Australia’s intelligence community needs another independent review

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On 9 March 2020 ASPI’s Danielle Cave co-authored an article with The Lowy Institute’s Alex Oliver focused on why women remain under-represented in senior and strategic roles in Australia’s intelligence community:

“The quality of the community’s output is dependent on the thousands of staff who manage an increasingly complex mix of operational, technical, and analytical work. Many of them work in high-pressure environments and are responsible for delivering the fruits of that work to the government, and to parliament.

A lack of independent and in-depth investigation over many decades has allowed a community to evolve in which women have not risen to the top at nearly the same rate as their male counterparts, which has produced a culture far less diverse than Australian society itself…

…The gap is most startling because, when you interrogate the data as we did for our 2019 report Foreign Territory: Women in International Relations, you can see it clearly. Our report found that Australia’s intelligence agencies, collectively, have the lowest proportions of women in leadership among the study sample, with female representation in the senior executive service across the community far lower than in the public service generally. Some agencies had actually suffered periodic declines in senior female representation.

We also discovered that there were fewer women in key senior intelligence roles, running operational, analytical, and technical divisions, posted in senior roles overseas and leading policy-shaping activities (such as reviews).”

Read the full article at the Lowy Interpreter here.

From board room to situation room. Why corporate security is national security

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Corporations are making valiant efforts to protect their assets and capabilities from attacks in the physical and cyber environments. But such attacks are not just matters of commercial concern to companies and their shareholders. They have significant potential to weaken national resilience.

There exists a void between business and national security agencies when it comes to understanding each other’s capabilities and limitations. There are already in place some mechanisms, established by both the Australian government and state governments, for security agencies to “hook up” with business. But the structures are fragmented between and within government departments and agencies and are often based on sector-specific silos.

Developing a secure and resilient nation can only be ensured through mutual obligation whereby both government and business understand and are committed to developing and maintaining the measures required to safeguard Australia. The threats we face don’t recognise the walls that exist between Australian businesses and national security agencies. To safeguard Australia, we need to put more doors in those walls. Today, corporate security is national security.

Australia’s management of strategic risk in the new era.

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Australia’s strategic outlook is deteriorating and, for the first time since World War II, we face an increased prospect of threat from a major power.

This means that a major change in Australia’s approach to the management of strategic risk is needed.

The 2017 independent review of intelligence: Views from The Strategist

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Over the past 40 years, Australian governments have periodically commissioned reviews of the Australian intelligence community (AIC). The first such inquiry—the Hope Royal Commission of 1974—was commissioned by the Whitlam government as a way of shedding light on what had hitherto been a shadowy group of little-known and little-understood government agencies. It was also the beginning of a journey that would eventually bring the AIC more into public view and onto a firm legislative footing. The second Hope Royal Commission, in 1983, was partly a response to some dramatic external events, in the forms of the Coomb–Ivanov affair and a poorly judged Australian Secret Intelligence Service training exercise that went badly wrong. But it was also a continuation of the process begun by the previous commission.

Opportunities abound abroad: optimising our criminal intelligence system overseas

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Criminal intelligence (CrimInt) is so useful in serious criminal investigations that it’s difficult to envisage a situation where it shouldn’t be sought and used if it’s available.

This special report argues that Australia’s current arrangements for gathering and disseminating CrimInt overseas are suboptimal.

While additional resources are needed to address this condition, there’s also a need to streamline priority setting and associated collection requirements, provide ways to evaluate and better coordinate the collection of information and intelligence product, and expand opportunities to improve training in CrimInt.

The paper provides recommendations to improve the quality and utility of our overseas CrimInt effort for law enforcement, policy and regulatory agencies.

Creative tension: Parliament and national security

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This paper argues that enhancing parliament’s role in national security will reinforce Executive accountability, improve the quality of public debate over national security and serve to strengthen the foundations of Australia’s parliamentary democracy.

