Tag Archive for: Intelligence

Reviewing the intelligence reviews (so far)

With the report of the recent intelligence review by Heather Smith and Richard Maude finally released, critics could look on and wonder: why all the fuss? After all, while the list of recommendations is substantial, the review overall recommends only incremental change. To understand what’s happened here, it helps to reflect on the historical context. This article provides a review of previous intelligence reviews that predated this one and what they mean for today.

Two things to note upfront. First is the incremental and spasmodic shift for intelligence organisations from operating under often secretive prime ministerial executive edicts last century to operating today under formalised and publicly available legislation that can be scrutinised by practitioners, pundits and critics alike.

Second is the expansion in the number of intelligence organisations and the number and consequence of the various oversight mechanisms that have accrued over the years. These mechanisms include a range of parliamentary, executive and independent accountability oversight mechanisms as captured in the below diagram of the NIC Structure and Accountability Arrangements (compiled by the author). The end result is a range of government instrumentalities intended to provide accurate reliable and timely intelligence support to government decision makers coupled with parliamentary, executive and independent accountability mechanisms that are unmatched internationally. But first, let’s review how we got there.

World War II Legacy

The intelligence organisations that emerged following World War II were different from their wartime antecedents. Back then, the combined arrangements working with the United States under General Douglas MacArthur had spawned collaborative agencies in 1942 in which Americans and Australians worked hand in hand. The Central Bureau (for signals intelligence) and the Allied Intelligence Bureau (for espionage, or human intelligence, sabotage and special operations), as well as the Allied Translator and Interpreter Services and Allied Geographical Section are the better known entities. When the Americans left at the end of the war, though, they took with them much of the organisational apparatus, people and equipment behind these organisations.

Source: author.

Early Cold War Arrangements

The Australian remnants of these once combined US-Australian entities were gathered at Victoria Barracks in Melbourne until a post-war plan was formulated. By 1947 a national signals-intelligence agency, the Defence Signals Bureau had emerged; this was the precursor to the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD). Also by 1947 there was an analytical arm, the Joint Intelligence Bureau, precursor to today’s Defence Intelligence Organisation (DIO). By 1949 the wartime domestic security service was seen as unreliable and compromised. It was replaced by prime ministerial edict with the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). By 1952 Alfred Brookes was commissioned to establish a foreign human intelligence collection agency, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS). None of these agencies had any media profile to note.

The Petrov Royal Commission

The defection in 1954 of KGB officer Vladimir Petrov, and his wife, Evdokia, who was the embassy cipher clerk, was a major coup for ASIO and led to national and global headlines that put ASIO in the spotlight. A Royal Commission on Espionage followed which looked at espionage, but not at ASIO or other intelligence organisations. The commission was engulfed in controversy as the Labor Party saw it as a ploy launched by prime minister Robert Menzies on the eve of a federal election. As David Horner writes in his official ASIO history, The Spy Catchers, the truth was less dramatic. Yes, Menzies capitalised on the opportunity, but the defection was genuine. In the end, ASIO was placed under legislation. No one was prosecuted, because much of the corroborating evidence of the so-called nest of spies came from what was then a still highly sensitive source, decrypted Soviet diplomatic messages pointing to Australians supplying secrets to the Soviets. The ASIO Act 1956 followed. This was the first time an Australian intelligence agency was placed under legislation, although it would be some time before ASIO was made accountable to parliament.

The first Hope Royal Commission

Two decades would pass before another royal commission probed into the workings of Australia’s intelligence apparatus. In 1974 prime minister Gough Whitlam commissioned Robert Marsden Hope, a New South Wales judge and civil libertarian, to undertake the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security (RCIS). Hope reviewed the post war intelligence arrangements and recommended a series of reforms, most implemented by Whitlam’s successor, Malcolm Fraser. This included establishing the Office of National Assessments (ONA) in 1977 as well as pushing through parliament a revised and expanded ASIO Act 1979. A Security Appeals Tribunal was established and later absorbed into the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), recently rebadged as the Administrative Review Tribunal.

Protective Security Review

Shortly after completing the RCIS, Hope was tasked to undertake a Protective Security Review (PSR) in February 1978. This followed the explosion of a bomb at the Hilton Hotel in downtown Sydney, which coincided with the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional meeting chaired by Fraser. Hope was not tasked to identify the culprit (the bombing was linked to the Ananda Marga sect), but his review led to closer coordination of intelligence and policing, both at state and federal levels, and the prioritisation of organising to counter acts of terrorism.

Second Hope

In March 1983, newly appointed prime minister Bob Hawke commissioned Hope once again, this time to review progress of the intelligence community (AIC) had made since Whitlam had commissioned him a decade earlier. The Royal Commission on Australia’s Security and Intelligence Agencies (RCASIA) coincided with revelations of KGB shenanigans with former ALP National Secretary David Combe, which led to the expulsion of KGB officer Valery Ivanov. The review was then expanded to also consider a bungled ASIS exercise conducted at the Sheraton Hotel in Melbourne. In the public hearings that followed, Hawke took the stand and defended the efficacy and significance of Australia’s intelligence community. Hope subsequently recommended, and Hawke approved, the creation of an Inspector General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS), with enduring powers of a royal commissioner. The IGIS office holder still has these powers.

First Richardson, Holloway and Cook

Hawke’s successor as prime minister, Paul Keating, commissioned Dennis Richardson in 1992 to review ASIO and consider where a peace dividend following the Cold War could be harvested. Mindful of the searing cross-examination Hawke had experienced with the RCASIA a decade earlier, this review was managed behind closed doors and went largely uncontested. But it dealt with weighty issues, including reports of penetration by Soviet spies. It did so by downsizing and clearing out personnel. Also, Sandy Holloway was commissioned to review shortfalls in Australia’s foreign intelligence collection. A former director-general of ONA, Michael Cook, is widely seen as associated with internal security reviews as well. He would have been pleased with Richardson’s work.

Samuels and Codd

By the mid-1990s reports were emerging of further inappropriate behaviour in ASIS. Justice Gordon Samuels and Michael Codd were commissioned to review the matter and make recommendations. Their mid-1995 report proposed that ASIS come under legislation (as ASIO had in 1956 and again in 1979). This led to a drawn-out process as parliamentarians debated over how to respond. Reports in 1999 of a surveillance network run by the Five Eyes partners, Echelon, accelerated the momentum for reform not just for ASIS. Eventually ASIO, ASIS and the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD, later ASD) came under what would become the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS).

By the end of September, parliament passed the Intelligence Services Act of 2001. This saw ASIS and DSD come under legislation for the first time. In addition, the powers of the IGIS would come to cover all six agencies of the intelligence community. These were ASIO, ASIS, DSD, DIO, ONA and the nascent Defence Intelligence and Geospatial Organisation (DIGO), which later became the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO).

Flood

Following the East Timor crisis of 1999, the first Bali bombing in 2002, and a scandal revolving around the unfounded claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction in 2003, the former ONA director Philip Flood was appointed to conduct a fresh review in 2004. His Report on the Inquiry into Australia’s Intelligence Agencies identified weaknesses in the analytical reporting process and reinforced the need for separation of intelligence analysis from policy formulation. He also called for a bolstering of resources and a reinforcing of ONA’s central role of AIC coordination.

