The Australian and NZ spies are targeting Indonesia's largest mobile phone network as well as the telecommunications systems of Australia's small Pacific Island neighbours, according to documents obtained from the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. The Australian and NZ signals intelligence agencies intercept satellite communications and under-sea telecommunications cables, and share the "full take" of telephone calls, emails, social media messages and associated metadata with each other as well as their "5-eyes" partners, the US National Security Agency and the British Government Security Communications Headquarters.

Document obtained from whistleblower: Former intelligence contractor Edward Snowden. Credit:Reuters

A leaked top-secret NZ report confirms the ASD's deep interest in Indonesia's largest mobile phone network, Telkomsel, which serves more than 122 million subscribers.

A NZ intelligence officer working on exchange in Canberra in 2009 was placed in ASD's "network infrastructure analysis section" where he was given "specific … tasks regarding Indonesian cellular telecommunications provider Telkomsel" including "investigating Call Data records being sent over FTP" [file transfer protocol - a standard network protocol used to transfer files from computer host to another], and researching Telkomsel's voice compression gateways used to support transmission of long-distance international and domestic telephone traffic.

Another 2012 US NSA document published last year revealed that the ASD stole nearly 1.8 million encrypted master keys, which are used to protect private communications, from the Telkomsel network, and developed a way to decrypt almost all of them. The ASD has also accessed bulk call data from Indosat, Indonesia's domestic satellite telecommunications provider, including data on Indonesian officials in various government ministries.