There are several measures that would materially improve parliament’s role in the conduct of national security: 

  • enhance respect for parliament as the forum for consideration of national security issues by utilising the parliament’s existing procedures to more fully consider issues of foreign affairs, defence, intelligence and border security
  • develop parliamentarians’ education in national security by providing a new members’ orientation program focussed on national security
  • examine parliament’s exercise of war powers 
  • encourage parliamentary diplomacy 
  • a material improvement in parliament’s role demands more attention to increasing the human and financial resources available to key national security committees
  • undertake an examination of national security committee mandates, particularly in intelligence oversight

Preserving the knowledge edge: Surveillance cooperation and the US–Australia alliance in Asia

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The US–Australia alliance is the bedrock of Australia’s defence policy. Successive governments have looked to the alliance for access to military technology, intelligence and training, as well as a promise of support against direct threats to Australia.

However, Australia, the US and other regional allies today face a rapidly changing strategic environment in the Indo-Pacific. The American ‘rebalance’ to Asia represents recognition by the US that it needs to give greater priority to its management of the changing balance—an effort firmly endorsed by President Obama in his address at theUniversity of Queensland.

Acting alone, Australia couldn’t possibly achieve the level of awareness that the evolving strategic environment demands. In alliance, it has the resources to ‘fill the gaps’ that remain in the US’s coverage of the region. This is why the C4ISR relationship with the US in the Indo-Pacific provides such a critical benefit to both members in the alliance. US–Australian C4ISR cooperation will be essential to the success of the US rebalance, but also to Australia’s own immediate security in a strategic environment in which more and more countries operate high-technology platforms that once used to be the preserve of Australia and its allies.

Investing wisely: spending political capital on Australia’s criminal intelligence capabilities

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This report examines a recent proposal to merge the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) and the CrimTrac Agency. There are two distinct—but not irreconcilable—views about this proposal. Reconciling these views will require detailed research about how a merged organisation would benefit all stakeholders—especially the frontline police and criminal intelligence operators in all the jurisdictions.

But does the merger proposal actually address the right question? This report argues that a better way to view this problem is to ask how the Commonwealth can play a role as a steward for national criminal intelligence.

Importantly, this question presents an opportunity for the Australian Justice Minister to give the federal Cabinet a chance to consider the Commonwealth’s role in law enforcement more holistically.

Information sharing in Australia’s national security community by Kelly O’Hara and Anthony Bergin

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This Policy Analysis, authored by Kelly O’Hara and Anthony Bergin, examines the information sharing vision of the new National Security CIO in light of reforms made towards a more joined-up national security community. It argues that information sharing should be a high priority for improving decision making in Australia’s national security community.

This Policy Analysis recommends: 

  • Making information discoverable and accessible to authorised users by means of off-the-shelf technology;
  • Mapping the information exchanges between agencies to reveal the extent of connectivity and capability gaps;
  • The National Security CIO conduct a regular audit to determine the extent to which community members have reached key milestones in making information discoverable and retrievable;
  • The new National Security College incorporate training modules on how to advance a responsibility to provide culture for senior national security officials;
  • The National Security CIO work in consultation with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner to develop a transparent national privacy framework of principles to guide information sharing in the national security community;
  • Greater use of Web 2.0 in the national security space to facilitate information sharing;
  • Establishing a centralised security vetting agency to issue clearances, rather than each agency ‘doing its own thing’.

Neighbourhood watch: The evolving terrorist threat in Southeast Asia

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The regional terrorist threat remains high on the list of Australia’s national security priorities. It is time to take stock of the regional security environment and to ask how the Southeast Asian terrorist threat might evolve in the future.  This report, authored by Peter Chalk and Carl Ungerer, analyses the changing nature of religious militancy and sets out a framework for understanding the forces and trends that are driving jihadist extremism in the region. A number of policy recommendations are made on the appropriate next steps in Australia’s regional counter-terrorism strategy.

The publication was launched at Parliament House by The Hon Mr Robert McClelland MP. For information on the launch including the speech click here.