Cornall and Black

In line with a recommendation by Flood for periodic intelligence reviews, Robert Cornall and Rufus Black were appointed to conduct an Independent Review of the Intelligence Community (IRIC) in 2011. In addition to commissioning the IRIC that year, prime minister Kevin Rudd established the National Security College (NSC) at the Australian National University (ANU) and appointed an Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM).

AustraliaUnited StatesCanadaBritainFranceIndonesia
Overarching Inspector-General/Commissioner✓✓✓
Agency-specific Inspector-Generals✓
Ministerial oversight✓✓✓✓
Parliamentary oversight✓✓✓✓✓
Executive oversight✓✓✓✓✓✓
Independent reviews or bodies✓✓

Oversight and accountability mechanisms of Australia, compared with allies and partners. Source: author.

L’Estrange & Merchant

In 2017, a former secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and first NSC director, Michael L’Estrange, along with a former Defence deputy secretary of intelligence and security, Stephen Merchant, were commissioned to undertake the next periodic review, the 2017 Independent Intelligence Review (IIR), aided by Sir Iain Lobban from Britain. Their review identified the expansion of the Australian intelligence community with the emergence of intelligence functions within the Australian Transactions Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission, the intelligence arm of the Australia Federal Police (AFP) and the intelligence function within the then Department of Immigration and Border Protection (now Home Affairs). This called for the renaming of ONA as the Office of National Intelligence (ONI), headed by a director-general of national intelligence (DGNI) with more resources and a remit to more closely coordinate and manage this expanded National Intelligence Community (NIC).

The L’Estrange Merchant report was written separately from the plan to establish a more expansive Home Affairs portfolio that would, in addition to ASIO, encompass the four latecomers to the NIC: AUSTRAC, ACIC, AFP Intel and Home Affairs Intel. This construct would in part be reversed under Prime Minister Antony Albanese, who returned ASIO, AUSTRAC, ACIC and AFP to the Attorney-General’s portfolio.

Second Richardson

After having overseen the culling and later rebuilding of ASIO, Dennis Richardson was called back to review the growing body of intelligence legislation, mindful that the Home Affairs arrangements had been announced at the same time as the 2017 IIR report was released. With a wealth of historical insights into the functions performed, in a lengthy report Richardson and his team outlined where significant streamlining of legislation would be useful.

And now Maude and Smith

With all of this before them, Smith and Maude, no doubt, would have realised that in conducting their Independent Intelligence Review, they were following a well-worn path of review and reform that’s been summarised here. The incremental and periodic reforms undertaken over more than half a century have seen Australia bequeathed an intelligence apparatus of state with high levels of accountability.

In the espionage business the secret of success is often enough in keeping one’s successes secret, there are always limits in how transparent these agencies can be. Mindful of this, successive reviewers and governments have recognised the need to bolster accountability mechanisms, including parliamentary, executive and independent ones as well as periodic reports to parliament and the Australian people. In an age of heightened foreign interference, misinformation and disinformation, the importance of these oversight mechanisms is more important than ever.

The surprise of the Independent Intelligence Review: economic security

After copping criticism for not releasing the report for nearly eight months, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese released the Independent Intelligence Review on 28 March. It makes for a heck of a read. The review makes 67 sweeping recommendations to overhaul Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC) on everything from legislation to oversight, open-source intelligence and investment.

But hidden in plain sight in the review is a surprising recommendation that Treasury lead a review relating to ‘economic security’.

That’s a surprise because Australia hasn’t really talked about economic security before. There isn’t a federal policy on achieving economic security, our ministers don’t address economic security in press releases, and it remains a bit of a foreign concept in Parliament.

The review doesn’t stop there. Authors Heather Smith and Richard Maude—both well-known figures in Canberra—say their ‘consultations suggest that more holistic and structural changes across the public service are required’. Two more key recommendations were to establish a dedicated economic security unit inside Treasury and embed members of the NIC in economic security policymaking.

One wonders why the government hasn’t done this already.

It’s because Australia’s security has historically been about its military. As an island nation in the Indo-Pacific, we’ve been forced to use our privileged location to achieve political and diplomatic advantage. We’ve had defence white papers for decades calling for more spending, more alliances, more things. Look no further than the 2023 Defence Strategic Review. Australia’s security was said to be linked to our alliance with the United States and achieving force projection, meaning spending billions of dollars on long-range missiles and nuclear-powered submarines.

Now, it seems the government has finally stopped thinking military power alone will cut it in this degrading geopolitical environment.

In his budget speech, Treasurer Jim Chalmers seemed to glibly admit that ‘in these uncertain times, economic security and national security are increasingly intertwined’. His Future Made in Australia Act, passed in December last year, is the first specific mention of economic security by the Commonwealth ever. The National Reconstruction Fund has finally started handing out some of its $15 billion of investment funding.

But we have a lot more work to do.

A 2024 report by the United States Studies Centre shows that Australia is well behind our closest allies. We don’t conduct outbound investment screening, as the US does, or ban investments with entities that could compromise our research and development, as Canada does. Our investment review bodies don’t seem to have actual teeth like the ones in Britain do, and unlike Japan we don’t have an economic security law.

Don’t forget, a former treasurer (advised by our Foreign Investment Review Board) took no action against a 99-year lease given to Chinese company Landbridge to operate the Port of Darwin. That decision is still haunting the corridors in Canberra today.

Australia needs leadership on economic security and it needs it now, or certainly after the election.

We need to beef up our existing legislation to protect Australian investment from both internal and external threats to our economic security. We don’t even need new levers; we just need to use the ones we have. In the past, we have arguably prioritised investment over security, instead of attracting investments that offer both. For those that we deem contrary to foreign policy, our foreign minister already has the power to cancel any foreign agreements—they just haven’t wanted to.

The Foreign Investment Review Board needs to be given the teeth—and, more importantly, the political capital—to make hard decisions about investment in Australia. The current review of the board is a fantastic opportunity change our inbound and outbound investment framework. Making the board independent from Treasury would go a long way to achieving that, as would a broader ability for it to call in and review investments that could pose security risks, rather than await applications.

More broadly, the NIC needs to be integrated not just with Treasury, but with industry and academia, where technological breakthroughs fuelling our economic growth are being made every day. Having a dedicated economic security policy would probably help too. And we can do all of that without resorting to protectionist or xenophobic responses such as banning whole countries from doing business.

Economic security is not a new concept, but we are definitely late to the party. Hopefully, no matter which government is elected in May, economic security doesn’t prove to be just another election buzzword.

Intelligence review is strong on workforce issues. Implementation may be harder

The 2024 Independent Intelligence Review offers a mature and sophisticated understanding of workforce challenges facing Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC). It provides a thoughtful roadmap for modernising that workforce and enhancing cross-agency and cross-sector collaboration.

But overcoming entrenched barriers—such as institutional resistance, rapid action alongside careful implementation, and investing in change while delivering core responsibilities—will require careful planning, strong leadership and a phased approach to ensure sustainable change.

The 2024 review builds on previous reviews, addressing persistent workforce issues in the NIC. These include security clearance process inefficiencies, inadequate resourcing, difficulties in attracting and retaining specialised skills, a need for greater workforce diversity, and leadership development and agency mobility.

The report acknowledges progress made since the 2017 review, including establishment of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) and introduction of the Top Secret–Privileged Access (TSPA) Vetting Authority. It notes that recruitment and retention strategies have evolved, highlighting some agencies’ innovative approaches.

