Tag Archive for: Law Enforcement

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).

Artificial intelligence and policing in Australia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards a Commonwealth law enforcement innovation framework

Introduction

In March 2019, ASPI, with the sponsorship of Oracle, coordinated the ASPI–Oracle Innovation Framework Workshop.

The workshop brought together subject-matter experts from federal law enforcement agencies, academia and the private sector to explore the feasibility of a Commonwealth law enforcement innovation framework (CLEIF).

This followed a 2018 research project that explored the current state of innovation in law enforcement.1 That research was based on a case study of innovation in Australia’s federal anti-money-laundering (AML) provisions.

The research project was underpinned by three key questions:

  1. How can technology enhance the identification of money-laundering offences?
  2. How can law enforcement bring together technology and policy to ensure more agile AML decision-making?
  3. How can law enforcement agencies gain faster access to new AML technologies and capabilities?

The research resulted in the publication of a Special Report, titled ‘I can see clearly now!’, which provided specific analysis of the key factors that support and restrict technological innovation in federal law enforcement AML efforts.2

The report’s central argument was that the current ecosystem for technological innovation in AML needs to be enhanced to engage with the dual challenge of disruptive technology and the integration of pockets of AML excellence into a holistic whole-of-government program.

While the research was focused on technology and AML, it has broader application to law enforcement technological innovation.

The research found little evidence that the organisational frameworks for enterprise or portfolio technological innovation in federal law enforcement are fully developed.3

The March 2019 workshop explored innovation themes in government and the corporate sector that had relevance to law enforcement. The results provide further input to policymakers as they formulate future directions for the agencies and their capabilities.

Purpose

This report presents the key innovation themes that were discussed during the workshop before presenting a SWOT analysis for the implementation of a CLEIF.4 The aim is to promote further consideration of the concept of such a framework.

Methodology

The workshop was conducted on 12 March 2019 under the Chatham House Rule. The agenda was divided into five sessions:

  • The context
  • Innovation in law enforcement: a case study of the Fintel Alliance
  • Innovation in research: a case study of the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre
  • Innovation in the private sector: a case study of Oracle
  • A SWOT analysis of the concept of a CLEIF.

The context

In this space, ‘innovation’ refers to industrialising the generation of new approaches. For many years, governments haven’t had a significant independent technological edge except in niche areas. Much of their advantage has been created by companies in sectors that are dependent on government spending—notably defence, with some contribution from in-house government R&D through entities such as Defence Science and Technology and its predecessor groups. This situation has shifted over time, and the dominant source of innovation is now commercial sectors that aren’t primarily driven by government investment and aren’t primarily in the defence sector. The result is that, in the face of rapid technological change, governments need to find new ways of accessing a technological edge. The very concepts of sovereignty and geographical jurisdictions are being challenged, given the globalised nature of some technologies, corporations and activities (finance being an obvious one of relevance to law enforcement).

At the turn of the millennium, cutting-edge computing capability was still being driven by governments, or at least by government demand. However, the speed at which technology has been developed and then deployed has since accelerated exponentially. In the process, the Australian Government’s technological advantages have eroded. There’s no binary answer to whether this is a positive or negative development; rather, it’s a truism of the contemporary environment that policymakers face, and not just in Australia.

More recently, technological developments, especially those that have been disruptive, have subsequently been driven predominantly by private corporations.5 Legislative responses to those changes, disruptive or otherwise, have lagged the changes.

In some cases, the corporations responsible for the changes draw their R&D budgets from revenues that exceed those of some governments. Complex ownership, financial and geographical arrangements make it difficult for governments to regulate these companies. The rising disruptive influence of small enterprises and start-ups has shown that at least some of this change isn’t just about available finance but about entrepreneurial approaches to technological innovation.

By the early 2000s, our day-to-day life was mostly viewed by policymakers through two conceptual lenses: real and virtual, with quite a clear separation between the two realms. Governments’ policy responses to technology, at least in Australia, treated technological challenges through similarly divided silos. In the meantime, events such as the launch of the iPhone in 2007 by Steve Jobs were altering the way that many of us interact with each other and the world. Today, many Australians are unlikely to see their life or social interactions as divided between the real and the virtual: it’s just their life.

