
In addition, there are six countries which Vodafone would not name, which do not even have to apply for court orders to monitor their customer's calls.
They have direct access to Vodafone’s network and can bug calls directly.
British newspaper The Independent quoted Gus Hosein, executive director of Privacy International, as saying: “These are the nightmare scenarios that we were imagining. I never thought that telcos [telecommunications companies] would be so complicit".
It was "unacceptable governments carry out surveillance work so massive, widespread and indiscriminate as that revealed by Vodafone’s report", Antonello Soro, chairman of Italy’s Data Protection Authority, said in a statement reported by Bloomberg News.
The statistics are likely to be just the tip of the iceberg given the six countries on which Vodafone refused to reveal data and that in several countries it is illegal to say whether wiretapping is happening or not.
These countries are Albania, Egypt, Hungary, India, Malta, Qatar, Romania, South Africa and Turkey, The Guardian reported.
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