Title: Re: Lawyer put on inhibited fly list
Post by falah on Apr 19th, 2012 at 8:23pm
Hidden Agendas: Our Intelligence Services
On the northern shore of Canberra’s Lake Burley Griffin, in the heart of the prized parliamentary triangle, a concrete and glass monolith is rising from the dirt. On a site the size of three city blocks and with floor space measuring 62,000 square metres, it is the biggest construction project Canberra has seen since the new Parliament House, which was the most expensive building in the Southern Hemisphere when it was opened by Queen Elizabeth in 1988.
This grand edifice is to be the new home of Australia’s premier spy agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). Costed at a staggering $585 million, the building has been called a “monster” by the architect of Parliament House. Yet it’s a fitting abode for an organisation that has grown over the past decade into one of the most powerful government bodies in the land – its staff numbers trebled, its budget increased more than sixfold to $438 million per year.
ASIO’s grandiose new headquarters are a monument to an intelligence complex on which Australia now spends around $1.4 billion per annum, out of a total national security budget of about $4 billion. According to the Australian Defence Almanac 2010–2011 published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), ASIO’s slice of that pie has risen 535% since 2001. Its twin, the foreign spy agency the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), has enjoyed a budget increase of 344%, while analysis agency the Office of National Assessments (ONA) has had a 443% bonus.
“Total funding for the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) has increased at a pace faster than some of our allied intelligence partners,” notes a recent ASPI report. “In the United Kingdom, for example, total funding for intelligence has increased by only 68% since 2004, albeit from a higher base.”
“By almost any measure, the increase is enormous,” says Professor George Williams, founding director of the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). But like the building itself, which was approved with minimal public consultation and exempted from parliamentary scrutiny because the then government deemed it “not in the public interest”, the extraordinary growth of Australia’s intelligence behemoth has occurred in the absence of any vigorous public debate. Questioning of the fact is routinely muted by the bipartisan consensus that national security must be protected, seemingly at any cost.
“From a policy perspective, the difficulty of assessing whether these agencies are performing is that agencies such as ASIO are unaccountable – you never know what they’re doing and we’re not entitled to know, and it makes it very difficult for the community to make an assessment,” says the barrister and civil rights activist Greg Barnes. “What government is going to cut back money for the security agencies? Then it’ll leak out: ‘sources say government risks terror attack’. So they’ve got them over a barrel.”
If the government is over a barrel then the man with the spanker must be Allan Gyngell, the director-general of ONA, designated as Australia’s “peak intelligence agency”. The lean, bespectacled Gyngell – a former adviser to Prime Minister Paul Keating and head of the prestigious Lowy Institute for International Policy from 2003 to 2009 – returned to take the reins at ONA last year after a 20-year absence from the agency; he worked as an analyst back in the ’80s when the Kremlinologists still held sway.
That world has spawned the phenomenal growth of the six agencies that make up the Australian Intelligence Community, of which Gyngell is nominally the head. As well as running ONA, which analyses incoming intelligence and advises the government on international issues, Gyngell co-ordinates the activities of the foreign intelligence collection services and chairs a monthly meeting of agency heads. In addition to the three civilian bodies there are three military agencies that come under the Department of Defence: the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD), which intercepts and reports foreign communications; the Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO), which provides strategic intelligence to support military operations; and the Defence Imagery and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO), which collects visual intelligence.
Add to the mix the Australian Federal Police (AFP), who are primarily responsible for law enforcement but have their own growing intelligence capacity, and Australia seems conspicuously over-serviced. The US, by comparison, has no domestic intelligence agency; the CIA handles foreign intelligence, while the FBI doubles as domestic intelligence collector and law enforcer. Canada has only one agency with carriage of domestic and foreign intelligence. The UK has two – MI5 and MI6 – but no national police force. All of which leaves Australia with at least one more national security-cum-intelligence outfit than most of its counterparts.
Our intelligence agencies are also far more secretive than those overseas, affecting an air of subterfuge that sometimes borders on the comical. The existence of ASIS, for example, was only publicly acknowledged in 1977, 25 years after it was formed. Industry insiders tend to refer to ASIS in hushed tones and not by name, using terms such as “the other place” or “the dark side”. When I rang the public information office of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), which ASIS reports to, a media officer would not even confirm this fact. The current director-general of ASIS, former defence department chief Nick Warner, declined to comment for this article, saying the head of ASIS has never been interviewed in the media (although one of his predecessors, Alan Taylor, did hold a press conference in 2001). Compare this with the high public profile enjoyed by successive heads of the CIA. And compare the ASIS website – a handful of pages with no phone numbers listed except to a line providing career advice – with the CIA’s, which contains hundreds of pages including a kids’ page, games, a virtual tour of its headquarters and more than 300 press releases issued since 1994. (ASIS has never issued one that I can find.)
While, unlike ASIS, the ‘S’ in ASIO does not stand for ‘Secret’, our domestic agency also employs a cloak-and-dagger style. ASIO staff introduce themselves at conferences only by their first names and say they work for “the attorney-general’s department”. Until recently the ASIO switchboard operator would answer only “hello”, without identifying the agency by name. Alone in the public relations world, ASIO media officers don’t give their surnames.
Such a plethora of agencies, each jealously guarding its secrets, inevitably leads to overlap and duplication, along with rivalry, suspicion, information hoarding and turf wars. There are myriad anecdotes to this effect. A participant at a recent conference attended by representatives of various agencies in Sydney tells how delegates sniggered when an ASIO staffer told the gathering, “you can’t write my name down, so if anyone’s written my name down would you please pass the piece of paper up to the front of the room.” The speaker following him announced “my name’s [withheld] and you can write my name down and for bugger’s sake don’t hand the piece of paper up to the front.” This second speaker was reportedly furious, having learnt that ASIO had kept important new research data to itself, and went on: “This is supposed to be an adult working environment but as you can see it’s not. They lie to us continuously, and I don’t know why they do it, but it makes our job impossible.”
Gyngell says the agencies co-operate much more closely than they did 20 years ago, when they behaved like “powerful individual fiefdoms with limited contact with each other”. But Carl Ungerer, a former ONA analyst who now heads ASPI’s national security program, says the agencies still operate like vast information silos, separated by diverse histories and cultures, and with entrenched bureaucracies jealously guarding their own turf. “Their growth has made them even more siloed [and] more fearfully guarding the independence of what they do in the system, because they’re bigger and stronger now and able to operate on their own,” says Ungerer.
Assessing the performance of the Australian Intelligence Community is difficult when so little of its work is public. “Compared with their American counterparts, Australian intelligence agencies often seem draped in too much secrecy, particularly with regard to the past,” says another former ONA analyst, Ken Ward. He notes it would be virtually impossible here to write the kind of authoritative histories of intelligence that are routinely written in the US. “I think it would be better if the Australian public were better informed. If America can do it without damaging its national security, why can’t Australia?”...
...ASIS’s reputation has never entirely recovered from the infamous Sheraton Hotel fiasco in 1983, when masked commandos with machine-guns terrified staff and guests during a hostage-rescue exercise at the five-star Melbourne hotel. ASIS has since been overhauled and now claims to be a “dynamic”, “high-performing” organisation. But it is still regarded with mild derision by some within the high-end agencies such as ONA. (“ASIS people have to lie for their living,” one insider commented to me.) Some argue privately that separate domestic and foreign intelligence bodies are unnecessary for a country such as Australia in a globalised world. “Some say you could get rid of ASIS tomorrow and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference,” another insider says.
http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-sally-neighbour-hidden-agendas-our-intelligence-services-2857
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