14 DAY TRIAL // Indonesia is none too happy with Australia at the moment considering the latest revelations based on Edward Snowden’s leaked files.
The country’s Foreign Minister, Marty Natalegawa, said that Australia should come clean on its past spying activities before any further news reports do the job for it. This is the only way to restore the ties between Indonesia and Australia, the minister said.
According to The Guardian, the two nations have been trying to mend the fences in the past few months, particularly after the first set of revelations regarding Australia’s spying practices targeting Indonesia’s president and his wife, as well as several government members.
It looks like they’ve been making some headway, but the latest reports were a big setback.
“My friendly advice, our advice, is to have, not quite ‘show and tell’, but at least indicate to us what have been past practices, the kind of activities, information that may have been obtained through irregular means,” said Natalegawa.
According to the latest leaks, Australia’s intelligence agency spied on the private discussions between Indonesian government officials and an American law firm on the topic of a trade deal between the two nations.
Furthermore, the Australian Signals Directorate managed to access bulk call data from Indosat, the Indonesian domestic satellite telco. Some 1.8 million encrypted master keys used to protect private telecommunications in the Telkomsel Mobile telephone network were also obtained by the ASD, and most of them were decrypted, effectively giving the agency full access to countless conversations.
Yesterday, the same Natalegawa warned Australia not to say that this was about national security, since the future of shrimp exported by Indonesia to the US had no such impact. That’s a reference to the fact that intelligence agencies always claim that all their operations are done to protect national security.