Telstra: Terror threat if we don’t get our way

In what can only be believed as a temper tantrum from the big baby themselves, Telstra’s public affairs nuisance Phil Burgess recently was cited in the media.

Basically, Fat Phil states that if Telstra didn’t get their way with their temper tantrum argument on FTTN, Australia would be “vulnerable to terrorist attacks”.

This is obviously nothing but more propaganda to incite fear into the masses of uninformed folk out there who know no better and might believe this trash.

Realistically, (Phil can’t think that way it seems), the countries telecommunications networks could be provided out of Iraq itself and we’d be in no different a position then we are now.

There’s a few reasons why, but essentially, the network can be broken into at various points, points like pillars, or even right at a customer house if someone knew what they were doing, could be patched into and the telecommunications “privacy” compromised.

But, the reason Phil stated as bringing us to a terror attack is that if the network isn’t with Telstra, for some strange reason, ASIO and the police, and others would have great difficulty in gaining surveillance (tapping of phone lines, etc).

That’s interesting to say that, considering Phil is suppossed to be the head of Telstra’s Public Affairs unit, why? Telstra’s a telecommunications company.

Telstra themselves SHOULD know by now (considering they have the nation’s largest) that all communications traffic is IP traffic.

As such, to tap a phone line, it can be done from the ice caps if you can get satelitte reception to administer the servers on the network.

In this day and age nearly everything is administered remotely, when you get a line connected at a rental place, that $59 they charge you, isn’t for someone to get off their fat arse, go down to your telephone exchange and wire you in, nope, it’s going straight to Telstra’s pocket, with the exception of perhaps 5 minutes @ 15.00 an hour going to the telephone consultant you speak to for pushing a few buttons on the computer to assign a phone number to the copper cable.

The same administration is possible on IP networks when it comes to recording calls, you can indeed log a call straight to a file whilst at the same time allowing the conversation to continue with no real human resources necessary (except someone to push a few buttons on a keyboard to set the recording up).

And the same goes for tracing a call, all Telstra need to do to find the destination of a particular call (or an incoming call) is search their databases for it (something like 1 minute).

And it doesn’t really cost them $2 or so to keep those silent numbers silent (a database flag determines “listed” or “unlisted”).

So, the argument that we are under greater risk of a terror threat due to having infrastructure in remote hands is absolute trash, from the king of trash himself, Phil.

Ask the defence forces themselves, who happily get their capacity from Optus, and not Telstra.

They don’t seem to be too concerned about Optus and its Singapore ownership.

I dare say the biggest issue would be incompetence, and I am sure we are likely to find a heap of incompetent telco staff among the ranks in Telstra.

Phil seems to be presenting himself as one, seemingly lacking the basic knowledge behind the networking components of a national telecommunications network that the company he represents owns. It’s very basic stuff. I don’t even work for Telstra (or any related company) and I already can figure out how they would rig that up.. Why can’t Phil?

The real story here is Phil is attempting to spit more misleading crap into the media to encourage more support from the uninformed, one can assume here that it’s not going to be bought, no one wants to pay excessive prices for access to a very basic telecommunications service.

Enjoy!