Unsurprisingly, technological disruptions to the way our world operates are becoming more frequent and potent. For those in government, many of the underlying policy assumptions about crime and security are now also being affected. Acceleration in the development and use of technology has been matched by changes in the capability of those who would do us harm.6 ASIO Director-General Duncan Lewis has recently argued that ‘a person who would wish us ill is far more empowered as a result of the technology at their disposal than once upon a time.’7 State and non-state actors alike are leveraging technology to communicate, mount information operations and conduct cyberattacks; for instance, the Islamic State terror group uses Twitter and Twitter bots to organise and market its message broadly.

Australian law enforcement agencies face an increasing number of challenges from emergent technologies. For ease of consideration, it’s possible to categorise those challenges into four broad thematic groupings:

  • the implications of specific technological developments 
  • encryption
  • the continued globalisation of organised crime
  • the declining impact of traditional policing responses.

A key policy challenge that underpins the issues facing the government relates more to limitations on the capacity of law enforcement here and elsewhere to introduce innovative strategies in response to disruptive technology. Many parts of law enforcement are rapidly changing and becoming more global, but that doesn’t mean an end to investigations and response roles.

With the rising threat to domestic security from non-state actors, law enforcement agencies face a broad family of threats that are increasingly untouchable because they operate in ways that aren’t vulnerable to existing police capabilities and legislative powers.

The range of transnational untouchables—those that exploit the vulnerabilities of international legal regimes, safe havens and corruption—is increasing.

The ability of law enforcement to collect admissible evidence and prosecute emergent transnational non-state actors is limited by legal jurisdictions, differing rules across jurisdictions and the effectiveness of cross-border cooperation. While criminal organisations can cross borders in seconds electronically, the collection of evidence from individual foreign jurisdictions using mutual legal assistance treaty arrangements, where they exist, can take weeks or months. While a non-state actor can operate from anywhere at any time, our law enforcement agencies’ operational freedom of movement is limited by the geographical borders established in domestic and international law. This point is illustrated by the 2017 Sydney airline terrorist plot. In late July 2017, the Australian Federal Police (AFP), with intelligence from Israel, uncovered a suspected Islamic State plot to blow up an Etihad flight to Abu Dhabi. The terror group allegedly coordinated the operation in Syria and mailed a bomb kit from Turkey.8

The detection of transnational criminals is becoming increasingly difficult. In a physical sense, proactively identifying deviant financial transactions, people and cargo across borders is being made ever more difficult by the exponentially growing number of legitimate transactions. This is making investigations more complex and time consuming, due in part to the increased sophistication and technological capabilities of criminal conspiracies but also to the density of cross-border flows.

Global supply chains and complex business structures are also making evidence collection more difficult. While data analytic capabilities are increasing, law enforcement is faced with growing information flows that are difficult to store and analyse. This point isn’t lost on Australian law enforcement officials and policymakers, who know that at least part of the solution is broader adoption of new approaches such as data analytics. Clearly, this requires new skills in law enforcement entities as well as new concepts for applying these new analytic tools.

The impact of new and emerging information and communications technology (ICT) ensures that technological disruptions will increase rapidly—and the resulting need to adapt should be built into agency business models. The implications of the current trajectory of technological developments is that the life cycle of ICT investments will be drastically reduced, particularly when it comes to applications that run over the underlying ICT infrastructure of servers, networks and storage. So, while the AFP’s current case management system might be decades old, the next one won’t have the same usable life.

The news isn’t all bad: there are pockets of excellence and consistent efforts for innovation in Australian law enforcement. While most of the government’s law enforcement efforts are focused on arrests and seizures, a few extremely successful enforcement officers are focused on the disruption of threats—especially organised crime—using soft power, such as capacity development.

Law enforcement has traditionally employed a ‘grow your own’ approach to subject-matter expertise and capability development. 

In the current operating context, it will also need to engage more frequently to acquire capabilities and subject-matter expertise on an as-required, contracted basis, putting expertise into the investigations at hand when needed. R&D budgets for law enforcement, especially for the development and rapid fielding of technological capabilities, need to drastically increase. Martin Callinan makes this point in his 2019 ASPI Special Report, Defence and security R&D: a sovereign strategic advantage.9 While government is unlikely to be the predominant spender or regain its ‘technological edge’ as a quasi-monopoly customer, it can innovate and it can use its funding to drive private innovation that it can use. After all, law enforcement innovation is a broad term with organisational, cultural, financial and policy dimensions.

