Indonesia's national police on 3 November 2026 named three officers, given by Antara only as LSP, ASN and EH, as suspects in an alleged illegal wiretapping and electronic data deletion case. Police say the tapping targeted the President, ministers and officials, political and media figures, NGOs and entrepreneurs across 2025 and 2026, and that data was erased in October to remove traces, according to Antara. Guilt is unproven.
The three are in detention in Jakarta. AP, in a copy on WRAL that names them, reported that none had commented publicly.
The same press conference supplied the alleged method. AP, in a copy on WRAL, reports that the taps were allegedly ordered without following a 2010 police regulation, that some numbers entered the Lawful Interception Management System without verification, and that intercepted data was then allegedly deleted from that system to conceal evidence. ABC News Australia reports the same. Prasetyo Hadi said the government has yet to identify who was behind it.
We think the alleged deletion matters more than the taps themselves. If the records can be erased, no later audit can show who was tapped, or why.
Foucault supplies the idea, with a caution. In Discipline and Punish (1975) he traced how modern power works through the possibility of being watched: in Bentham's panopticon prison, control comes from the possibility of internal monitoring, so prisoners who may be observed at any moment regulate themselves. Covert taps work the other way round, because the watched do not know. Our reading is that his point survives as the chilling effect that the critic Usman Hamid describes, below: once people believe they can be overheard, they speak more carefully.
The case for interception is strongest in general terms, and we found no public defence of the police scheme itself. In June 2025 the Attorney General's Office signed wiretapping agreements with telecom operators. Its spokesperson, Harli Siregar, cited a 2021 law giving the office wiretapping authority and said: "We have many fugitives and need technology to detect them" and that use would "not be done arbitrarily", the Jakarta Post reported.
The argument we would expect from defenders, though no one has made it on the record, is that what is alleged here is a failure of enforcement, with a 2010 regulation ignored and numbers entered unverified. That argues for audits and sanctions, not for taking the tool away.
Coordinating Minister Yusril Ihza Mahendra called the matter "a serious matter for any country", as quoted by AP in a copy on WRAL. He promised an evaluation of surveillance safeguards. House Commission III chairman Habiburokhman said lawmakers expected the process to remain professional, objective and transparent.
Critics warned earlier, though about the Attorney General's pacts rather than this case. In 2025 Wahyudi Djafar of Rakhsa Initiatives said there was "no clear limitation on how the wiretap will be conducted and for how long and who can use the data". Usman Hamid argued in an opinion piece for publicly accessible law, judicial authorisation and independent oversight rather than memoranda. The Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation said that, if proven, the tapping would be a human rights violation and abuse of authority.
The disagreement is whether the agencies that run the system can restore trust in it, as the government's response implies, or whether that needs a judge and an outside body, as Hamid argued. An independent audit of what the interception system's records still hold, given the alleged deletion, would help settle it.
Watch for: who ordered the taps. Police have disclosed no motive, and the government says it does not yet know.
Cover image: Indonesian Guard of Honor at Istana Merdeka, Jakarta, Press, Media and Information Bureau of the Presidential Secretariat of Indonesia / Wikimedia Commons, public domain (Indonesian government work). File photograph, November 2019.
