Govt leaks 10,000 asylum seekers' personal data

The Australian Department of Immigration and Border Protection has leaked the personal details of about 10,000 asylum seekers in detention, potentially endangering lives. Two investigations have been launched into the leak.

A Wednesday afternoon report from The Guardian claimed that a database containing information on almost 10,000 asylum seekers was published on the department’s website. The database contained asylum seekers’ full names, nationalities, location, arrival date and boat arrival information.

The database covers a third of all asylum seekers held in Australia, including every person held in a mainland detention facility and on Christmas Island, as well as several thousand in the community detention program.

The department admitted it accidentally published the information on its website, SBS reported. The department said the information was never intended to be in the public domain.

“The department acknowledges that the file was vulnerable to unauthorised access,” a spokeswoman said. “The file has been removed and the department is investigating how this occurred to ensure that it does not happen again.”

Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim will investigate the breach.

“The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will be working with the department to make sure they are fully aware of their privacy obligations and to ensure that incidents of this nature will not be repeated,” Pilgrim said.

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison said the department has engaged KPMG to investigate the breach.

“There is no excuse for that information to have been put there in a way that could have been potentially accessed,” he said. “KPMG will give us some interim findings ... next week.”

He said the information had been on the website for “a few days”.

“It was placed there inadvertently. It wasn’t readily accessible. It required quite a number of things for any user to do to gain access to that information,” he said.

The Refugee Council of Australia said the leak has put the safety of asylum seekers and their families at risk.

The council’s CEO, Paul Power, told SBS that: “Certainly in a number of countries of asylum, people who have gone somewhere else to seek asylum are pursued by the authorities in different ways and to be named in this way by the Department of Immigration has all sorts of implications.

“But it could also potentially create an immediate risk for family members who could be tracked by authorities in the country of origin as being linked to a person in detention or community detention in Australia.”