Last year, a newspaper in Timor-Leste broke a story about Justice Minister Lucia Lobato. The story is well documented and you can read about it here and here and here. The evidence of the story came in the form of SMS text messages. There is a .PDF document that contains the content from several hundred text messages sent to the Justice Minister. The document also shows the phone numbers that sent the messages.

I have been told that in the document there is an SMS sent by ABC journalist Stephanie March to the Justice Minister. The message was just inquiring about an interview, but it’s the fact that the message was there that leads me to wonder if we are all being watched.

I’ve never heard of such a thing as a collection of text messages sent to the phone of a government minister. It’s information that, in any country, would not normally be in the public domain.

It’s certainly something to think about. I remember when I was in England, there were certain people who didn’t send SMS messages because they said the messages are monitored. I always put this down to paranoia.

But who knows – maybe we are all being watched.