The transnational element of a ‘domestic’ problem: policy solutions to countering right-wing violent extremism in Australia

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The rise of right-wing violent extremist (RWE) ideas bursts to the forefront of public attention in flashes of violence. Shootings and vehicular attacks perpetrated by individuals motivated by hateful views stun the public. They have also sharpened government attention to and galvanised action on addressing such violence.

These incidents of violence and these disturbing trends call for renewed vigilance in confronting RWE, which ASIO has since classified as ‘ideologically motivated violent extremism’ (IMVE), in Australia’s security agencies’ policy and law enforcement responses. As governments respond to IMVE, it is important to nuance how they conceptualise the challenges posed by RWE and, therefore, scope their solutions.

This report looks at four case studies, qualitative interviews, and expert literature to highlight important transnational dimensions of RWE, as well as expand the way governments understand the RWE threat and craft policy responses to it.

The result shows a clear need for governments to take a broader lens when understanding and responding to RWE. While governments may conventionally see terrorism in ‘domestic’ versus ‘international’ terms, RWE attackers and their sources and legacies of inspiration are not bound by national borders. Efforts to address RWE, then, should take into account these transnational dimensions while examining the challenge at hand and developing and implementing solutions.

The report’s recommendations point to early steps Australia can take to improve international collaboration and coordination on countering RWE. Our approaches and solutions must recognise this threat to democracy and include efforts to bolster resilience in democratic institutions and processes. Public trust and confidence in these institutions and processes is a critical element of this resilience to mis/disinformation broadly, and the violent extremism it enables. This report shows that it’s not only important for governments to take RWE seriously, it matters how governments do so.

Artificial intelligence and policing in Australia

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ASPI’s Strategic Policing and Law Enforcement Program is delighted to share its new Strategic Insights report, Artificial intelligence and policing in Australia by Dr Teagan Westendorf.

Digital technologies, devices and the internet are producing huge amounts of data and greater capacity to store it, and those developments are likely to accelerate. For law enforcement, a critical capability lagging behind the pace of tech innovation is the ability and capacity to screen, analyse and render insights from the ever-increasing volume of data—and to do so in accordance with the constraints on access to and use of personal information within our democratic system.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are presenting valuable solutions to the public and private sectors for screening big and live data. AI is also commonly considered and marketed as a solution that removes human bias, although AI algorithms and dataset creation can also perpetuate human bias and so aren’t value or error free.

This report analyses limitations, both technical and implementation, of AI algorithms, and the implications of those limitations on the safe, reliable and ethical use of AI in policing and law enforcement scenarios. This publication closely examines usage of AI by domestic policing agencies to model what success looks like for safe, reliable and ethical use of AI in policing and law enforcement spaces. It also explores possible strategies to mitigate the potential negative effects of AI data insights and decision-making in the justice system; and implications for regulation of AI use by police and law enforcement in Australia.

AI ‘algorithms’ or ‘models’ promise to: enable high volumes of data processing at speed, while identifying patterns human judgement is not capable of; supercharge knowledge management while (supposedly) removing human bias from that process; and operate with ethical principles coded into their decision-making.

This ‘promise’, however, is not a guarantee.

The future of assistance to law enforcement in an end-to-end encrypted world

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Domestic telecommunications companies assist law enforcement by the lawful interception of otherwise private communications when presented with a valid warrant.

This has been a powerful tool to combat crime. In the 2019–20 financial year, for example, 3,677 new warrants for telecommunications interception were issued, and information gained through interception warrants was used in 2,685 arrests, 5,219 prosecutions and 2,652 convictions. That was in the context of 43,189 custodial sentences in the same year.

But law enforcement and security officials assert that the usefulness of ‘exceptional access’, as it’s called in this paper, has declined over time as strong encryption has become increasingly common.

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Director-General Michael Burgess has stated that encryption ‘damages intelligence coverage’ in 97% of ASIO’s priority counter-intelligence cases.

The problem of increasingly powerful encryption degrading the usefulness of exceptional access is often referred to as ‘going dark’.

The Australian Government has committed to the reform of Australia’s electronic surveillance legislative framework.5 Although its discussion paper mentions encryption only in passing,6 we can expect that encryption and going dark will be a topic of debate as reform is considered. This paper contributes to that debate by examining how firms that provide digital communications services can provide assistance to law enforcement even as strong encryption is increasingly common.

Although exceptional access is primarily concerned with evidence collection, it may be better in some cases to focus on crime prevention, when it comes to achieving society’s broader aim of safety and security. This may be especially true for serious offences that cause significant harms to individuals, such as child exploitation and terrorism.

Accordingly, in this paper I divide assistance to law enforcement into two broad types: 

  1. Building communications services so that criminal harm and abuse that occur on the service can be detected and addressed, or doesn’t even occur in the first place. Examples of harms that might be avoided include cyberbullying or child exploitation that occur online.
  2. Assisting law enforcement with exceptional access for crimes that are unrelated to the communications service. Examples of such crimes might include an encrypted messaging service being used to organise drug smuggling or corruption.

