Tag Archive for: Intelligence

The ‘official’ histories of Australian and British intelligence: Lessons learned and next steps

Unclassified, official histories of ‘secret’ intelligence organisations, for public readership, seem a contradiction in terms. These ‘official’ works are commissioned by the agencies in question and directly informed by those agencies’ own records, thus distinguishing them from other, outsider historical accounts. But while such official intelligence histories are relatively new, sometimes controversial, and often challenging for historians and agencies alike, the experiences of the Australian and British intelligence communities suggest they’re a promising development for scholarship, maintaining public trust and informed public discourse, and more effective functioning of national security agencies. Furthermore, these histories remain an ongoing project for Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

A national strategic warning intelligence capability for Australia

Australia’s strategic warning time has collapsed—in response to profound geopolitical shifts. As the ADF is adapting to the hard implications of this change, so must the national intelligence community (NIC).

Australian Government decision-makers need time and insight to identify and prioritise threats (and opportunities) and devise effective responses. Strategic warning intelligence enables and empowers them to do so. But it must be done in a way that keeps up with the rapid pace of geopolitical and technological change, and a widening array of non-traditional strategic threats, and in a fashion best suited to Australia’s circumstances.

To meet this need the NIC should develop a discrete, institutional strategic warning intelligence function—an Australian Centre for Strategic Warning (ACSW). This would recognise the distinct skills, analytical focus and interface with decision-making entailed—and the vital national interests at stake. In implementing an ACSW, much can be learned from our own and other intelligence communities’ ongoing efforts to adapt to threats other than invasion—notably terrorism and pandemics. This will be especially pertinent in its application to grey-zone threats such as economic coercion.

Done right, an ACSW would be an important addition to the suite of Australia’s statecraft tools.

Australia’s 2024 Independent Intelligence Review: Opportunities and challenges: Views from The Strategist

Australia has a recent history of intelligence community reform via independent intelligence reviews (IIRs) commissioned by government on a regular basis since 2004. The latest IIR is being undertaken by Dr Heather Smith and Mr Richard Maude.

In the lead-up to the announcement of the 2024 IIR, and afterwards, ASPI’s The Strategist has served as a valuable forum for canvassing publicly the most significant issues and challenges to be addressed by the reviewers.

This report draws together a selection of articles featured in The Strategist over the past year, with direct relevance to the review and its terms of reference. The articles cover topics from the broad to the specific but include:

  • the review itself, including its scope and purpose
  • the key capability challenge facing Australian intelligence—its future workforce
  • the ‘how’ of intelligence now and into the future; more particularly, new tools such as intelligence diplomacy and offensive cyber operations
  • the purposes for intelligence – from addressing global, existential risks to informing effective net assessment of Australia’s strategic circumstances.

In the lead-up to the expected public release of the IIR’s findings later this year, this compilation provides valuable background to the review and to the fundamental challenges and opportunities facing Australian intelligence in the decade ahead.

Incels in Australia: The ideology, the threat, and a way forward

This report explores the phenomenon of ‘incels’—involuntary celibates—and the misogynistic ideology that underpins a subset of this global community of men that has become a thriving Internet subculture. It examines how online spaces, from popular social media sites to dedicated incel forums, are providing a platform for not just the expansion of misogynistic views but gender-based violent extremism.

It raises key questions regarding Australian efforts to counter misogynistic ideologies within our nation. If there’s a continuum that has sexist, but lawful, views on gender at one end and gendered hate speech at the other, at what point does misogynistic ideology tip into acts of gendered violence? What’s needed to prevent misogynistic ideologies from becoming violent? And how do we, as a society, avoid the epidemic levels of violence against women in Australia?

This report doesn’t intend to provide answers to all of those questions. It does, however, seek to make an important contribution to public discourse about the increasing trend in misogynistic ideology through examination of a particularly violent community of misogynists, and proposes a range of policy options for consideration to tackle the threat that misogynistic ideology poses to Australia.

