CANBERRA, Australia — Australian police revealed on Friday that an officer broke the country’s contentious new metadata laws by illegally accessing a journalist’s phone records to identify an anonymous source.
Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin revealed the first known breach of the laws, which were passed by Parliament in March 2015 despite widespread privacy concerns.
The laws force Australian communication companies and Internet providers to store customers’ personal metadata, such as phone numbers called and websites accessed, for at least two years as a counterterrorism measure for the convenience of law enforcement agencies.
A police officer investigating a police leak failed to get a warrant earlier this year before accessing the phone records of a journalist who reported the leak, Colvin said.
The journalist involved was not told of the breach because the investigation was ongoing, Colvin said.
Police destroyed all the evidence gathered as a result of the breach and advised the Commonwealth Ombudsman, a watchdog that investigates complaints from the public of unreasonable treatment by government agencies, Colvin said. The ombudsman will launch an investigation of the breach next week.
Colvin said the investigator had not been aware that before accessing a journalist’s phone records to identify a source, police must get a federal judge to issue a Journalist Information Warrant. Such warrants are an added safeguard in the legislation in recognition of journalists’ obligation to protect sources.
Colvin would not say whether police would now seek a warrant. But he said Australian Federal Police have never applied for such a warrant since the new laws came into force.