The latest review addresses the rapidly evolving workforce landscape and mounting pressures on intelligence agencies in increasingly competitive environments—both geopolitical and the labour market. It considers emerging dynamics such as the expectations of younger generations, increasing demand for remote and flexible work arrangements, disparate allowance structures and constrained intra-community mobility.

The review argues for a more sophisticated approach to workforce data collection and bolstering the collective elements of workforce management, such as by developing a NIC-wide employee value proposition, adopting talent management and mobility programs, and introducing a NIC chief people officer role.

Overall, the 2024 review continues to push the thinking about Australia’s intelligence workforce. People and skills are presented not as individual agency concerns, but as an enterprise-wide challenge requiring improved collective action and a stronger focus on modern workforce expectations.

But translating the review’s recommendations into concrete changes is easier said than done. The review itself notes differences across the NIC in work practices, allowance structures, security requirements and workforce data reporting. Alongside a reluctance to commit to workforce mobility, these findings hint at the potential for deeper resistance to centralised action by agencies accustomed to managing their own staffing functions.

Underlying constraints may mean some NIC agencies are not on board with taking a collective approach to building the skills and commitment needed to keep pace with shifting national security threats.

The first constraint is institutional resistance to centralisation. Until the establishment of ONI in 2018, NIC agencies had operated independently in almost all functions. Staffing and workforce planning were no exception. Those accustomed to control over their own processes may resist centralisation—for example, recommendations of a new NIC chief people officer, continued use of a single TSPA clearance and a NIC-wide employee value proposition.

To overcome this, the benefits of centralisation should be emphasised as a complement to agencies’ own efforts. These include enhanced efficiency, consistency, shared purpose, and the ability to meet workforce shortages through collective strength instead of individual action. The proposed chief people officer will need to be a facilitator, not an enforcer, driving alignment while respecting individual agency needs.

The second constraint is the balance between speedy action and rigorous security and procedural practices. The challenge lies in ensuring that necessary processes, such as security clearances and formalising shared programs, do not become bottlenecks that slow down the implementation of key initiatives.

The key to balancing speed with rigor is agile execution. This means having an effective implementation plan where smaller scale initiatives are implemented quickly and adapted iteratively, within the security and process parameters of the day. The NIC should focus on quick wins that demonstrate progress while laying the groundwork for longer-term changes.

Finally, there is the challenge of committing time and funding to achieving collective action on workforce issues, which are already stretched by core responsibilities. Intelligence agencies today address a wider range of security challenges and threats than ever before. Without committed resources, the move towards greater centralisation and optimisation of workforce processes risks detracting from core duties or lacking follow-through.

The government’s allocation of $44.6 million over four years to ONI is a good, but initial, start on implementing the many recommendations, which range from intelligence support for ministers and leveraging collective capabilities to legislative reform and oversight, alongside workforce management.

Australian intelligence work is more important than ever, as we face evolving global security threats highlighted in the review’s focus on conflict preparedness. Successfully implementing the review’s recommendations will not be a quick or simple process. It will require substantial investments of time, resources and goodwill from across the NIC and external partners.

The success of these reforms will ultimately depend on the NIC’s ability to embrace flexibility, innovation and collaboration. And to commit to a community that exists in more than name only.

Technology can make Team Australia fit for strategic competition

In the late 1970s Australian sport underwent institutional innovation propelling it to new heights. Today, Australia must urgently adapt to a contested and confronting strategic environment.

Contributing to this, a new ASPI research project will examine technology’s role in fostering national security innovation, particularly in transcending business as usual.

Australians love sport, especially the Olympics. They particularly love winning—even if they only beat New Zealand. Between 1956 and 1972 Australia won at least five golds (and 17 medals) at each summer games. This seemingly confirmed how effortless national success, prosperity and development were for the post-war ‘lucky country’.

And then the world changed.

Australia returned from Montreal 1976 with zero golds and just five medals. Humiliation was exacerbated by it being the first games broadcast in colour on Australian television. Worse, the Kiwis won two golds—even beating the Kookaburras at hockey.

Australia had missed the global shift in sports to professionalism and (sometimes questionable) sports science. Post-Montreal disquiet motivated Malcolm Fraser to reverse planned cuts and to establish the Australian Institute of Sport in 1981. Beyond the dollars, Australian sport underwent a profound cultural and psychological shift and continued to evolve: in May 2024 the Albanese government invested almost $250 million in the sport institute’s modernisation.

The result? Since 1981 Australia has won at least 20 medals at each summer games except 1988’s. We’ve even become regular winter medallists. Adaptation, innovation and commitment paid off.

Today much more consequential shockwaves are bearing upon Australian prosperity and sovereignty: the prospect of Chinese hegemony in our hemisphere; convulsions in US policy and relationships; and the metastasising threat environment described in the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s 2025 Annual Threat Assessment.

Since the late 2010s, governments of both persuasions have rhetorically recognised the magnitude of the challenge. In 2020, the then prime minister said Australia was facing ‘one of the most challenging times we have known since the 1930s and the early 1940s’. According to a press release from Defence Minister Richard Marles, ‘Australia faces the most complex and challenging strategic environment since the Second World War.’ Prime Minister Anthony Albanese describes ‘a time of profound geopolitical uncertainty’. Foreign Minister Penny Wong says it’s ‘nothing less than a contest over the way our region and our world work’.

So, where’s the imperative to address this ‘new world disorder’? We’re still not organising like a nation under this sort of challenge—despite warnings in ASIO’s threat assessments, the Defence Strategic Review and the National Defence Strategy. How do we create traction? How do we overcome the capacity gap of a nation of 26 million in a region of 4.3 billion?

Like after the 1976 Olympics, this isn’t just about budgets. It’s about creating cultural shift and encouraging and implementing novel, innovative ways of working—particularly through opportunities presented by technology.

A new research project by ASPI’s Statecraft & Intelligence Centre, in collaboration with Australian technologists Penten, is exploring the application of Australian sovereign technologies (including secure mobility) to business-as-usual work practices inside national security agencies. This aims to show how technology may foster innovation, bridge the capacity gap and sustain capabilities.

The project also explores how agencies and staff can access effective, secure tools so that ‘working better’ doesn’t become ‘working around’—which would introduce security and governance risks highlighted in a recent report by the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner and shown by the Signalgate debacle in the United States.

Agency-level focus recognises that national adaptation will need to be comprehensive, including not just big-picture government and societal changes but organisational and workplace-level reforms. What’s more, it comes as historically significant investments are creating opportunities to transform default ways of working. This is also happening as the recently released Independent Intelligence Review finds that ‘the business model for meeting the intelligence needs of executive government is no longer keeping up with demand and needs re-imagining’ and, separately, that the National Intelligence Community must ‘work hard at recruitment and retention’.

Using internationally tested secure mobility options inside and outside high security spaces doesn’t simply promise convenience and speed. They offer possibilities for better bridging the interface between intelligence producers and consumers—moving beyond pieces of paper (and electronic versions of pieces of paper) to meet actual information preferences of a new generation of ministers, officials and war fighters. This in turn will transform how intelligence is generated, presented and evaluated.

