The photo on the right shows the ceiling of Crown Casino in Melbourne. As you can imagine, there would be hundreds of cameras inside a casino. Many of them are easily spotted. Many more are in the darkened domes so that you can never be sure if you are being followed. This camera is encased in the old-fashioned movie-set light unit with four farm-gates. It blends-in with some of the other identical encasements that are, would you believe, real lights. Technically speaking, you cannot sneeze inside a casino without being captured on camera.

I am led to believe that there are no blind-spots at major casinos. Just imagine all the computer software and hardware that manages so many cameras. I am also told that in Australia, casinos are not permitted to have blind-spots inside the casino’s hub (office area) so as to remove the risk of customers being take out the back and roughed up (something that we are told tends to happen at some unscrupulous establishments).

I guess Sydney Airport could learn a thing or two from casinos. When a brawl (involving twenty biker gang members) broke out in full view of passengers and staff near the check-in area at Sydney Airport (one man was killed while others were beaten senseless) it transpired that not a single camera caught the real drama. Oh dear. How can that be? I recall seeing cameras every which way at Sydney airport. Fat lot of good when you actually need one.

Wherever we turn, we are told that we are being watched, monitored, or recorded, and just when you need some evidence to back you up, they say that the tape was not running. Poor Chapelle Corby. She is serving time in an Indonesian prison for drug smuggling. She insisted that she was innocent. Her defence lawyers asked for the the footage from the baggage-handling area of Sydney Airport, and they were told that the footage had been erased. How convenient. What’s the point, and what’s the use? She was accused of refusing to open her bags for inspection in Bali. Again, the cameras inside the customs area were of no help, and it was reported that the local judge was not so keen on seeing the tapes (although some say that the cameras were not operating on that day, and this leads me to wonder how many days of the year they are not operating).



I recall at time when I worked at IBM at Pennant Hills. We were on a massive campus. Our building was an award-winning structure with all the bells and whistles. One day, due to global terrorist activities around the world against American companies, security was stepped up. More than ever before, guards were placed at major sections of this huge complex that housed almost 10,000 people. There were check-point inspectors making sure that the staff ID/access-badge (required to open the dozens of doors that one encountered when walking from one end to the other) were not only matching the face with the cardholder, but that badges were face-out. I always wore mine face-in so that members of the public did not spy my name and employee number etc. Anyway, all that security was admirable, but misguided. In my line of work, I often had to carry large files or boxes containing heavy computers from my office to my vehicle, and vice versa. One afternoon, I walked from my office (red dot) to the foyer/reception area (blue dot), and went back to my office to grab the next box so that I could then leave my two heavy boxes in the foyer, while I walked to my car (yellow dot), drive it around, and retrieve my material for a conference I was hosting that evening. By the time I had walked back to my office and then returned to the foyer, I witnessed a flap at the foyer with security guards seconds away from evacuating the building (and that’s no simple decision considering the masses of people inside these multi-storey buildings!) ‘Stand back, stand back,’ shouted one guard. Being security minded, I wanted to know what was going on. The police bomb-squad had been called. ‘What’s it all about?’ I asked. The security guard pointed to the box in the foyer (the one that I had placed there a few minutes prior). He found it suspicious that a box would be left in the reception area. American Express had suffered a few explosions when it was sent bombs in protest against America, so our man could not be blamed for being overly cautious. I explained that I had placed that box there. With this update from me, his Code Orange Alert was defused. I said, ‘Hey, all you had to do was rewind the security tapes. You would have easily seen that it was I who had placed box there.’ The security man whispered, ‘The cameras don’t work’. Laugh if you will. That building boasted every mod-con under the sun. Even the shutters operated automatically, so that the afternoon sun did not inconvenience the high-tech workers. Click-clack could be heard every second of the day as security doors were opened and closed to the thousands or employees who could hardly fetch a cup of coffee without clicking and clacking.

You might be wondering what the pink dot represents. That’s for another daft story. One day I parked my car near that front area (pink dot) where limos and taxis would drop-off VIPs and customers. It was also the visitor parking area. It is much larger than it appears in the photo. IBM was always paranoid about a ram-raid or trucks ploughing through the front foyer. For that reason, there was a water garden feature outside, acting as a mote. The cameras were not only large, imposing, and high-tech, but also boasted night vision! Upon approaching the building, I saw the security guard inspecting a hotrod parked inches from the glass doors. We struck a conversation and I discovered that it was his hobby vehicle… his pride and joy. ‘Why did you park it here?’ I asked, thinking that the sun would not be good for it. ‘Why don’t you park it in one of the underground car spots?’ I added.