This report makes six recommendations designed to reduce and, where possible, prevent the risk of future occurrence of incel and similar violence in Australia. The recommendations include greater awareness raising and policy recognition that incel violence can be an ideological form of issue-motivated extremism which would provide certainty that incels could formally fall within the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO)—in addition to law-enforcement agencies—and would encourage tailored education programs focused on engaging young males at risk from indoctrination in this extreme subculture (along with their parents).

An inflection point for Australian intelligence: Revisiting the 2004 Flood Report

The 2003 Iraq war, and more particularly intelligence failure in relation to Iraqi WMD, led to a broad-ranging inquiry into Australian intelligence conducted by Philip Flood AO. Flood’s July 2004 report has proven an inflection point between the Australian Intelligence Community (AIC) of the immediate post–Cold War period and today’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Flood laid out an ambitious vision for Australian intelligence and forcefully advocated for sovereign intelligence capability. The scope of his review extended beyond more than ‘recent intelligence lessons’ – that is, Iraq’s WMD, the 2002 Bali bombings and the unrest that led to 2003’s Regional Assistance Mission Solomon Islands – to the effectiveness of oversight and accountability within the AIC (including priority setting), ‘division of labour’ between AIC agencies and their communications with each other, maintenance of contestability in intelligence assessments, and adequacy of resourcing (especially for the Office of National Assessments – ONA).

It was in addressing these matters that Flood laid the foundation for the future NIC, upon which would be constructed the reforms instituted by the L’Estrange-Merchant review of 2017.

Importantly, Flood’s recommendations significantly enhanced ONA’s capabilities—not just analytical resources but also the resources (and tasking) needed to address the more effective coordination and evaluation of foreign intelligence across the AIC. This was a critical step towards the more structured and institutionalised (if sometimes bureaucratic) NIC of 2023 and an enhanced community leadership role for, ultimately, ONI.

In addition, the Flood Report identified issues that remain pertinent and challenging today – including the vexed issue of the public presentation of intelligence for policy purposes, the central importance of the intelligence community’s people (including training, career management, recruitment and language proficiency), intelligence distribution (including avoiding overloading time-poor customers), the need to maximise collaborative opportunities between agencies, and how best to leverage intelligence relationships (including broadening relations beyond traditional allied partners).

Informing Australia’s next independent intelligence review: Learning from the past

The Australian Government commissions a review of its intelligence community every five to seven years. With July 2023 marking six years since release of the last review’s report and, with funding already allocated in this year’s federal budget, the next one is likely to commence shortly.

The best starting place for the forthcoming review is the work that precedes it, so reflection on 2017’s Independent Intelligence Review proves valuable. This report, Informing Australia’s next independent intelligence review, reflects on the experiences of the 2017 review and the implementation of its recommendations, and draws lessons to inform the terms of reference, approach and suggested focus of the next review.

In doing so the report identifies three broad topics upon which the next review can most profitably ground its work: attracting, building and retaining a skilled workforce; adapting to rapid and profound technological change; and leveraging more, and closer, partnerships. It also highlights how the past six years have raised important and challenging questions in relation to each of those broad topics and identifies opportunities to further advance the future performance of the National Intelligence Community. In addition, specific recommendations are made to inform government’s planning and preparation for the new review.

Collaborative and agile. Intelligence community collaboration insights from the United Kingdom and the United States

The central aim of this report is to generate insights from the US and UK intelligence communities’ collaboration efforts. It identifies insights so that members of Australia’s national intelligence community, including the ONI, can use them to enhance the community’s collaboration and agility for the purpose of giving Australian decision-makers an insight edge over others. We acknowledge that agencies must contextualise those insights to Australia’s specific circumstances, and we’ve sought to do some of that in this report. The report isn’t intended as an academic think piece but as a guide-and goad-to actions that can advance and protect Australia’s wellbeing, prosperity and security.