Making IT use and IT-linked work practices inside national security facilities look more like 2025 and less like 1995 isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s an important shift towards meeting expectations of current and future workforce talent. Meeting their needs would improve retention and thereby addresses a key national security vulnerability.

These are just two examples of possibilities being explored as part of the ASPI-Penten project, which will report later this year and provide practical, implementable advice to the broader national security community – while building on the IIR’s findings and recommendations.

Business as usual didn’t cut it in sport 50 years ago. It definitely won’t cut it in the unforgiving international arena today—or tomorrow.

Australia’s security architecture must evolve, not regress

The Independent Intelligence Review, publicly released last Friday, was inoffensive and largely supported the intelligence community status quo. But it was also largely quiet on the challenges facing the broader national security community in an increasingly dangerous world, in which traditional intelligence is just one tool of statecraft and national power.

After the January discovery of a caravan laden with explosives in Dural, Sydney, confusion emerged around what federal and state governments knew and when. The review was completed before the caravan was discovered, and the plot was likely beyond the review’s scope. However, government responses to the event should prompt a discussion about Australia’s national security architecture.

Australia faces an unprecedented convergence of threats. We are confronted simultaneously by the rise of aggressive authoritarian powers, global conflict, persistent and evolving terrorism, foreign interference and the normalisation of cyber warfare.

Luck will not protect us; we need structure and certainty. Australia saw these threats early and began to modernise its security architecture in 2017, including the establishment of the Home Affairs portfolio.

But the government has gradually reversed some elements of the consolidation, returning various security responsibilities to the Attorney-General’s portfolio, including for the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. This reversion to an outdated model risks leaving the system ill-equipped to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

Debate on Home Affairs seems fixated on the leadership style of its former head, Michael Pezzullo. Leadership is crucial, but obsession with individual style over substance, distracts from both strategic thinking and the fundamental issue of resurrecting a system that had structural inadequacies and was demonstrably unfit for purpose. We are not simply revisiting a past model; we are resurrecting a failed one.

The Attorney-General’s portfolio, in its traditional guise, was designed for a simpler, less dangerous era. Domestic threats were minimal and tended to come one by one—for example, after the end of the Cold War, security focus shifted from espionage to the emerging threat of Islamist terrorism. The Attorney-General’s oversight was appropriate, as it focused primarily on the legal framework while security agencies executed operations.

However, the proliferation and intersection of modern threats have overwhelmed this antiquated model.

When confronted with asylum-seeker boat arrivals, global terrorism, China and hybrid threats including cyber, the previous system—notwithstanding highly talented people—struggled as the Attorney-General’s portfolio held both the legal and security responsibilities. Having public servants working on legal considerations and intelligence officers doing operations is no longer adequate.

The system’s limitations were evident well before the 2017 restructure. In 2011, prime minister Julia Gillard moved cybersecurity from the Attorney-General’s purview into her own department. Similarly, the 2012 review of illegal boat arrival policy was managed within the prime minister’s department, reflecting that the framework was not up to the task. And as a result of a review after the 2014 Martin Place terrorist attack, the Abbott government created a Counterterrorism Coordinator within the prime minister’s portfolio.

The rise of the Islamic State terrorist group in 2014 exposed policy deficits. While terror laws rightly fell under the Attorney-General’s remit, the broader policy response demanded a more strategic perspective and decisive approach. Changes were needed, partly because laws were so out of date.

But it was China’s rise that finally revealed the urgent need for a dedicated focus on national security policy. The 2016 review into foreign interference was a direct consequence of Australia’s evolving threat landscape.

Few of our closest partners’ chief law officers also function as security ministers. Typically, a dedicated security minister focuses on threat assessment and policy development, while the Attorney-General ensures that all actions are lawful.

Australia’s Home Affairs model strengthened the legal checks and balances by separating security policy and operational functions from the legal oversight function. It ensured that a single minister could not simultaneously identify a threat, determine the appropriate response and authorise the necessary actions without independent scrutiny. The previous system essentially allowed a single minister to mark their own homework.

Dividing security responsibilities between the Attorney-General and Home Affairs portfolios limits the effectiveness of both departments.

If this gradual dilution portends a future abolition of Home Affairs altogether, that would be a mistake. As the Dural caravan controversy unfolded, no one seemed able to agree on what was an appropriate amount of information-sharing between police and security agencies, and state and federal governments. This underscores the need for clarity that Home Affairs is responsible for setting, coordinating and implementing national security policy.

Home Affairs was created because the threat environment was evolving and, within our national security architecture, foreign and defence policy were covered but the third aspect of national security—domestic security—was lacking. So, what security evolution has justified its regression? The Attorney-General’s department has not shown itself to be more capable than Home Affairs in terrorism, cybersecurity or foreign interference.

Home Affairs—to the government’s credit—led the world by banning DeepSeek from government devices. Could we count on such decisive action if lawyers were doing all the work and then reviewing it themselves? Would you allow your lawyer to run your business, rather than provide essential legal counsel?

Technology amplifies threats and is advancing much faster than new laws can be written. Terrorists use encrypted apps to plot attacks and social media to attract recruits. China spreads propaganda through social media and has already begun using cyber intrusions to prepare to conduct sabotage operations in future conflict.

Australia must not only reinstate the separation between the security minister and the attorney-general; it must evolve further to confront 21st-century threats. This should include establishing a National Security Council or Secretariat, like those of many of our partner nations, including Quad countries. This body should be led by a national security adviser who provides strategic coherence and policy coordination.

To navigate the increasingly complex and dangerous global security landscape, we need to evolve, not regress.

The Independent Intelligence Review is finally out, and it’s a worthy sequel

The unclassified version of the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review (IIR) was released today. It’s a welcome and worthy sequel to its 2017 predecessor, with an ambitious set of recommendations for enhancements to Australia’s national intelligence community (NIC).

The IIR’s authors, Heather Smith and Richard Maude, have definitely met the goals of the review process: to gauge the effectiveness with which the NIC serves the national interest and meets the needs of government, and to examine how well positioned the community is for the future.

Smith and Maude find that the NIC is ‘today a more capable and integrated intelligence enterprise’, and it’s ‘highly capable and performing well’. But they also identify opportunities for ‘greater—or different—collective responses … so that the NIC can more effectively serve the national interest and meet the needs of government in the future’.

Unsurprisingly, given its authorship, the 2024 IIR captures well the state of Australia’s emergent and emerging strategic and security challenges, and the key priority issues facing the NIC. The report’s strategic framing reflects the reality of the international environment.

The report includes 67 recommendations, with the implication that there might also be classified recommendations or parts of recommendations. That is a lot—in 2017 there were just 23. Many of the 2024 recommendations are primarily about drawing attention to issues or sometimes getting down into the weeds. Compare that with 2017 and its singular vision for the creation of the NIC and the concept of ‘national intelligence’.

However, that’s the wrong take. Rather, the Smith-Maude recommendations reflect the breadth of the issues facing Australian intelligence and the complexity of its operating environment.

Smith and Maude’s principal findings are as follows:

—There is a gap between what’s being asked of the Office of National Intelligence (ONI, a creation of the 2017 review) in terms of leading the NIC as a collective enterprise and ONI’s ability to ‘bring the rest of the intelligence community along’. There’s a need for greater NIC integration and the review recommends ways to help ONI achieve this.