I start by exploring the justification for exceptional access and then examine how encryption has affected assistance to law enforcement, as well as the differences between transport encryption and end-to-end (E2E) encryption and the implications those differences have for law enforcement.

I examine encryption trends and discuss the costs and benefits of exceptional access schemes.

I then examine some of the approaches that can be used by service providers to provide these two different forms of assistance as E2E encryption becomes increasingly common. I also summarise some of the advantages and disadvantages of those different approaches.

A number of initiatives seek to embed safety and security into the design, development and deployment of services. They encourage industry to take a proactive and preventive approach to user safety and seek to balance and effectively manage privacy, safety and security requirements. Those initiatives have relatively few big-picture privacy or security drawbacks, but there are many issues on which there isn’t yet consensus on how to design platforms safely. Such initiatives may also need extensive resources for employee trust and safety teams.

Providing law enforcement access to E2E encrypted systems is very challenging. Proposals that allow access bring with them some potentially significant risks that exceptional access mechanisms will be abused by malicious actors.

Watch the launch webinar here.

‘High rollers’ A study of criminal profits along Australia’s heroin and methamphetamine supply chains

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This report helps develop an understanding of the quantum of profits being made and where in the value chain they occur. Australians spent approximately A$5.8 billion on methamphetamine and A$470 million on heroin in FY 2019.

Approximately A$1,216,806,017 was paid to international wholesalers overseas for the amphetamine and heroin that was smuggled into Australia in that year. The profit that remained in Australia’s economy was about A$5,012,150,000. Those funds are undermining Australia’s public health and distorting our economy daily, and ultimately funding drug cartels and traffickers in Southeast Asia.

One key takeaway from the figures presented in this report is that the Australian drug trade is large and growing. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement agencies, methamphetamine and heroin use has been increasing by up to 17% year on year. Falling prices in Southeast Asia are likely to keep pushing that number up, while drug prices and purity in Australia remain relatively stable.

Authors Dr John Coyne and Dr Teagan Westendorf write that, ‘While ever-larger drug busts continue to dominate the headlines, the underlying fact is that methamphetamine and heroin imports continue to rise despite authorities seizing up to 34% of imported drugs’.

As production prices for methamphetamine continue to decline along with wholesale prices, more sophisticated transnational organised crime actors are likely to begin to examine their business models in greater detail. Industrial production of methamphetamine for high-volume, low-profit regional markets like Australia has significant benefits for them.

The data suggests that the more sophisticated transnational organised crime groups will seek to expand their control of the heroin and methamphetamine value chains to include greater elements of the wholesale supply chain as well as alternative product lines, such as synthetic opioids.

The authors note that ‘in the absence of supply reduction, and even with more effective supply-chain disruption, our federal and state governments will need to invest more heavily in demand reduction and harm minimisation.’

National security agencies and the cloud: An urgent capability issue for Australia

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This new ASPI report, argues for the development of a national security cloud. If the community doesn’t shift to cloud infrastructure, it’ll cut itself off from the most powerful software and applications available, placing itself in a less capable position using legacy software that vendors no longer support.

The report’s authors argue that if this need isn’t addressed rapidly and comprehensively, Australia will quite simply be at a major disadvantage against potential adversaries who are using this effective new technology at scale to advance their own analysis and operational performance.

The report identifies four significant obstacles that stand in the way of Australia’s national security community moving to cloud infrastructure. These obstacles need to be crossed, and the change needs to be driven by ministers and agency heads. Ministers and agency heads have both the responsibility and perspective to look beyond the important current technical security standards and rules and think about the capability benefit that cloud computing can bring to Australia’s national security. They’re the ones who must balance opportunity and risk. 

Podcast

Supporting the report, in a special episode of Policy, Guns and Money, we continue the important conversation on cloud computing. Michael Shoebridge and John Coyne, co-authors of ASPI’s recent report ‘National security agencies and the cloud: An urgent capability issue for Australia’, are joined by Oracle’s Kirsty Linehan and Nathan Cook, experts in cloud computing, for an in-depth discussion on cloud computing in Australia’s national security infrastructure.

Australia-China law enforcement cooperation

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Australia and China have an extensive and growing economic relationship underpinned by diverse people-to-people connections. China is Australia’s largest two-way trading partner in goods and services (A$195 billion in 2017–18). Chinese investment into Australia’s real estate industry increased by 400% in the five years to 2015, to A$12 billion in 2014–15. Money flows from China into Australia almost doubled between 2011–12 and 2015–16, from A$42 billion to almost A$77 billion. China is Australia’s largest source of overseas students (over 157,000 studied in Australia in 2016) and second largest and highest spending inbound tourism market (with 1.2 million visits in 2016).

