Law-enforcement data requests up 9% in 2014, Telstra Transparency Report shows

Telstra received and acted on 84,949 requests for customer information from law-enforcement agencies during the year ending 30 June, the company has revealed in its first-ever full-year transparency report.

During the course of that year, the company acted upon 75,448 requests for customer information, carriage service records, and pre-warrant checks – the last being a pre-investigation that confirms the telecommunications service in question is still active.

Some 6202 requests were received relating to life-threatening situations and 000 emergency calls, while 598 court orders were served and 2701 requests received as a result of warrants for interception or access to stored communications.

The end-of-year figures confirm that law-enforcement bodies are increasingly turning to Telstra to assist in investigations: compared with the company’s first-ever transparency report, which was published earlier this year and covered the period from July to December 2013, the volume of requests was up in three of four categories during the second half of the year.

Some 39,395 requests for customer information were received during the six months to June as opposed to 36,053 requests in the first half – a 9.3 percent increase.

Similarly, 3331 requests were received in life-threatening situations during the second half, compared to 2871 in the first half – a rise of 16 percent. Some 328 court orders were processed, up 21 percent from 270 in the first half.

The only category that declined in the second half related to the administration of warrants, with 1251 warrants handled in the second half as compared to 1450 in the first half of the year.

Overall, Telstra handled 44,305 requests in the second half of the year – an increase of 9 percent over the 40,644 requests lodged in the first half.

Depending on the requests lodged, the information that Telstra provides may include a customer’s name, address, service number, connection dates, date of birth, previous address, call records, SMS records, and Internet records reflecting the date, time, duration and destination of a call. Internet session information might include the date, time and duration of Internet sessions as well as email logs from Bigpond mail addresses but does not include URLs, according to the transparency report.

The transparency report does not include figures for requests by national security bodies, which are excluded from reporting by the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979.

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