—There’s also a ‘need for deeper integration of intelligence with other arms of government’ to ensure intelligence is used as a ‘tool of statecraft to maximise Australia’s competitive edge’. This goes beyond just achieving decision advantage over adversaries and competitors. It includes using intelligence for strategic warning, and for influencing outcomes through intelligence diplomacy and the purposeful public release of intelligence information.

—Finally, innovation is key to preparing for future conflict and crisis, deploying new technologies, building and nurturing partnerships, and in recruiting, retaining and training a highly skilled and committed NIC workforce.

That emphasis on the policy-intelligence interface is important, and may come to be seen as one of the most consequential dimensions of the 2024 IIR. It was a resounding theme of ASPI’s submission to the review, including the idea of transforming the national intelligence community into ‘national intelligence power’.

Importantly, the unclassified version of the 2024 review gives the Australian public a sophisticated and updated understanding of the NIC, which serves them and acts in their name but about which information is necessarily limited. It also explains the very real challenges and opportunities the NIC faces and the laws and oversight mechanisms that govern Australian intelligence.

At 127 pages, comparable to the 2017 review’s 132, the 2024 version is both substantive and substantial. That substance confirms the value of Australia’s world-leading process of intelligence review. It works by scheduled check-up rather than crisis-driven post-mortem, and includes a detailed public version of the review’s findings. ASPI has consistently argued in support of this approach.

Kudos should also be given to the Albanese government for its related announcement of $44.6 million over four years from 2025–26 for ONI to begin implementation of key priorities identified in the 2024 IIR.

There is one disappointment. The prime minister’s media statement releasing the report says that ‘consistent with the approach to past independent intelligence reviews under successive governments, details about the proposed approach to specific recommendations will remain classified’.

As I highlighted in my submission to the review, and in previous analysis of the 2017 IIR, that historic practice of not publicly accounting for implementation of recommendations (at least in some form) has led to sub-optimal implementation and accountability in past. My concern about this approach is only reinforced by the number and complexity of recommendations.

Nonetheless, it was pleasing that the review listened to and made productive use of the contributions and submissions made, including from outside of government. For example, recommendation 66—providing security-cleared personal staff to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security Chair and Deputy Chair, to help relieve the workload on the committee’s members and secretariat, and also enhance parliamentary oversight capability—was suggested in ASPI’s submission to the review.

The depth and sophistication of the Smith-Maude review means there will be further analysis and insights to come as their findings and recommendations are pored over.

Trump’s upending of US intelligence: implications for Australia

Australia has no room for complacency as it watches the second Trump Administration upend the US Intelligence Community (USIC). The evident mutual advantages of the US-Australian intelligence partnership and of the Five Eyes alliance more generally are not enough to guarantee preservation of benefits. In addition, Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC) will need to adopt a more deliberate and coordinated approach to its relationship with the USIC, centred around agreed national objectives.

Amid the turmoil being experienced in the USIC, and the longer-term challenges for American partner agencies themselves, especially as a result of likely disruption to fragile workforce development pipelines, there will be opportunities for the NIC. As happened after US intelligence reforms in 2004, Australia can learn what works, what doesn’t—and what can be adopted by the NIC, particularly in relation to the utility of the ‘China challenge’ as a potential organising principle. Already, the NIC can note the vital need for intelligence organisations in democratic societies to not just protect reputations for bipartisanship but to keep the trust and confidence of the broader public.

Trump and his spies, the second time around

Donald Trump’s first presidential term was characterised by conflict and tensions between him as a neophyte politician and the USIC. This was exemplified by Trump’s remarks at a 2018 summit in Helsinki, where he appeared to side with President Vladimir Putin over the FBI’s assessment that Moscow had tried to interfere in the 2016 US election. In one regard this estrangement between Trump and the USIC seemed incongruous. A president otherwise so keen to advance US interests through the forceful exercise of American power did not make best use of a policy instrument designed to do just that, the USIC.

The re-elected and emboldened Trump need not make the same mistake (although he might still).

Looking beyond current political debates surrounding his cabinet picks and the handling of broader US government reforms, what will the intelligence community look like in the next four years, and what are the implications for close intelligence allies like Australia?

By the end of Trump’s first term his estrangement from the USIC was confirmed, and it was accentuated by his four years out of office, his legal troubles, which included charges (now discontinued) for mishandling classified material, and an electoral campaign in which he cast intelligence agencies as an inveterate deep state.

More recently, attention has focused on the president’s unorthodox choices for some leadership positions, notably Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence (DNI) and Kash Patel as director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. These choices shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. After all, the old axiom holds that personnel is policy, and this is amplified by Trump’s personal loyalty-driven approach to governing. In addition, Trump has come to office the second time around considerably better prepared to staff a new administration than in 2016—and these picks are his, not those of advisers. But in trying to understand what this might mean we should seek further contextualization, especially on where the USIC might be steered by its new captains.

Project 2025, new (and old) faces and implications for US Intelligence

Alongside public statements by the Trump administration and its appointees, another potential source for such context is Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, published in 2023 by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It should be noted that during the election campaign Trump disavowed knowledge of this conservative think-tank project but he has since re-embraced the manifesto’s authors and recommendations. And Mandate for Leadership’s chapter on intelligence reform offers detail absent from the 2024 Republican Party Platform.

More particularly, that chapter draws heavily on the views of John Ratcliffe, Trump’s former DNI, now director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Ratcliffe’s leadership of the CIA now heightens the significance of his expressed views, suggesting that the manifesto’s policy priorities and prescriptions for CIA (and the USIC generally) will influence the administration’s own.

The chapter is not without its idiosyncrasies and errors. Nonetheless, a close reading of Project 2025 gives insights into the USIC for the next four years, especially through its five consistent themes: politicisation, China, the CIA’s future, technology and centralisation through the Office of the DNI (ODNI).

Politicisation is an unavoidable topic, the bitter fruit of the estrangement in Trump’s first term. Mandate for Leadership makes the case for a return to a politically neutral USIC, but that itself seems challenging in the current environment in which so much is tarred as politicised. The future of the enabling Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is bound up in relitigating past cases that affected individuals in Trump’s orbit. Integrity in analysis is framed by continuing debate over the appropriate emphasis on electoral interference threats from China instead of Russia. One resulting measure recommended in the manifesto is USIC leaders and their agencies withdrawing from the public square. It will be interesting to see whether this recommendation carries through to the new USIC leadership, given the existing public (and very political) profiles of Gabbard and Patel.

The positive mirror image of ‘politicisation’ is responsiveness, and this is borne out in Mandate for Leadership’s case for a more empowered DNI, one who is more directive over the rest of the USIC and responsive to the president. This change would be accompanied by down-sizing and shedding some of the responsibilities ODNI has accumulated since 2004—unsurprisingly, since bloat has been a criticism of ODNI since its establishment. It’s telling that the handful of Republican senators who were initially sceptical about Gabbard’s nomination as DNI were apparently won over by her commitment to just such downsizing.

It’s also worth noting that an invocation to laser focus on the president’s defined needs risks undermining an intelligence community’s important role in seeing over the horizon to unknown unknowns.

Nonetheless, statutory ambiguities have already weakened the ODNI’s authority over budgets, personnel and operations, leaving it unable to resolve interagency rivalries or streamline intelligence activities. According to the manifesto, these deficiencies, compounded by entrenched inefficiencies, have relegated the ODNI to a bureaucratic bottleneck rather than a strategic leader, raising concerns about its ability to address evolving global threats effectively.

