No law-enforcement agency was involved in obtaining the IP address information related to the blackmail. Instead, the identity of Murray was revealed by Telstra, which had been ordered to comply with a "preliminary discovery" court request by Mr Biggs' lawyer The identity of the author of text messages sent to Mr Biggs in relation to the matter was sought from Vodafone, but this returned nothing useful. is signed off by a senior officer. Mr Biggs' case highlights that Lawyers representing clients in civil court disputes are also able to access metadata. Although exactly how many times this has been done in the past is unclear, searches by Fairfax Media show that it's been done several times. Outside of the 582,727 metadata disclosures made in the 2013-14 financial year by Australian telecommunications companies to law-enforcement agencies, a further 11,526 disclosures — which are likely to include content data as well as metadata — were made "authorised by or under a law", according to an Australian Communications and Media Authority report.

Another 553 were "made as a witness under summons". In the same period, Telstra revealed it had acted on 598 court orders, a figure likely to form part of ACMA's figures. The revelation comes after Attorney-General George Brandis and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull introduced last month the "Data Retention Bill" to force internet and phone companies to store Australians' internet and phone records for two years. They argued that the data was often purged but should be stored to help fight terrorism and crime. It's very obtrusive... It's very difficult to get, but if you manage to do it, you can get some fantastic results. Lawyer Ben Patrick Lyonswoodwho assisted Mr Biggs

His firm was lucky in Mr Biggs' case that Telstra kept records – Murray was ordered to repay the money with interest and an extra $20,000 in exemplary damages and was also ordered to make no representations about Biggs to anyone – but where providers had not stored "We are approached just about every day by people who are in situations where they are either being defamed or blackmailed or subject to identity fraud or one of a number of really quite intrusive attacks online," Mr Jarvis said. "And the fact is the IP address [of the perpetrator] … is often dynamic and how long the internet service provider has retained that data doesn't appear to be a long time and that defeats the purpose of us endeavouring to investigate the matter in some cases." There had been several instances in which his firm had been unable to obtain any information from the internet service provider "because they state that they don't have any", he said. If data retention came into law, his chances of identifying people would increase, Mr Jarvis said.

Seamus Byrne, a private investigator and director at Motivation Group, said preliminary discovery against internet providers and content hosts was "increasingly popular" in civil litigation involving issues such as online defamation, intellectual property infringement, theft of confidential information and extortion attempts. Increasing the retention period of IP addresses and other metadata "should benefit parties to litigation", Mr Byrne said. The studio behind the movie Dallas Buyers Club is using preliminary discovery to try to obtain the names of account holders Ben Patrick, who runs his own firm Patrick & Associates, told Fairfax Media he gained the identities of people behind IP addressesusing discovery orders at least five times while at another firm. "It's like a search warrant for the police," Mr Patrick told BRW Magazine

Mr Patrick added that metadata could also be obtained from telcos and internet content hosts using subpoenas, which didn't need a judge's sign off but could be fought. But fighting subpoenas could be costly, he said, so telcos often complied if they were narrow enough requests and not broad. *John Biggs is a pseudonym. His real name is subject to a suppression order.