Indonesia's wiretapping scandal: President Prabowo and the elite under surveillance

The wiretapping scandal reaches the president himself

A scandal over illegal surveillance is escalating in Indonesia, in which, according to police, even the head of state was a target. As Deutsche Welle reports, at the beginning of the month police named four high-ranking officers as suspects in an alleged illegal operation to surveil President Prabowo Subianto and other prominent figures. Among those detained is former national police chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo (the president's namesake), who became the president's chief of staff in October — just weeks before the scandal broke.

The scale of the operation and the authorities' response

According to investigators, the officers intercepted communications in 2025–2026 without proper authorization and then attempted to delete records of the operation. New police chief Suyudi Ario Seto told a parliamentary commission hearing that the surveillance targeted the president, staff of the presidential palace, ministries and state institutions, members of parliament, party figures, governors, anti-corruption officials, activists and students. The parliamentary commission is investigating the motives of the operation and the possible involvement of other high-ranking individuals, while police have opened a case into possible offenses related to treason. After the allegations emerged, Prabowo held a meeting at his residence with ten former national police chiefs and the current head of the force. As a precaution, the government deployed an additional 20,000 troops to Jakarta, although there were no signs that the wiretapping was part of a broader campaign to topple the Prabowo administration. Amnesty International called for an investigation into whether the surveillance was used to intimidate critics of the government and undermine civil liberties.

Why the system proved vulnerable

Formally, Indonesia's Electronic Information and Transactions Law prohibits unauthorized interception, while other legislation permits surveillance for certain law enforcement and intelligence purposes. However, as Associate Professor Johannes Sulaiman of Jenderal Achmad Yani University told DW, 'the use of surveillance is actually quite widespread,' and the laws are circumvented because there is no separate regulation of wiretapping, particularly by law enforcement agencies. Gatra Priyandita, a senior analyst at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, recalled that intelligence services played a role in political competition even under the authoritarian Suharto regime, which collapsed in 1998, and that scandals continued after democratization: in 1999, a leaked recording of a phone call by President B.J. Habibie raised suspicions of surveillance within the palace itself, and in 2024 the elite counterterrorism unit Densus 88 was caught surveilling Deputy Attorney General Febrie Adriansyah, who oversaw major corruption cases. What distinguishes the current case is its scale and the fact that surveillance capabilities were apparently used outside established procedures and against a sitting president.

The political backdrop: Jokowi's legacy and Gibran's resignation

The affair has heightened tensions between Prabowo and his predecessor Joko Widodo (Jokowi), who in 2024, barred from seeking re-election, backed Prabowo's campaign; the alliance with Jokowi proved decisive for the election victory, but left the president governing alongside officials and networks built up over his predecessor's decade in power. Prabowo, a former special forces general, has been in office since October 2024 and, according to critics, is accelerating the militarization of civilian governance, including through legislation expanding the military's ability to hold civilian posts. A series of government reshuffles is seen as an attempt to consolidate control: Listyo, appointed police chief by Jokowi in 2021 and considered close to the former president, was replaced in October. This week, Vice President Gibran Rakabuming Raka, Jokowi's eldest son, resigned amid a scandal over educational credentials: the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court concluded that his foreign diploma did not meet the requirements for vice-presidential candidates and had been mistakenly accepted by the electoral authorities. According to DW, the diploma review appears to be unrelated to the wiretapping investigation.

Calls for reform

Nikki Fahrizal, a researcher at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Jakarta, called the situation 'a calculated and systematic abuse of power,' pointing out that the fundamental problem lies in the constitutional position of the national police, which reports directly to the president, raising the risk that the police serve the political interests of the head of state rather than the law alone. He noted that the police reform commission established by Prabowo in November last year had achieved no significant changes under Listyo, and urged consolidating the fragmented surveillance rules into a single legal framework with stricter oversight of the police's investigative and intelligence units. Without such changes, he said, divided political loyalties risk becoming a 'dangerous virus' spreading through the police and other security agencies.