Key manifesto recommendations therefore include granting DNI full authority over budgets and personnel to dismantle institutional silos and reduce redundancies. These structural changes would be accompanied by efforts to address cultural issues such as politicisation and overclassifying the secrecy of information, which are said to hinder operational effectiveness.

Where might that more directive DNI drive the USIC? One answer is a more joined up national intelligence effort that sees the generational threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party as an imperative, if not an organising principle. That would certainly be the choice of Ratcliffe, who boasted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that:

As DNI, I dramatically increased the Intelligence Community’s resources devoted to China. I openly warned the American people that, from my unique vantage point as the official who saw more US intelligence than anyone else, I assessed that China was far and away our top national security threat.

Ratcliffe’s coda—that ‘President Trump has been an incredible leader on this issue, and it is encouraging that a bipartisan consensus has emerged in recent years’—belies the ambiguity otherwise apparent in the new DNI’s own testimony (which gave little insight into her thoughts on the targets of US intelligence) and by both Gabbard and Ratcliffe’s unwillingness to comment on the messiness of the president’s approach to TikTok’s future.

Presumably USIC focus will follow policy priorities, including on China. We’ve already seen other, alternative priorities aired in public: countering the Mexican cartels, the western hemisphere more broadly, and economic intelligence (the reflex of all new governments everywhere when contemplating what intelligence machinery can do for their policy agenda).

The CIA features as prominently in Mandate for Leadership as the ODNI, unlike the other 16 agencies of the USIC. It’s the CIA that stands accused of managerialism run amok, and for which there are calls for the return of an ‘OSS culture’. (The Office of Strategic Services was the CIA’s World War II antecedent. Presumably Mandate for Leadership is referring to the OSS’s famed can-do pioneering spirit and not to its penetration by the Soviets.) Hence Ratcliffe’s clarion call at his nomination hearing:

To the brave CIA officers listening around the world, if all of this sounds like what you signed up for, then buckle up and get ready to make a difference. If it doesn’t, then it’s time to find a new line of work.

Manifestations of this desire for a cultural shift within CIA are found in the manifesto’s argument for greater external and lateral recruitment into the agency, a more ruthless up-or-out approach to promotion, and transfer of various CIA elements and facilities away from Washington DC and northern Virginia.

Perhaps more consequentially, the manifesto makes the case for recalibrating covert action responsibilities away from CIA and towards the Department of Defense (and its ‘certain clandestine capabilities […] that may resemble but far exceed in scale similar capabilities outside of DOD’). Covert action is described as activities ‘to influence political, economic or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly’. This aligns with a broader shift in confidence towards the military intelligence agencies, which are seen (fairly or not) as more reliable and responsive than the CIA. This shift has been highlighted in conversations with Republican-aligned national security figures over the past year.

Finally, the newfound alignment between conservative US politics and the US technology sector finds expression in the manifesto’s pushback against the European Union’s data privacy regulations and a warning to the USIC to avoid duplicating technology development by the private sector. Mandate for Leadership also takes to task the current USIC for not adhering to an ‘obligation to share’ relevant intelligence, especially on cyber threats to industry. It similarly echoes the president’s criticisms of over-classification (which, it must be fair, have been bipartisan and broad-ranging for many years). Thus, according to the manifesto, ‘an ODNI-run declassification process that is faster, nimbler, default-to-automated, and larger-scale should be a priority.’

Insights for Washington’s intelligence partners

The above is necessarily a partial view of what will be the next four years for the USIC. Just as a decades-long prioritisation of global counter-terrorism was not on the cards when George W Bush took office in 2001, so events will play their own part in deciding what happens next. But there is a useful foundation from which close intelligence allies like Australia can take some cues.

The USIC will be distracted and inwardly focused, partly because it will be working through contradictory impulses and directives early in this administration. This is where the question of personnel is particularly important. The apparent effort to denude the FBI of its existing leadership and structure, particularly moves to downsize the bureau’s National Security Division (including disbandment of counter-foreign interference efforts, victims of the bad political blood of the past decade), bodes poorly for US counter-intelligence. So too does the call for the FBI to return to crime fighting. Yet these circumstances (and the partisan political climate) don’t suggest that an idea advanced in the past by conservative critics of the FBI, creation of a separate non-law-enforcement security intelligence agency comparable to ASIO or MI5, is likely to come to pass anytime soon.

As for the remainder of the USIC, their workforces are being buffeted by the same forces affecting the wider US civil service. Of particular concern are moves to pause entry-level recruitment processes or even to dismiss probationary staff. These kinds of disruption have historically (in the US but also elsewhere) had cascading effects through intelligence agencies over years, indeed even decades, especially for streams requiring careful selection and considerable training (such as for CIA’s Directorate of Operations).

As radical as aspects of the new administration’s approach might appear, there is also a certain (and not always unwelcome) conservatism. For example, Mandate for Leadership rejects expansion of the Five Eyes alliance, a perennial subject of think pieces, favouring instead ‘ad hoc or quasi-formal intelligence expansion […] amongst nations trying to counter the threat from China’. This underplays the long-term efforts typically required in building effective liaison relationships. But even ad hoc relations might not remain viable. For example, Gabbard has been notably hostile in her past public commentary about Japan’s defence build-up and desire for a closer security relationship with the US. She was given the opportunity to moderate those comments during questioning before the Senate intelligence committee but declined to do so. And we’ve also seen remarks, now walked back, by a separate member of the administration (albeit one from outside of national security policy) about excluding Canada from the Five Eyes.

Gabbard also declined senators’ myriad (almost pleading) opportunities to dissociate herself from her past support for Edward Snowden. That she did not do so only underscored the priority she accords to her interpretation of civil rights, also reflected in her answers to the other matter of importance to those same senators: the continuation of FISA’s section 702. The other priority apparent from the new DNI’s remarks, and from related administration actions, is a more forward leaning approach to declassification and over-classification.

Taken together, these emphases are likely to engender some concerns among close intelligence partners used to sharing sensitive secrets by default. It would be natural in this situation for those partners to take stock of existing relationships with the USIC, especially where, in parallel, there are perhaps new divergences on stated policy objectives.

At the same time, the mutual advantages of the Five Eyes relationship (now almost 80 years old), including in the advancement of US interests, are readily identifiable. But this shouldn’t be a reason for complacency. Such demonstration of obvious advantage may still not be enough to insulate relationships from unwelcome developments. After all, the single best example of the US gaining from an intimate security arrangement with a close partner remains the North American Aerospace Defence Command, a US-Canadian military organisation, better known as NORAD, that stands ready to warn of nuclear attack. Yet such a close relationship has done little to shield Canada from recent actions by the White House.

What will be required is a careful and coordinated approach from the Australian government across all points of the alliance (including intelligence). As always in Canberra, the simplest but also most challenging part of the exercise will be determining and sustaining a clear national (and whole-of-government) objective for that approach to serve.

Recommendations for Australia’s National Intelligence Community

Amidst this turmoil in Washington, there are opportunities for Australia’s NIC also. There will be lessons to be learned from new directions in IC organisation and leadership, just as Australia’s establishment of the Office of National Intelligence was well informed by what went right and wrong in the creation of the US ODNI. This includes the potential value of using China as a central organising principle for an intelligence community that is also required to deal with other persistent, if not as strategic, national security challenges.