The man replied, ‘I like it here so that I can keep an eye on it.’ That did not make sense. His office is well inside. Surely he was not thinking of standing outside all day. He then pointed up to the security camera and said, ‘I train his camera onto it. I can keep an eye on it from my desk.’

Well, there you have it. An American company at the height of its paranoia, with real threats of explosives being levelled against it and against most American companies around the world, at a time when American Express and others had suffered big-time, and there we had a camera, installed at great expense to protect the castle, was turning a blind eye to the world while it spied on the guard’s toy.

As you well know, we now have cameras trained on cameras. All we need is guards to watch guards.

Think of someone you revere and respect. Now imagine them acting like blithering idiots. You will soon wonder how someone so talented can be so brainless. This is what I have to contend with when I look at the size and might of Telstra, and reconcile the fact that their actions floor me. They knock me out with their utter stupidity and sheer mindless protocols that I find embarrassing because I have to imagine humans within Telstra going to work each day, sitting at their desk, being utterly and completely without brainpower. And then I wonder how that company functions?



I have been a Telstra client for over ten years. I had always made a point of noting that I do not wish to receive any newsletters from Telstra. I just do not have time to read ad hoc letters and promotions. So, for ten years, I have managed this quite well. Then, one day, out of the blue, I received this newsletter. How did Telstra decide to over-ride my preferences, and to ignore all that I had requested, and just disrespect and disregard our agreement? Never mind, we can say that it was a computer error. Let’s blame the technology. Sorry and all that. Okay. End of story. Forgiven. Not a massive problem. There was an ‘unsubscribe’ button. All I had to do was to opt-out, even thought I had never opted-in, and specifically asked to never opt-in. Forgiven.

So I pressed the ‘unsubscribe’ button, and what transpired just did my head in. The opt-out screen said, ‘We’re sorry to hear that you do not wish to receive email marketing from Telstra. To opt-out, complete the form below and click ‘Submit”…’ It then showed this screen below, and asked for the full name, date of birth, etc.

With scams and fraud and identity-theft being one of the biggest problems of the on-line world, this question from Telstra is completely unreasonable. A corporation of that size ought to know better about conditioning the community into divulging such information. A date-of-birth is a vital piece of information, and should not be submitted so casually. Scammers could easily send out emails, pretending to be from banks and telcos, and making it easy to unsubscribe, asking for the date of birth. With fraud so rife, it is crazy. I had never opted-in, so why put the onus on me to go through all these hoops to unsubscribe? There is no way that I am going to enter my date of birth into a form that I never really wanted in the first place. I just wanted Telstra to leave me alone. Besides, look at the combination of data: they want my title, first name, last name, email address and date of birth. Wow, that is a good start for a hacker or identity-thief. Why does Telstra need to know my full name? They are sending a letter to my email. Who cares what my name is. Sure they can give me reasons, but they have no right to be arguing about the ‘good reasons’ that suit them, when there are very good reasons why they should not be asking such questions in the first place!

What is a customer supposed to do? The bureaucracy of Telstra is so daunting that the customer has to comply with this risky request and expose themselves to ID theft. But, how would a customer know if that newsletter was really from Telstra? We must advise all users to never divulge that kind of information. So how can we educate a community when we keep confusing them? In the end, the customer would have to call Telstra, waste up to one hour, to speak with someone overseas who will no doubt not know what the call is about, and frustrate the customer by regurgitating policies and procedures until the client screams at the poor untrained clueless operator and hangs up. I am very busy. I do not wish to receive newsletters because I do not have time. This means that I do not have time to protest about these matters. Yet, sadly, it is my duty, as it is all our duty, to speak-up when we see potential dangers. I had no choice but to follow this up. What transpired was even more proof that Telstra has zero clue about security and identity theft.

I felt it my duty to inform Telstra of its stupid methods, so I went on-line to submit a complaint form.