This economic relationship is mutually beneficial, but it also creates opportunities for criminals. The large volume of money, goods and people moving between the two countries makes it easier to conceal crimes, such as trafficked drugs or laundered money. Much activity also takes place online, making the cyber realm a major vector for cross-border criminal activity. It’s therefore important that the two governments work together to fight transnational crime where there are links between Australia and China, or where either’s citizens play key facilitator roles.

Weapons of mass economic disruption

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While Australia no longer rides upon the sheep’s back, strong economic and cultural links with agriculture remain and our economy is still intrinsically linked to agricultural production.

As the so-called ‘strawberry sabotage’ clearly demonstrates, accidental or deliberate biosecurity breaches present very real existential and economic threats to Australia that can harm agricultural exports as well as impact food security and trigger concerns about its safety.

ASPI’s latest research report ‘Weapons of Mass (economic) Disruption: Rethinking Biosecurity in Australia’ highlights the importance Australia’s effective and successful plant and animal biosecurity systems and border protection services to our wellbeing and economy and adds a further perspective on new and emerging threats that need to be addressed.

Mice that Roar

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This report argues that over the past five years, there’s been an increase in coastguard and maritime border response capabilities across much of ASEAN. ASEAN states have primarily focused their new capabilities on enhancing physical presence patrols and response within their respective exclusive economic zones (EEZs). Coastguards have become important strategic cushions between navies in ASEAN.

Underpinning this regional maritime strategic trend is an assumption that coastguard vessels are less threatening, in terms of their potential use of force, to the captains and crews of other nations’ vessels during unplanned encounters at sea. It isn’t all plain sailing for this model. Emboldening fishing fleets, coastguards or militias by removing the risk of a military response to aggressive actions in others’ jurisdictions may well be a negative for the maritime security of ASEAN nations.

The report highlights an opportunity for Australia to cooperate and collaborate with partners across the region on surveillance, maritime domain awareness (MDA) and maritime patrols.

Australia’s strategic relationship with the US ensures that Chinese leaders pay close attention to its diplomatic and military activities in ASEAN. The promotion of greater regional coastguard cooperation won’t deeply offend Chinese Government sensitivities, it will attract Chinese Government attention because it is against the Chinese state’s preferred bilateral engagement model, and because it may be effective in creating regional cohesion in dealing with maritime security issues. These efforts will send a clear message to Beijing that the region is taking measures to protect the sovereignty of its waters.

Anti-Money Laundering. A case study

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The Australian Government’s technological monopolies have ended. Technological developments, especially those that have been disruptive, have been driven primarily by private corporations for at least the past 10 years. Meanwhile, legislative responses to those changes, be they disruptive or otherwise, have been increasingly delayed.

Acceleration in the development and use of technology has been matched by changes in the capability of those who would do us harm. In the face of rapid social change, governments have lost more than a technological edge, as the very conceptualisations of sovereignty and geographical jurisdictions are being challenged. Law enforcement agencies’ traditional business models for dealing with organised crime are under significant pressure from threat actors that are able to operate more agile decision-making cycles and exploit seams between jurisdictions and in law enforcement agencies’ capabilities.

In this context, Australian law enforcement agencies face an increasing number of challenges from emergent technologies. A key policy challenge underpinning these issues relates to the limited capacity of law enforcement to introduce innovative strategies in response to disruptive technology. Another is how to make cross-jurisdictional cooperation simpler and easier.

ASPI’s latest Special Report by Dr John Coyne and Ms Amelia Meurant-Tompkinson, explores technological innovation in law enforcement through a specific crime type case study of anti-money laundering (AML) provisions. It analyses the factors that support or restrict technological innovation in federal law enforcement’s AML efforts and argues that the current ecosystem for innovation for AML needs to be enhanced to engage with the dual challenge of disruptive technology, and the integration of existing pockets of AML excellence into a holistic whole-of-government innovation program. The initial steps for responding to this challenge should include an analysis of the central assumptions that underpin innovation, policymaking, strategy and finance in this space.

In this video, Madeleine Nyst discusses the report with John Coyne and Amelia Meurant-Tompkinson.

People Smugglers Globally 2017

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The global drivers for the irregular movement of people, from human security to economics, are growing, not dissipating.

In 2016, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees reported that there were 65.6 million ‘forcibly displaced people worldwide’, 22.5 million refugees and 10 million stateless people.

Globally, there are some 767 million people living below the poverty line. In Africa alone, there are some 200 million people ‘aged between 15–24 and this will likely double by 2045’. While these figures are startling, the fact that in 2016 only 189,300 refugees were resettled highlights the scale of the likely demand for irregular migration.

Much has been said and published on irregular migration from the perspective of the migrant. In the process, it has become politically expedient to homogenise perceptions of people smugglers.

This new ASPI report focuses on people-smuggling syndicates globally.

The report provides a concise analysis of the various people-smuggling syndicates operating in the globe’s people smuggling hot-spots. This authoritative report provides a concise analysis of each people smuggling hot-spot, with accompanying policy recommendations for interventions.