This report doesn’t seek to second-guess the internal insights that it explores. Instead, it takes an external perspective, informed by experience in relevant agencies and by perspectives from intelligence-community partners and analysts in the UK and the US.

The ASIS Interviews

The ASIS Interviews is a series of interviews with the Director-General of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, Paul Symon – with bio, transcripts and videos.

For the first time in the 68 year history of Australia’s overseas spy service, the top spy has gone before the camera for a series of video interviews, conducted by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Symon, a former Major General, talks about the purposes and principles of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and spying in the 21st century.

The interviews were recorded in September & October 2020 and will be released weekly.

1: The formation of ASIS.

2: Purpose and principles.

3: Spying for Australia.

4: Australia’s James Bond: finding jewels for the country.

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

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

This Policy Analysis recommends: 

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

Neighbourhood watch: The evolving terrorist threat in Southeast Asia

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

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

Tag Archive for: Intelligence

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.

A stronger centre is key to future Australian intelligence capability

It will be a welcome step if the current Independent Intelligence Review (IIR) recommends further empowering the Office of National Intelligence (ONI) to lead capability development and, by extension, to achieve a more collective approach by the many Australian agencies working in the field.

Terms of reference for the IIR encompass progress in the implementation of recommendations from previous reviews, including the establishment of the ONI and the creation of the national intelligence community (NIC). The review has been due to report to the government in mid-2024.

Australia’s traditionally federated intelligence community might seem unusual, given its moderate size; it’s more comparable to the notoriously decentralised US intelligence community than those of other Five Eyes countries. Australia typically separates assessment from collection (although not in the case of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO) and has different agencies for different collection modes (signals, imagery and human intelligence-gathering) and for different intelligence purposes (foreign, defence, security, law enforcement, border and regulatory). The resulting myriad agencies, variously reporting to five ministers, work collaboratively towards common goals.

This is not accidental. As the 2017 IIR observed, ‘those delineations have broad enduring relevance. They capture, in particular, the essential requirements for a relationship of trust between government and the wider community in Australia about the legitimate uses of intelligence, and therefore the legal framework within which the agencies need to operate.’ However, the future would ‘demand greater levels of collaboration across traditional dividing lines and more cross-over points’.

So we got ONI, built up from the old Office of National Assessments (ONA) and responsible for the NIC’s enterprise-level management—‘leading the development and implementation of national intelligence priorities, undertaking systematic and rigorous evaluation of the performance of the agencies, implementing strategic workforce planning and facilitating joint capability planning,’ as the 2017 report said.

Seven years on, the NIC hasn’t quite developed as envisioned. As I’ve written previously, that’s due to levers that aren’t exercised as fully as the 2017 reviewers recommended (the Joint Capability Fund, or JCF, and the Intelligence Capability Investment Program, or ICIP); such unforeseen developments as establishment of the Department of Home Affairs and the Defence Intelligence Group; and natural structural features and incentives. The latter include enduring deficiencies in national security decision-making.

ONI’s role was defined cautiously, including legislatively, as ‘guidance’ and ‘coordination’. Within ONI, there remains gravitational pull upon attention and resources by its enduring role from when it was ONA as the principal all-source assessment agency.

It’s not quite the vision from the speech of the then attorney-general introducing ONI’s charter legislation: ‘ONI will lead the NIC with an “enterprise management” approach, creating … a “whole greater than the sum of its parts” which will leverage the strengths of each agency and enable government to consider the NIC’s efforts in their entirety.’ In short, a stronger centre.

Meanwhile, drivers identified earlier for a concerted community approach are now more pressing: the prospect of war, the persistence of transnational threats and the intensification of the international intelligence contest.

Portfolio-based approaches to operations and oversight still make sense, as confirmed by Dennis Richardson’s 2019 Comprehensive Review of national security legislation. For this outcome, an ONI that coordinates is sufficient, but capability development requires a more empowered ONI (one that leads) and a genuine community-first approach.