It seems that one cannot complain to Telstra unless one divulges the account details. This is absurd. I just want to highlight something to them. I want to tell Telstra that they must not send out newsletters whose opt-out procedures request private data, because scammers can start doing this, and tricking clients left, right, and centre. The Australian Taxation Office never sends out such stupid emails. Yet, some clever scammer sent out a perfect replica of an ATO email asking people to enter their details to claim their tax refund etc. The poor tax office had to contend with confused clients who were duped. And the reason that the tax office had that problem, which was not of their own making, was due to the fact that silly organisations like Telstra and the Commonwealth Bank and St George Bank and American Express, all engage in hideous practices that put clients at risk.

In this form, Telstra wants the date of birth and the ABN when clients submit anything to do with an account. I do not understand how they can ask for a date of birth in relation to a company? That’s another long story. Meanwhile, I filled in the form and I only submitted information marked with a red asterisk. You might be jumping the gun here by advising me to just submit the form without my DOB, because the DOB is not a mandatory field. This is not true, as I soon found out. More about this below, but first, this is what I wrote to Telstra, trying to do them a favour, and trying to highlight to them an important matter that affects them and all their clients. I wrote, ‘…To unsubscribe, your page asks me to fill in enough details that a Phisher or scammer would ask for. Are you really sending this out and if so, you must stop it immediately. It goes against what we are trying to teach everyone not to do, due to internet scams. You must never ask such questions for a simple thing to unsubscribe. Get your security team onto this or ask them to call me so that I can enlighten them as to why this is stupid and harmful to all concerned. [I provided the Telstra link here]. Thank you. And by the way, please unsubscribe me! I will not fill out such information. And prove to me where and when I, all of a sudden, just opted in?’

You would think that someone read that and took a keen interest. Sadly, after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the USA in 2001, the US Government realised that a range of departments do not communicate. Alarm bells would ring in one department, but the channels were blocked, depriving other agencies from knowing about the dangers of certain terrorist cells. The same issue is afflicting Telstra. What more does someone have to do to warn them about a clear danger or an obvious problem? Their operators seem to have no idea about the real world. Their number-one priority, it seems to me, is to open emails from clients, and shoot back a question.

Oh, I long for the day when someone, anyone, from any organisation, can just take the query and act upon it. These help-desk people and online responders delight in answering a question with a question. No matter what you write, they just shoot the email back at you, ignoring its contents, and ticking it off as one more thing that they had done to justify their salary. They get paid by the number of tickets they touch, not by the number of tickets they actually resolve.

Anyway, I tried to tell them. If the people receiving my note did not understand it, they should have sent it to a senior person who might have known better. Alas not. They returned my query with a set of questions, as you can see in this email below, which, first of all, does not allow me to respond by email. Don’t you just hate it when these large corporations send out emails and say, ‘Do not respond to this email’. What is that all about? A telco who sells internet bandwidth for emails and communications, communicates with the customer via an email and says, you cannot respond via email. Oh grow up!

"I was complaining about Telstra asking for private information when trying to opt-out of a newsletter to which I had never opted-in. Telstra responds by saying, '...so we can bar premium sms and value added services on your account.' It proceeds to ask me for my driver's licence number and account password! It does my head in."

I was warning Telstra about a procedure that is utterly risky for them and their clients. Yet, this was the response from Telstra, completely off the wall. 100% irrelevant. 1000% not what I asked. 10,000% nothing to do with the price of fish. And 100,000% not even within the same galaxy of what I was trying to warn them about. Here is what they wrote:

Dear Nader,

Thank you for your email dated 24/09/2009 regarding third party charges.

Please provide us the following information, so we can bar premium sms and value added services on your account.

Mobile Number
Account Password
Date of Birth
Australian License Number

I started out by refusing to give my date of birth, and now they want my password and my driver’s licence number! And I cannot even respond to this person. No phone number! Telstra cannot communicate with me to hold a conversation. Everything has to be done in tickets, and never can two people speak about anything. How pathetic. So large yet so distant!

So I left it at that. I cannot be sucked into their docility and putridity. I have a life to live.

Lo and behold, someone sent to me a survey, asking if I would like to rate my recent experience with Telstra. Although unconvinced that my involvement in their survey would be of any use, I succumbed, out of duty. I must take every avenue to be a good community citizen and help that organisation to stop breeching codes of conduct that give scammers an advantage. They never responded. Organisations think that surveys are a one way communications process. That is a childish attitude.