Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's mobile phone number made available online | Hacker News Reader

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese's mobile phone number made available online

abc.net.au

21 pointsRileyJames27 comments

Albo Yet to Receive Single Phone Call After Number Leaked Online

~ https://theshovel.com.au/2025/10/14/albo-yet-to-receive-sing...

  A crestfallen Anthony Albanese says he hasn’t received a single phone call, text, or even a cheeky meme, after his personal phone number was leaked online this week.

  “I honestly thought I’d be inundated,” the PM said at a press conference today, staring at his phone’s empty notifications screen. “Not even a scam text pretending to be Australia Post”.

  Albanese said he’d even logged into a website that requires two factor identification, just so he would receive at least one text message. “But they ended up sending me a code to my email address instead. My phone’s still empty”.

That's hilarious, satire aside, would you call him?

I thought it would be very interesting if the public could submit questions to the Prime Minister during PMQ, and not just rely on their elected official. Make sure they are reasonable and professional, and ask him.

I wouldn't call him, not unless he was swimming in my dam. No one deserves the out of band hassle.

He was on the Australian TV Q+A which had questions submitted by the general public, and it's not all that hard to get meaningful questions put forward in Parliamentary Question Time .. which is better for all as it goes on the record via Hansard.

* https://www.abc.net.au/about/media-centre/press-releases/q-a...

* https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Hansard

* House Question Time, 9 October 2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gU9mf2sMfe8

I've written to the Prime Minister and nary a response. I'd call him and complain about his government's failings, and failure to respond in a timely manner to concerns and letters directed to him.

I'd call him useless, but lets be frank he is no worse than his peers, or recent prime ministers from both sides of Parliament.

TBH if you called me with general complaints et al. I doubt I'd bother replying either.

If there's any actionable issue that you want to raise a better starting place is with whatever minister has the portfolio that's relevant. Also write (and cc the minister) to whatever national reporters are covering that domain.

It's about finding the leverage to raise awareness and response to whatever policing, agricultural, medical, defense, et al. questions or concerns you have.

TIL there is an Australian version of The Onion.

We know Albanese is a loyal Qantas Frequent Flyer member [0], so this may be related to the recent Qantas breach -

“ Hackers release Qantas customers' data on dark web. The stolen data included some customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, and frequent flyer numbers.“ [1]

0: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/oct/28/anthony-alb...

1:https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-11/hackers-release-qanta...

Australia still requires metadata collection and storage for all telcos and ISPs.

Remember the phrase "metadata isn't data"?

If it's your metadata, collection and storage is mandated. If it's their metadata, they send in the police to put a stop to it.

I think this is sort of a broad-spectrum feeling among many of the elite, government, etc. They want to know everything about you, but how dare you question anything about them. I'm not talking about flight tracking, I think that's a different subject, but the lead attitude around information is a serious problem.

>The mobile phone numbers of Anthony Albanese, Sussan Ley and other prominent Australians have been made public on a free website.

>The Australian Federal Police is formally seeking to get the prime minister's number removed.

How about getting the Prime Minister a new phone number instead?

I feel the fundamental problem is the idea of phone number being secret or private in the first place. It is just very weak form of access control, I believe we can do much better these days.

How so?

Besides being trivial to enumerate, every service and their mother is asking for a phone number, from physical stores/rentals/hotels who sometimes reject you if you say no, to the countless online services either asking for it or requiring it. I must have given away my phone number to hundreds if not thousands of entities after having it for more than 20 years.

I was interested in how we could do much better, but I should have been more specific.

Incoming calls should be subject to acls and default-deny policy should be practical. This means that

- caller identity should not be spoofable

- identities should form hierarchies and groups so you can allow whole organizations instead of individuals

- organizations should use predictable identities for egress calls

- most likely managing multiple identities per device is needed (e.g. personal and work identites)

etc

None of this is particularly difficult technically. Even simply slapping x509 certs on calls and having some basic filtering would achieve a lot.

> None of this is particularly difficult technically. Even simply slapping x509 certs on calls and having some basic filtering would achieve a lot.

Slapping x509 certs on probably some of the oldest telecommunications infrastructure in the world (both in terms of devices using it, and devices enabling it) wouldn't be "technically difficult"?

But I've never worked in telecommunications, maybe I'm overestimating how large piece of work this would be.

> maybe I'm overestimating

Probably not.

Relative to the effort that has been poured to volte etc and 3g/4g/5g in general.

>The story was first reported by Ette Media, whose co-founder Antoinette Lattouf also had her number published on the site.

I wondered if the ABC would acknowledge who broke this story. (Latouffe sued the ABC earlier this year for wrongful dismissal and won.)

They didn't link to her new media company though or the original story (other news sites did).

https://www.ettemedia.com/exclusive-personal-phone-number-of...

This reminds me of that simpson meme where basically you can just call upon Australia's prime minister

Oh dear... Ms. Streisand, is that you?

Exactly why should not every elected person's full details including phone number and address be publicly available? If they are doing nothing bad they have nothing to fear from electorate. Honest man has nothing to fear as proverb say.

And allowing direct communication would increase transparency and improve how well democracy can work.

> If they are doing nothing bad they have nothing to fear from electorate.

This is not true. There are quite a few people who love to harassed whoever they see as opposition. That includes harassment of loved ones of the politicians. So, that is why.

> Honest man has nothing to fear as proverb say.

Nonsense. That is true in happy times and completely false in ... times like today.

It's not practical, they'd just stop answering it and all you'd get is form responses. At least if we're talking heads of government or the like.

Local representatives is a different matter and I think some reps in Australia do give out their mobile numbers.

> If they are doing nothing bad they have nothing to fear from electorate.

Some possible reasons:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Don...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_shootings_of_Minnesota_le...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Amess

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Paul_Pelosi

I tried to choose a range of politicians to make my point.

Too many nutcases. You could be elected two seconds ago and there will already be a small line of people waiting to do you harm.

> The Australian Federal Police is formally seeking to get the prime minister's number removed.

As an Australian living in Australia, this reads as:

“We became so enraged that we formed a committee. We will be asking the government to let us nicely ask the criminals to nicely take down his number.”

The innocence is charming :)

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