An investigation has revealed that the AFP’s community policing arm, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) police, used “covert and intrusive” powers to unlawfully gain personal location information on an estimated 1,704 separate occasions between October 2015 and 2019.
The report (pdf) by the Commonwealth Ombudsman, Michael Manthorpe, came after the Australian Federal Police (AFP) self-reported a number of records that were not submitted for the usual compliance inspections leading to Manthorpe’s investigation determining that Location-Based Services (LBS) were accessed 1,713 times, of which only 9 were fully compliant with the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979 (TIA Act).