There will also be opportunities for cooperation on technology, whether that’s the next frontier of space surveillance (which the manifesto identifies as an opportunity for Five Eyes collaboration) or in addressing the challenge presented to intelligence operations by the burgeoning phenomenon of ubiquitous technical surveillance.

So, the Office of National Intelligence should be thinking about how to engage with a potentially different looking and focussed ODNI. Likewise, Australia’s defence intelligence agencies should be thinking about an even more important engagement role, if there is a swing in confidence and influence within the US system from the civilian to the military.

More broadly, it will be incumbent on Australia’s NIC to closely monitor US policy changes and evaluate their potential effects here. Furthermore, as we adjust to those changes and continue to demonstrate mutual advantage from the intelligence partnership, we need to prioritise investing in truly sovereign intelligence capabilities for Australia—both as a hedge against the unknowable future and as a tangible and valuable contribution to the continuing partnership.

We would also do well to learn from experience in the US and redouble existing commitments to a NIC that enjoys not only bipartisan support but also the trust and confidence of the Australian public beyond Canberra. This includes when negotiating the complex national security (and unavoidably political) challenges presented by foreign interference and disinformation.

The 2025 Annual Threat Assessment: ASIO makes the case for ‘national’ security

Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Director-General Mike Burgess called on Wednesday night for national security that’s truly national. Only through such a broad-ranging and joined approach across governments and society can Australia navigate the deteriorating security outlook to 2030, as assessed by ASIO.

Burgess was delivering his sixth public Annual Threat Assessment. Since he introduced them in 2020, the annual assessments have become something of a genre—deadly serious yet interspersed with humour. They present concrete facts in a circumspect but calculated way, acknowledging that adversaries are also a target audience and sometimes even addressing them directly. It’s not how the public service usually talks, and that’s by design.

From the outset, Burgess intended to use these statements ‘to move beyond the bureaucratic language of annual reports and help everyone understand the significant threats we see directed at Australia and Australians’. Since then, it’s become increasingly clear that the operative word was ‘everyone’.

Over the past six years, Burgess’ public statements have tracked the shift in ASIO’s foremost concerns, from the war on terror to the reemergence of espionage and foreign interference. At the same time, he has made the case that today’s violent extremism can’t be thought of, or fought, with concepts and methods inherited from last decade’s fight against Islamic State. As he said last year, ‘threats, circumstances, technologies and people all change’.

But a persistent through-line has been the emphasis he places on security responsibilities beyond ASIO’s walls. That’s an emphasis Burgess has deepened and extended over the years.

In 2020, he chose to underscore how ASIO’s officers are not apart from, but part of, the Australian community: ‘The point is’, he said, ‘we are you’. This time, he might well have said ‘you are us’.

The message was clear that it’s no longer appropriate to think of national security as something a security agency provides for the public. National security is something the Australian public provides for itself, and ASIO is just one, though an important one, of many ways in which the Australian public does that:

You cannot arrest your way to social cohesion. You cannot regulate your way to fewer grievances. You cannot spy your way to less youth radicalisation. In this environment, national security is truly national security—everybody’s business.

That business is unfortunately not in a downturn. This year’s assessment, as the director-general noted, was ‘the first of its kind’. In previous years he’d spoken about ‘past and present threats’; on this occasion he declassified part of a strategic outlook produced by ASIO’s Futures Team, charting broader trends out to 2030. The outlook is unpromising: more security surprises, more threat diversity and fewer effective norms to constrain state and non-state behaviour.

The future Burgess paints is one that is under pressure from great-power competition, the diffuse post-Covid-19 constellation of anti-authority grievances and ever-mutating radicalisation pathways, all accelerated by technological advances. The most confronting thing about this future is not any particular security concern, but that there may be no particular security concerns. Australia in 2030, this outlook suggests, will find it far more difficult to establish security priorities at a strategic level, readily trading emphasis on one source of threat for de-emphasis on another.

The ASIO Act includes seven ‘heads’ of security:

—Espionage;

—Foreign interference;

—Politically motivated violence (of which terrorism is a subcategory);

—Promotion of communal violence;

—Sabotage;

—Attacks on Australia’s defence system; and

—Serious threats to border integrity.

The first three, according to Burgess, are ‘already flashing red’. Excluding threats to border integrity, which he expects to remain manageable under current policy settings, the others are all trending upwards.

Burgess noted the ‘normalisation of violent protest’ following recent events in the Middle East as an example of the increasing ease with which overseas conflicts resonate in Australia as violence between, or consciously targeted at, particular communities.

He identified sabotage, a major concern in the early Cold War, as primed for a comeback. While physical sabotage never goes out of style, cyber-enabled sabotage of critical infrastructure ‘presents a more acute concern for Australia’. Meanwhile Defence, already a priority target for foreign intelligence agencies, is expected to become more so as the AUKUS submarine project matures.

Burgess argued that this security environment of ‘everything, everywhere all at once’ requires a whole-of-society—not just an ASIO—response, and urgently.

When Burgess said ‘we cannot leave our responses too late’, it was clear that the ‘we’ meant all Australians, not just those with ‘security’ in their job title.

ASIO’s outlook, as presented, doesn’t make for pleasant reading. The director-general described it as his ‘most significant, serious and sober address so far’. Indeed, he seemed less inclined to spin yarns or make wry asides than in previous years.

Fortunately for his audience, Burgess ended on a positive, rousing note.

I can assure you ASIO will use all of the tools we have available to identify and counter these threats. Our powers are significant, our capabilities are exceptional, our resolve is resolute.

Now the challenge falls to us as a nation—individuals, communities, governments and security agencies alike—to make good on ‘national’ security.

We can do better with OSINT. It needs structured training and careers

Before the end of World War II, intelligence was an informal craft with a barely structured career path. Talented individuals were recruited from the military or elite schools, honed skills on the job, and if they excelled, rose through the ranks. Over time, disciplines such as signals intelligence and geospatial intelligence evolved, adopting structured training, career pathways and institutional frameworks.

Open-source intelligence (OSINT) work, however, remains in its early days—unstructured and thus undervalued. It needs standardised training, career paths and perhaps even a government-led centre of excellence if it is to be properly valued.

Professionalising OSINT would improve practitioner skills, elevate its credibility and encourage agencies to take it more seriously. However, care must be taken not to lose the diversity and creativity that are among the great strengths of this form of intelligence.

Historically, intelligence careers were loosely defined, with entry points through the military or elite institutions. Even talented journalists and writers often flowed in and out of intelligence work.

Today, intelligence is a recognised profession with structured pathways. Universities offer undergraduate and postgraduate programs in security studies and intelligence analysis. Agencies such as the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Geospatial-Intelligence Organisation (AGO) provide rigorous training programs for graduates, ensuring consistency and quality.

Graduate analysts at AGO undergo foundational training covering topics such as topography, sensor systems, imagery analysis and critical thinking. This is followed by on-the-job mentorship, ensuring practical application of knowledge. Military pathways, such as the Royal Australian Air Force’s Air Intelligence Analyst program, mirror this structure, blending formal education with field experience.

This systematic approach ensures that intelligence practitioners meet high standards.