That’s not to say there haven’t been gains. In December 2021, ONI Director-General Andrew Shearer noted NIC agreement to capability-sharing principles, ‘so that we don’t have different agencies duplicating each other and inventing different solutions to the same problems’.

Nonetheless, we need not just the 2017 IIR vision for ONI but that model’s further enhancement. The tale of the Top Secret Cloud, foreshadowed in that review’s recommendation 13, illustrates this well.

In 2019, ASIO announced the pursuit of a new, cloud-based enterprise technology platform. This was superseded by ONI’s late 2020 request for expressions of interest for NIC-wide cloud computing services. A year later, Shearer acknowledged that agencies were cooperating on a top-secret cloud initiative. Then, in December 2023, he confirmed that the initiative was ongoing and it promised to ‘open up a shared collaborative space that will really reinforce this sense of working together as a genuine community and bringing all those different capabilities to bear on problems.’ On 4 July 2024, the government announced a strategic partnership between the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) and Amazon Web Services to deliver the Top Secret Cloud at a cost of at least $2 billion.

An empowered ONI, leading a more collectively capable NIC, is critical to kicking on and making good on similar, future joint-capability developments. In fact, ASPI recommended this in relation to the Top Secret Cloud in its 2020 report National security agencies and the cloud: An urgent capability issue for Australia.

There is more than one way to skin the capability development cat. Community approaches needn’t be monolithic. Mini-lateralism can also be relevant. ONI can organise and direct community-benefiting developments through other NIC elements that are particularly capable of executing complex technical projects. In the case of information technologies, as we can see from the Top Secret Cloud announcement, that’s ASD.

What’s more, the Top Secret Cloud itself promises to drive other capability developments and operational effectiveness. Associated encouragement of more adaptive approaches to security can in the future open up other forms of efficiency and effectiveness (that is, the adoption of certain shared services).

Legislation shouldn’t be a barrier. Leaning forward on capability development, as distinct from agencies’ operations, shouldn’t fall foul of section 10 of the Office of National Intelligence Act 2018 (which details limits to ONI’s role).

Achieving a more collective NIC isn’t solely an agency problem. We also need ministers to buy in, providing incentive structures for agency leaders to prioritise community where appropriate. That includes more community-focused processes for decision-making. It also includes re-examining measures like JCF and ICIP, but funded as envisaged in 2017, and moving away from innovation-killers like the budgetary efficiency dividend.

ONI can also lead broader reforms, changing cultural and organisational incentives and disincentives for interagency service, encouraging more informed support to the NIC from the Department of Finance and others, and adaptive security approaches (that is, with focus on net result). The latter should be free of Monday morning experts appearing when future security problems are encountered, as they will—with or without adopting cloud computing.

A note of caution. The new assertion of leadership by ONI can’t be exclusionary. ONI can’t say ‘my way or the highway.’ In fact, it will be vital to avoid a potential pothole of cloud-related (operational) costs distorting existing budgets, especially for agencies that are already transforming business models through decade-long programs: ASIO ($1.3 billion), ASD’s Project REDSPICE ($9.9 billion) and the ‘modernisation’ of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service ($1.58 billion). That would be a surefire way of cruelling the case for future collective action.

Australia needs a national centre for strategic warning intelligence

Even mindboggling actions typically have a logic that’s discoverable, whether Hitler declaring war on America after Pearl Harbor or Putin invading Ukraine. That’s why ‘strategic warning’—informed by ‘strategic warning intelligence’—is so important.

Indeed, intelligence’s intuitive responsibility is warning and intelligence ‘failures’ are often framed around a failure to do so. Failing to exercise strategic warning intelligence effectively risks near-existential national damage—as Israel can attest.

The latest report from ASPI’s Statecraft & Intelligence Centre highlights the critical importance of intelligence in warning of future threats. It recommends that the Australian Government should therefore invest in a discrete, institutional strategic warning intelligence function—an Australian Centre for Strategic Warning (ACSW).

