Anger As Police Track Mobile Phones
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday February 10, 1997
Privacy groups and civil libertarians expressed outrage yesterday that police are effectively monitoring mobile phone users without their knowledge.
Police can track suspected criminals with mobile telephones to within several hundred metres by studying signals transmitted from the phones to nearby base stations.
The suspects can be located whether or not they are making a call - a spokesman for Telstra said tell-tale signals were emitted from its mobile phones on average every 30 minutes.
The chairman of the NSW Privacy Committee, Mr Chris Puplick, said walking around with a mobile phone was "like walking around with a beeper or an implanted transmitter".
"If I wanted to track in three weekends time who is at the Gay Mardi Gras presumably I could work out which members of the judiciary have got their mobile phone with them at the party."
The president of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, Mr John Marsden, said the use of phone records by police was an "invasion of privacy and a vicious attack on people's rights".
Telstra and Optus do not keep records of the signals transmitted from phones to base stations but if a warrant is issued in advance they can track a user's position.
In some cases, even streets can be identified but accuracy is affected by topography, interference from buildings, the position of base stations and the number of mobile phones in the area.
Police have also been using mobile phone records, kept by Telstra and Optus for billing purposes, to check the alibis of murder suspects and to establish whom drug dealers are calling.
They say the records are a "very valuable investigative tool" and, according to Senior Sergeant Frank Helsen of the NSW Police Service Crime Data Centre, officers make daily requests for them.
Both Telstra and Optus have confirmed that they keep these records - which give the date, time, cell area from which a call is made, and its destination - for seven years.
"We will provide the police with whatever level of information they're after and if it's a legitimate request then they will be looking for information that will help them as much as possible," said Ms Melina Reed, of Optus.
"In most cases we cannot provide the level of accuracy that police are after."
Under the Telecommunications Act (1991), phone companies must provide "all reasonable assistance" to law enforcement agencies where a prosecution is underway and certain steps are taken.
A Homicide Squad officer whose requests for phone records helped lead to the arrest of two suspects in separate murder cases, said: "They said they were in a particular spot when we could prove they made phone calls from a different area, near the scene of the crimes."
© 1997 Sydney Morning Herald
