Northern Territory, Queensland criminal tracking devices fail after Telstra outage

Electronic ankle bracelets used to track criminals in the Northern Territory stopped working for up to four days when Telstra's network was hit by a major outage earlier this month.

The NT Correctional Service's Department has confirmed that the outage affected devices used to monitor 85 individuals, including prisoners serving sentences at work camps, and people on community correction orders.

The electronic monitoring system is supposed to provide 24-7 monitoring to ensure criminals are obeying curfew orders and not entering exclusion zones.

But the tracking system failed when a single Telstra cable running through rural New South Wales was damaged on May 4.

"A significant number of NT Correctional Services electronic monitoring devices were affected by an intermittent outage issue in the Telstra Mobile G4S network communications service that began at 1:10am on Friday, 4 May, 2018," said a spokeswoman from the NT Correctional Services.

She said that it was then Telstra's responsibility to fix the outage.

"At 8:10 am Friday, 4 May, 2018, there were approximately 85 electronic monitoring devices identified as having an unresolved communication issues and by 11:30am, 23 had been resolved. By Saturday, 5 May, only seven remained unresolved," the spokeswoman said.

"The safety of the public is always a priority and electronic monitoring bracelets are only one of a number of ways people on parole or community corrections are monitored."

The ABC is seeking a response from the security contractor G4S, which administers the anklet devices.

Queensland monitoring devices affected

Electronic monitoring devices in Queensland were also hit by a less severe outage on May 4, Queensland Corrective Services (QCS) has confirmed.

"QCS immediately put contingency processes into place to ensure public safety, and escalated the incident to the service provider for priority resolution," a QCS spokeswoman told the ABC.

"Offenders have no way of knowing when the devices are not operational.

"Nearly 300 individuals are monitored using similar GPS devices in Queensland, including high risk offenders and those on parole. 299 devices were affected by the outage, QCS has confirmed."

The spokeswoman said the organisation used other contingency plans.

"Offenders subject to GPS monitoring may be confined to their residence if there is a sustained loss of data connectivity," she said.

"The most serious offenders are monitored by staff on the ground at the Wacol and Townsville precincts.

"Checks on other offenders are made by physical and telephone checks in the event of prolonged outages."

The ABC understands that the May 4 outage affected QCS monitoring devices for 45 minutes and no serious breaches occurred.

The ABC has approached other states' corrective services agencies to clarify what impact the Telstra outage had on their respective monitoring systems.

Corrective Services NSW said they experienced no issues with their electronic monitoring system as a result of the Telstra outages on May 4 and Monday.

"Our system roams across the three major telecommunications networks so that, in the event one experiences an outage, the system will divert to the next," a spokeswoman explained.

Software fault caused outage, Telstra says

The impact on prisoner monitoring devices emerged as Telstra started to shed light on what caused Monday's massive network disruption to its 4G mobile phone services.

"We have identified that the initial cause of the disruption was a software fault which triggered multiple elements across the network to fail," a Telstra spokesman said.

"The network is designed to switch onto standby hardware, which it did. Following the failover however, a further fault caused an interruption which impacted 4G connections.

"There is redundancy built into these systems but this did not operate as intended."

The outage resulted in the failure of many National Bank and Commonwealth Bank EFTPOS facilities across the nation, the cancellation of several regional train services, and widespread problems with customers' mobile phone and data services.

Telstra said it was still investigating the root cause of the software fault.

Let's block ads! (Why?)