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- In short: Meeting rooms at Tasmania's Risdon Prison hosted 723 visits during a two-month period when police were secretly recording audio and video of all conversations
- What's next? A review into how police access surveillance warrants is yet to start – a year after the matter was publicly revealed. There are calls for everyone caught up in the recordings to be contacted
Tasmania Police secretly recorded potentially hundreds of private and legally privileged conversations in a meeting room at the state's adult prison – with calls for those affected to be contacted to review their cases.
Police bugged a meeting room at Risdon Prison on June 15, 2017, to record a conversation involving lawyer Jeffrey Ian Thompson, who was a lawyer for convicted murderer Sue Neill-Fraser.
But the devices – one recording audio and video, the other just audio – continued recording until August 17, 2017, picking up all meetings in the room.
This week, Attorney-General Elise Archer has given data to parliament showing how many times the meeting rooms were used during the period, in response to a question – almost a year ago – from Labor justice spokesperson Ella Haddad.
The four meeting rooms hosted 723 visits, including private prisoner meetings with lawyers, medical professionals and the Parole Board.
The recordings were sent back to a computer in a Tasmanian police station, specially installed for the operation, with the recordings able be monitored in real time.
Five police officers could access it, along with technical services officers upon request.
The Justice Department said it could not break the data down by the specific room which was bugged.
Police had obtained a 90-day warrant from a magistrate to carry out the bugging, but Justice Michael Brett found it was too broad, and the evidence could not be used.
His decision last August was the first time the matter was publicly revealed.
Ms Haddad described it as a "massive breach of privacy".
"In terms of meetings with lawyers it is a huge breach of legal professional privilege that should never have happened.
"These professionals and inmates should be informed of the government's breach which means their conversations have been unlawfully recorded."
At the time, police gave assurances that no other recordings were accessed.