The Defence Strategic Review and National Defence Strategy confirm that Australia’s strategic warning time has collapsed from 10 years (for development of capabilities threatening Australia) to zero, in response to profound geopolitical shifts. The threat of war in our neighbourhood is more real now than since the 1970s. Flashpoints abound across the Indo-Pacific, not least in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, with direct potential impacts on our national interests.

Aggressors have more proven options to pursue their objectives covertly and incrementally, to our cost. This includes through cyber threats to critical infrastructure, as we saw when the Volt Typhoon hacker group was exposed by Five Eyes authorities in March this year. Threats are also broadening as states begin to use economic relations as a weapon, while transnational threats (including more instances of self-guided, grievance-driven terrorism) persist. As the Australian Defence Force is adapting to the hard implications of these change, so must Australia’s National Intelligence Community (NIC).

Regardless of threat origin or type, Australian Government decision-makers need time and insight to identify and prioritise threats and opportunities, and to devise effective diplomatic and other—including military—responses. It is strategic warning intelligence that enables and empowers them to do so.

Strategic warning is historically complicated and difficult. But the focus of strategic warning intelligence is broadening to reflect the full spectrum of threats, including the ‘grey zone’ between war and peace, and to a strategic environment where declarations of war are now rare—though the risk of actual war remains a reality. Indeed, strategic warning intelligence has already adapted to some new threats, while the methodology for indicators and warning has proven applicable in new circumstances—such as the cyber domain—provided that indicators are predictable, diagnostic, unambiguous and collectable.

Success or failure rests on analytical effectiveness, clarity of communication, and timeliness within a dynamic intelligence contest that is characterised by pervasive denial and deception. The current and emerging landscape also includes the promise, but also challenge, of incorporating all sources of intelligence in a fast-moving environment. Importantly, the effective communication of warning—including the persuasion of policymakers—and the integration of strategic warning intelligence with response mechanisms are critical. Done well, strategic warning intelligence empowers decision-makers to try and change the future, not just accept their fate. Intelligence-enabled shifts in alert posture or diplomatic signalling may be enough to dissuade aggressors from hostile actions.

However, Australia’s strategic warning intelligence capabilities are institutionally decentralised and were historically focussed on the long-range threat of military attack. How can future strategic warning intelligence be done in a way that keeps up with the rapid pace of geopolitical and technological change, in a fashion that best suits Australia’s circumstances?

Establishing an ACSW would recognise the importance of distinct skills, analytical focus, and interface with decision-making, as well as the vital national interests at stake. And in implementing an ACSW, much can be learned from our own and other intelligence communities’ ongoing efforts to adapt to threats other than invasion, notably terrorism and pandemics. This will be especially pertinent in application to grey-zone threats such as economic coercion.

The ACSW should be designed for an Australian context, informed by international perspectives, and have the mission to warn on a range of threats. Given the breadth of national responsibilities in question—and current NIC architecture—it should be located within the Office of National Intelligence and should leverage a multi-agency secondment model for its consciously limited staffing.

The ACSW’s leadership, akin to a National Intelligence Officer for Warning, should be able to apply analysis that is critical and independent from institutional interests. It should be afforded suitable access to decision-makers. Developing an effective interface with institutions such as the Cabinet’s National Security Committee will be vital, and would be enhanced by future developments, including in suitable accountability measures and incorporation of response options like strategic downgrades of intelligence.

A first step should be proving the ACSW concept through a classified simulation exercise applied to an economic coercion or impending regional crisis case-study.

Done right, an ACSW would be an important addition to the suite of Australia’s statecraft tools in an ever more challenging world. Setting aside the threat of invasion, imagine the future cost of surprise coercive actions against Australia’s most critical resource exports—those untouched during the imbroglio with China in recent years.

Would the national interest not be well served by time and space to identify such a development early enough to address it effectively?

