Transparency by Telstra: a good start but not enough

Telstra probably thought it was doing the right thing by joining other big names and publishing a transparency report. Instead, it's become a focus of criticism for, in the eyes of 'net freedom advocates, handing over too much customer information on too little pretext.

The carrier's report has led to a headline number: more than 84,000 customer records of some kind delivered up to authorities in 2013-2014.

That number has landed Telstra square in Australia's data retention debate, since the government is keen to implement new data retention laws while at the same time asserting that the new laws won't actually change anything.

The problem for Telstra is that the most controversial part of its cooperation with law enforcement also involves the greatest number of customer records and the least amount of detail. While there's legitimate grounds to criticise – or at least examine – what led to 2,701 warrants for “interception or access to stored communications” or 598 court orders, the carrier has no discretion in such matters.

It's also likely that 6,202 “life threatening situations” aren't going to draw down anyone's wrath. Even if either emergency services or Telstra made errors of judgement in such circumstances, the pressure to decide and act quickly is obvious.

It's the more than 75,000 requests for customer information that's subject to debate and criticism, and here, the carrier has done itself (perhaps inadvertently) a disservice. Here's how Telstra describes those requests: “Telstra customer information, carriage service records and pre-warrant checks”.

For a start, let's deal with the pre-warrant checks: all this seems to mean is that an agency (perhaps Police) is calling Telstra to check the status of a service, so it puts the correct name and account information on a warrant. That should be accepted as uncontroversial, since the last thing anyone wants is to have agencies serving warrants on the wrong accounts.

That doesn't give much of an “out” to the carrier, however: even allowing for a two-to-one relationship between checks and warrants actually issued, the total would be less than 6,000 and Telstra would still be getting criticism for the remaining 69,000.

Of course, here Telstra is constrained again, to some degree: the business of collating telecommunications data retention requests by (for example) the requesting agency falls to the Attorney-General's Department. To that extent, the individual carriers are probably constrained in the information they're allowed to give the public.

That constrains the debate – and, it should be added, brings perhaps-unwarranted odium down on Telstra's head when it belongs elsewhere. The carriers – all of them – could take a role in informing and educating the public. Even without taking a hand in the debate themselves, carriers could at least try to give us the best possible (and legal) understanding what governments demand of them. ®