In contrast, OSINT lacks this structure. Many practitioners are self-taught, or they transition from other intelligence fields, adapting skills to OSINT’s unique demands. While commercial organisations—such as Janes, SANS Institute and OSINT Combine—offer valuable courses, these remain standalone efforts without an integrated career pathway.

Recent events have demonstrated OSINT’s value. During the Covid-19 pandemic, when classified systems were less physically accessible, analysts could use OSINT to help meet intelligence requirements working remotely.

During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, OSINT, such as commercial satellite imagery, provided troop movements and real-time intelligence that shaped global understanding of the conflict. And volunteer efforts, such as Stanford students uncovering atrocities using geolocation tools, showed OSINT’s ability to deliver actionable insights at speed.

Washington also publicly released a blend of declassified and OSINT reports on false-flag attacks the Kremlin would use to justify the invasion.

Despite these successes, OSINT is often dismissed as just Googling. It lacks the credibility of disciplines reliant on classified sources or costly sensors, leaving it seen as outside the secret club.  Critics such as Joseph Hatfield argue it overlaps with other fields and lacks a clear framework, making it seem like a junk drawer for miscellaneous information. While these criticisms have merit, they risk undervaluing OSINT’s operational strengths.

A centralised OSINT agency or centre of excellence could standardise tradecraft, developing specialised tools and creating a formal career pathway. However, this approach would require significant investment and coordination.

While some agencies are developing internal OSINT capabilities, the absence of standardisation means these programs provide no recognised qualifications. Without formal accreditation, these internal training programs function similarly to the commercial courses, rather than as part of a structured intelligence career pathway.

Training should cover core skills such as data scraping, navigating hidden information, overcoming targets’ denial and deception efforts, verifying open-source data and integrating OSINT into broader analytical processes.

Expanding in-house OSINT programs would allow practitioners to develop expertise while maintaining flexibility in their roles. This flexibility is particularly important because OSINT operates across various domains, including cyber threat intelligence, counterterrorism, corporate security and law enforcement. By providing structured training within agencies, OSINT analysts could specialise in areas relevant to their operational needs while ensuring a consistent standard of tradecraft.

Additionally, employing OSINT analysts in unclassified roles would allow agencies to make productive use of personnel while they undergo the often lengthy security vetting process. This would help address workforce shortages and ensure a steady pipeline of trained analysts ready to transition into higher-security roles when required.

One of OSINT’s greatest strengths is diversity. Practitioners from varied backgrounds bring unique perspectives, creativity and unconventional problem-solving to their work. Journalists, technologists and citizen-sleuths, such as those at Bellingcat, have proven OSINT’s value—for example by uncovering Russian war crimes or hidden missile silos in China. Standardisation must not stifle this diversity. Training should encourage innovation while ensuring consistency and quality.

OSINT delivers near-instantaneous situational awareness, unlike signals or geospatial intelligence, which sometimes involve lengthy tasking cycles. However, its speed comes with challenges, such as filtering disinformation and verifying data. By professionalising OSINT, agencies can better harness its potential while addressing these problems.

Ultimately, professionalisation would improve OSINT’s credibility and outputs while fostering a cultural shift to recognise it as an equal partner in the intelligence community. By retaining diversity and creativity alongside robust frameworks, OSINT can evolve into a respected, indispensable discipline.

Stepping out of the shadows: ASIS asks publicly, ‘Do you want in on the secret?’

It’s not often that the Australian government’s most secretive agency steps out of the shadows. But that’s what happened on Tuesday night when Kerri Hartland, director-general of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), gave a speech in Canberra exploring the psychology and mechanics of Australian human-intelligence (humint) operations.

That Hartland, who became ASIS’s first female director-general early last year, gave a public speech is itself novel. ASIS (and its ministers) have traditionally been allergic to publicity, even by the standards of such national intelligence community stablemates as the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and Australian Signals Directorate. This is, after all, an agency that existed for a quarter of a century without being publicly acknowledged, and that only came under an act of Parliament in 2001. It’s also an agency for which secrecy, albeit suitably purposeful secrecy, is a critical enabler.

Public remarks by an ASIS director-general are not wholly unprecedented. The public address in 2012 by Nick Warner, director-general at the time, was a first. His immediate successor, Paul Symon, addressed a variety of forums in the lead-up to his retirement at the end of 2022 and in earlier interviews to ASPI. While Bill Burns and Richard Moore, chiefs of the CIA and MI6 respectively (agencies credited by Hartland as ‘two of our closest partners’), appeared together publicly last month to talk about how they’re handling threats posed by Russia and China.

Hartland’s speech on 30 October was unusual for being unconnected to anniversaries or valedictories. It’s also the first time there’s been a public articulation of the fundamentals of how ASIS spies for Australia, namely the identification, recruitment and running of foreigners with access to secrets Australia wants and cannot otherwise obtain.

It’s worth noting that ASIS is itself unusual. Everyone spies but not everyone has a dedicated foreign humint service. Within the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, for example, ASIS’s existence makes Australia more similar to its US and UK partners than to New Zealand and Canada (which have security services like ASIO and signals intelligence agencies like ASD but have not taken this step).

ASIS has existed for 72 years and governments—from that of Menzies to Hawke and, yes, Keating to Albanese—have found it a valuable tool. This says something about Australia’s national intelligence culture and gives a realistic sense of the country’s interests and place in the world. And it belies some more rose-tinted historical accounts of Australian foreign policy.

Hartland’s speech was framed around the themes of mythology, technology and psychology. She also generally emphasised collaboration: intelligence as a team sport; the importance of back room capabilities; and the variety of perspectives, skills and other aspects required to undertake successful espionage in the 21st century.

This collaborative dimension is itself a clue to why ASIS is making this public pitch now. It is increasingly evident that there is a need for collaboration to enable future intelligence work—whether it’s collection, analysis or other functions—and that this includes collaboration inside and outside of government. This is a development that should be highlighted when the government finally gets around to releasing the public version of the 2024 Independent Intelligence Review.

Hartland’s remarks underscore how collaboration is particularly important to the humint business. That collaboration encompasses people (the recruits and skills ASIS needs, hence the speech’s subtitle: ‘Do you want in on the secret?’), technological solutions to defeat operational threats in this digital age (through partnerships with sovereign industry and research) or society (in terms of the social licence underpinning the necessary risk that accompanies intelligence operations). It also means different forms of intelligence working together and a whole-of-government effort for national effect.

Hartland also made a clear attempt at myth-busting about how ASIS works and what its officers look like, embraced ethics and clearly rejected use of coercion towards ASIS’s sources and prospective sources. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the absence of official commentary has at times opened up all manner of myth-making about ASIS (and about Australian intelligence more broadly) in the public square—most notoriously in the 1970s.

The speech also offered insights into the purpose and use of the ‘secret intelligence’ that is ASIS’s ultimate contribution—including Hartland highlighting its value in the context of Australia’s challenging strategic circumstances. On her account, the secrets obtained ‘give Australia and our allies an advantage and help disrupt threats’. What’s more, she set out her case for the continuing value of humint: ‘To get to the true actions and intentions of people and groups overseas, it still takes a human sitting down with another human’.

The Australian public hearing directly from those officials who act covertly in their name is a very welcome development and should be encouraged. Secrecy might remain essential in the field but collaboration (including with the public and with the private sector) is increasingly key to winning the 21st century intelligence contest.