The former Vodafone CEO was questioned by a Senate committee after the carrier admitted accessing a reporter’s call records and text messages. He claimed that a serious privacy breach of the subscriber’s phone wasn’t reported to the police because he just didn’t know about it.

Bill Morrow, who is now the CEO of the Australian government-owned corporation National Broadband Network, faced heavy questioning about his time at Vodafone after it was recently revealed that Fairfax journalist had her call and text messages accessed by Vodafone’s employee and reported on a serious data breach. Vodafone finally admitted her phone records were accessed. However, the company denied wrongdoing.

It should be mentioned that Bill Morrow became CEO of Vodafone the year after the alleged privacy breach. Due to his present position, the Senate asked him whether he informed the communications minister that his company had hacked a journalist’s phone. Morrow answered that he couldn’t tell anything because he was not aware of it at the time. He admitted that back in 2012, there were many problems within Vodafone, fraud being one of them, but all the problems were appropriately dealt with.

As you may know, it can be an offence under the Telecommunications Act for a carrier to use or disclose sensitive data collected within their operations. It appeared that Vodafone failed to report a serious breach of the Telecommunications Act to the police, and therefore Morrow was questioned by the government. In the meantime, the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance has urged the Australian privacy commissioner to investigate the circumstances of the privacy breach.