 

 

OSINT capability should be dispersed through government

Stealing other countries’ secrets is the form of intelligence gathering that gets most attention—and resources. But a mass of information is publicly available and just waiting to be collected, to produce what’s called open-source intelligence (OSINT). 

Governments, including Australia’s, are working on how better to collect it, and one idea is to set up a central agency for the task. If that’s a solution, however, it’s not the full solution. Potentially valuable public information and the ways it is used are so varied that individual parts of the government each need to collect it and turn it into OSINT. 

So, as an independent review into Australia’s intelligence agencies proceeds, a high priority should be strengthening OSINT capabilities dispersed through the government. Australia must have an ecosystem of OSINT capabilities that are fit-for-purpose, evolve with the information environment, embrace accessibility of PAI, and move forward in alignment with industry, academia, and the whole federal government—not just the national intelligence community (NIC). 

Ben Scott of the National Security College argues that setting up a dedicated OSINT agency would rebalance the NIC’s work, putting more focus on publicly available information (PAI). And so it would. The problem is that there can be no one-size-fits-all OSINT capability: sources and applications are just too diverse. 

OSINT centres that are fit for purpose must be tailored to deliver intelligence at the level and tempo required by each part of the government to consume and exploit. In practice, this means the demand for OSINT varies according to the operational demands of each agency. They will variously require specialised forms of collection and exploitation, sometimes sustained monitoring of enduring hazards, or unplanned or dynamic collection on emergent threats. 

The Richardson review of the legal framework of intelligence collection provides a glimpse of these operational demands. The Department of Home Affairs, for example, uses PAI to inform policymaking, identify research gaps, and reduce the volume and effectiveness of terrorist and violent extremist content online. The department has a sustained high tempo of OSINT operations with a strong focus on people both onshore and overseas. 

The Department of Defence, by contrast, requires the capacity to quickly scale OSINT gathering in support of war fighters during crisis and conflict. 

Fit-for-purpose integration also depends on the intelligence maturity of the consumer. Some have access to exquisite intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets. For them, OSINT will be geared for sharing with people at lower classifications, collecting against otherwise inaccessible targets, collecting faster and more cheaply and cueing other intelligence-gathering methods. 

But operators at the tactical edge or organisations not traditionally served with intelligence may have limited or no access to exquisite ISR capabilities. For them, OSINT is the solution. Many parts of the federal government outside the NIC find themselves in this situation, and their organic capabilities should be empowered. 

Moreover, OSINT centres must tailor and continuously adapt the inputs of their capability to the target information environment. As Scott outlines, we are amid an ongoing information revolution, where the potential of OSINT lies in capitalising on the growing volume, variety and velocity of PAI. The challenge of operating in this information environment lies in keeping pace with a landscape that varies by region and language and features unique and diverse platforms. This complexity extends to the diverse types of data generated on these platforms, including social media, news articles, satellite imagery, ship telemetry and more.  

But the difficulty doesn’t end there. How you access, use, protect, and share this information can be governed by whether it is personally identifiable, copyrighted, or access-controlled. While a central OSINT agency can play a significant enabling role, diverse agencies in the government can excel at keeping pace with and exploiting their respective target environments. 

Accessibility of PAI is the strongest argument for strengthening agency capabilities alongside a central body. Given the online nature of the information environment, if you have an internet connection, you have access to PAI. This accessibility is part of what makes OSINT so attractive to intelligence missions of all shapes and sizes—not just inside the NIC. 

However, the seemingly low barrier to entry is deceptive. Operating legally, safely, and effectively over sustained periods demands more than just connectivity; it requires tailored governance, policies, training, and technology, and operating without that backing carries risks. Those include risks that may compromise the integrity of collection and analytical products, harm analyst mental wellbeing, expose sensitive information, break laws, or conflict with other missions. 

Fortunately, agencies can already engage with these risks by leveraging the Government’s centre of expertise for open source within the Office of National Intelligence. 

