Markus Junianto Sihaloho, Jakarta – A minister has threatened to punish Indonesian telecommunications companies if found to be complicit in allowing US and Australian intelligence agencies access to customers' communications, amid new spying revelations in documents leaked by whistle-blower Edward J. Snowden.
Communications Minister Tifatul Sembiring said in Jakarta on Tuesday that any operators involved in the alleged wiretapping by the US National Security Agency and the Australian Signals Directorate "will be closed immediately."
"That includes the state-owned ones," he said, referring to Telkomsel, majority-owned by the Indonesian government, and Indosat, in which Jakarta holds a minority stake. "No one is above the law," he said.
Tifatul said he had ordered an immediate investigation into the wiretapping allegation and would work closely with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the matter.
Communications Ministry spokesman Gatot S.Dewa Broto said separately that officials would seek explanations from Telkomsel and Indosat if the investigation showed any indication that the companies were complicit in the spying on their own subscribers.
"If the report indicates their involvement, the ministry will immediately launch an investigation and ask the operators to submit a written report," he said.
The furor, the latest over spying allegations by the United States or Australia against Indonesia, stems from a report in The New York Times, citing documents leaked by former NSA contractor Snowden, that reveals how US and Australian intelligence shared "broad access to the Indonesian telecommunications system."
"The NSA has given the Australians access to bulk call data from Indosat," according to a 2012 agency document, The New York Times reported.
It added that Australia had "obtained nearly 1.8 million encrypted master keys, which are used to protect private communications," from Telkomsel, "and developed a way to decrypt almost all of them, according to a 2013 NSA document."
Denials
Telkomsel, with 123 million subscribers, is Indonesia's biggest wireless carrier, while Indosat, with 55 million, is the second biggest. The companies have denied any involvement in the alleged wiretapping or submission of subscriber communications to a third party without a warrant.
"We have always complied with the regulations and laws," Adita Irawati, the vice president of corporate communications at Telkomsel, told the Indonesian news portal Vivanews.com.
She said Telkomsel had signed a memorandum of understanding with Indonesian law enforcement agencies on complying with national regulations about intercepting communications. "We comply with the special regulation on interception as stipulated under the law," Adita said.
Indosat President Director Alexander Rusli also said his company complied with the law on intercepting communications, adding that Indosat had implemented a high level of network security to protect subscriber communications. "Indosat also manages and operates its networks itself and does not adopt a network outsourcing system," he said in a press release.
'Soft target'
But Ichsanuddin Noorsy, a public policy expert at the University of Indonesia, said it was conceivable that a "backdoor" program had been installed in the carriers' networks that allowed the data to be siphoned without officials at Telkomsel or Indosat finding out.
"Telkomsel in particular is a soft target because its billing system was developed by an Israeli company, Amdocs," he said on Tuesday. "This backdoor strategy by a software vendor could have been the way in."
He warned that Indonesian companies would remain vulnerable to such practices as long as they kept relying on foreign technology, and pointed to China and its investment in secure, homegrown technologies as the kind of example that Indonesia should be following.
"Not only do we not have a robust security system for our technology, but we leave ourselves open to wiretapping through our use of foreign software," Ichsanuddin said.
He also said that part of the problem was that Indonesian phone and Internet users were in general not as concerned about privacy as their peers in the United States, noting that when similar revelations emerged last year that US carrier Verizon had handed over subscriber data to the NSA, there was a huge public outcry.
"They protested against the NSA and they went on to develop encryption technology to thwart the NSA," Ichsanuddin said, adding that such a breach of privacy would not cause much of a ruffle among Indonesian mobile subscribers.
Harsh statements
Politicians have demanded a strong response from the government to the latest spying claim, with Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa coming in for praise for taking a hard-line with Australia over its role in another espionage scandal.
"The minister's statements of late have been quite harsh, but that's what Indonesia needs to do to determine once and for all whether we are a friend or a foe to these other countries," Pramono Anung, a deputy speaker of the House of Representatives, said on Tuesday. "This isn't about something that an individual or a group is doing. The government has to take a broad approach to it."
Marty was unflinching in a statement on Monday over allegations that the Australian Signals Directorate had listened in on phone calls between Indonesian officials and their US lawyers representing Jakarta in a trade dispute with the United States last year.
"I find it extremely difficult to comprehend how talks between the US and Indonesia on shrimp has any direct or indirect implication on Australia's security," he said at a joint press conference in Jakarta with John Kerry, the visiting US secretary of state. "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
The allegations, also stemming from a report in The New York Times that was published as Kerry arrived in Jakarta over the weekend as part of his Asian tour, cited documents released by Snowden as showing that the Australian Signals Directorate had offered to share the communications, including possibly "information covered by attorney-client privilege," with the NSA.
It was not immediately clear whether the NSA accepted the Australian offer or what the dispute in question was about, but at the time of the 2013 NSA bulletin Indonesia was embroiled in a dispute over a US ban on sales of clove cigarettes, and US claims that shrimp from Indonesia were being sold below market prices.
The US later dropped its claim in the shrimp case, while the World Trade Organization has referred the clove cigarette case to arbitration.
Australia has declined to comment specifically on the allegation, but Prime Minister Tony Abbott has justified his government's intelligence gathering as being "for the benefit of our friends."