Accessibility is also the reason why, as Scott acknowledges, OSINT thrives beyond government. Industry, academia, NGOs and private citizens are all delivering innovative intelligence products, services, and research. 

Australia is fortunate to have established vendors of OSINT training and managed services that already support, augment and complement a government workforce under strain. In the technology space, vendors build tailored OSINT tools and infrastructure that manage attribution and enhance all elements of the intelligence cycle. The challenge for all capability managers is in navigating a burgeoning marketplace, mapping their needs to the right mix of tools and services, and then optimally integrating them. 

Tag Archive for: Intelligence

TSD Summit Sessions: Intelligence and evolving technology with Michael Rogers and Jason Healey

In the third video edition of The Sydney Dialogue Summit Sessions, Jason Healey, Senior Research Scholar at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, sits down with Admiral Michael Rogers (Ret’d), Senior Advisor at Trusted Future, to discuss all things intelligence.

Jason was a founding member of both the Office of the National Cyber Director at the White House and the first cyber command in the world, the Joint Task Force for Computer Network Defense, while Michael is a former Commander of the US Cyber Command and Director of the US National Security Agency.

The conversation explores how Michael’s career began as a surface warfare officer and how he made the transition into the world of intelligence, as well as how signals intelligence has changed over time and whether it will stay the same in the decades ahead.

With Australia no longer having a 10‑year window of strategic warning time ahead of major conflict, they also talk about intelligence and warning. Jason asks Michael how intelligence can provide better warning and whether the job is becoming more difficult as the world becomes more complex.

Jason and Michael were both panellists at The Sydney Dialogue, ASPI’s premier policy summit for critical, emerging and cyber technologies, held on September 2 and 3. This special episode is the third in a series of podcasts filmed on the sidelines of the conference, which will be released in the coming weeks.

Check out ASPI’s YouTube channel here to watch the full video.


Speakers:
⁠Jason Healey
Admiral Michael Rogers (Ret’d)⁠

Stop the World: TSD Summit Sessions: Defence, intelligence and technology with Shashank Joshi

In the final lead-in episode to the Sydney Dialogue (but not the last in the series!), ASPI’s Executive Director, Justin Bassi, interviews Shashank Joshi, Defence Editor at the Economist.  

They discuss technology, security and strategic competition, including the impact of artificial intelligence on defence and intelligence operations, the implications of the no-limits partnership between Russia and China and increasing alignment between authoritarian states. They also cover the challenge of protecting free speech online within a framework of rules which also protects public safety.

They talk about Shashank’s latest Economist report ‘Spycraft: Watching the Watchers’, which explores the intersection of technology and intelligence, and looks at the history of intel and tech development, including advancements from radio to the internet and encryption.

The Sydney Dialogue (TSD) is ASPI’s flagship initiative on cyber and critical technologies. The summit brings together world leaders, global technology industry innovators and leading thinkers on cyber and critical technology for frank and productive discussions. TSD 2024 will address the advances made across these technologies and their impact on our societies, economies and national security.

Find out more about TSD 2024 here: ⁠https://tsd.aspi.org.au/⁠    

Mentioned in this episode: ⁠https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2024-07-06⁠  

Guests:
⁠Justin Bassi⁠
Shashank Joshi

Stop the World: The future of intelligence

This week on Stop the World, it’s all about intelligence. Chris Taylor, head of ASPI’s Statecraft and Intelligence Program interviews David Gioe, Professor of Intelligence and Security at King’s College London and Associate Professor of History at the US Military Academy at West Point. 

They discuss the history of intelligence, with a focus on the Cold War, and explore how it has evolved over time. Chris asks David about the impact of technology on intelligence collection and analysis, and they consider the changing nature of intelligence and new techniques, as well as the ongoing importance of human intelligence.

Mentioned in this episode:
ASPI report: Australia’s 2024 Independent Intelligence Review: opportunities and challenges

Guests:
Chris Taylor
David Gioe