Key points

  1. Innovation is increasingly coming from commercial sectors that aren’t primarily driven by government.
  2. The Australian Government’s ability to be a dominant driver of technological innovation has ended.
  3. Opportunities to adopt commercial innovation are strong, and the government’s ability to seed innovation from R&D funding can push innovation into paths useful to law enforcement.
  4. Innovation isn’t just about available finance but about entrepreneurial approaches to technological innovation.
  5. Technological disruptions to the way our world operates are becoming more frequent and potent—and perhaps need to be thought of less as disruptions than as rapidly emerging opportunities to change the way agencies operate.
  6. A key policy challenge that underpins the issues facing the government relates more to the limited capacity of law enforcement, whether in Australia or in other countries, to introduce innovative strategies in response to disruptive technology.
  7. R&D budgets for law enforcement, especially for the development and rapid fielding of technological capabilities, need to drastically increase and be used to drive private innovation that law enforcement can use.

A law enforcement case study: the Fintel Alliance

Launched in 2017 by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the Fintel Alliance is a private–public partnership established to combat money-laundering and terrorism financing. The alliance is between the federal government and the finance sector.

It’s structured with two hubs: an Innovation Hub and an Operations Hub. Individuals from various private-sector finance organisations are seconded into the Fintel Alliance, which allows for higher levels of collaboration.

The Innovation Hub activities are either ‘push projects’ (that is, looking at ways new technologies may be employed in an operational scenario) or generated by the Operations Hub identifying operational problems to be solved with technology. The Innovation Hub develops capability, through proof-of-concept with the Fintel Alliance members, which is then moved across to the Operations Hub.

Two recent examples are the Pseudocode and the Alerting Platform projects.

  • Pseudocode allows the Fintel Alliance to identify criminal networks using data drawn from all stakeholders, and to develop typologies in order to improve reporting of suspicious individuals and behaviour.
  • The Alerting Platform Project is a longer term one and is a form of confidential computing whereby users can use data without seeing information. This approach to anonymising data but still enabling it to be useful in data analysis is a promising design approach to address privacy concerns and legislative restraints on the use of personal information.

This division of innovation and implementation could be a useful adaptation for the CLEIF, as innovation could occur centrally in conjunction with various stakeholders and be operationalised in various operations hubs as needed by agencies.

Key points

  1. Innovation projects with multiple stakeholders that cross sectors are complex. Participation isn’t mandatory, and contributions can vary. An innovation framework needs to consider that an equal contribution from each stakeholder may be unlikely—and stakeholders must be comfortable with this as a design principle of the partnership.
  2. Centrally managed innovation frameworks need to proactively engage with those responsible for operationalising projects throughout the innovation process.

Innovation in research: the Data to Decisions Cooperative Research Centre

Cooperative research centres (CRCs) were pioneered by the Australian Government during the 1990s to support collaboration among government, industry and researchers and foster high-quality research and outcomes. Since then, the government has committed nearly $5 billion in grants to CRC projects.

The Data to Decisions (D2D) CRC is a collaboration between national security agencies, industry and researchers.10 The D2D CRC was established as a five-year project with the purpose of solving big data challenges facing the Australian national security community. It currently runs four R&D projects, which all focus on harnessing the power of big data to create predictive and analytical functions for national security and law enforcement agencies.

After five years, this particular CRC is nearing the end of its life cycle; however, it has spurred the creation of two new start-ups (Fivecast and NQRY) to continue the innovation generated in the research projects, showing the potential for work from CRCs to become self-sustaining and attract funding from other sources as well.

The D2D CRC provided several key insights on its innovation journey. The first is the need to remove the fear of failure (‘fail fast’ is an easy motto but a much harder thing to demonstrate in practice). During its first years of operation, D2D was frequently faced with decisions that involved significant implementation risks. There was a need to balance necessary risks in innovation against insulation from failure. In doing so, D2D made failure not a thing to be punished or frowned upon but an inflection point for learning.

The second key insight was the need for innovation champions who not only support but understand the innovation process.

The real benefit of a CRC is its ability to draw together a variety of stakeholders and bridge the public–private divide.

Workshop discussions following the presentation of the case study highlighted the inherent challenges of traditional law enforcement performance indicators for technology development. A key observation is that often law performance measures for enforcement technology projects are more centrally focused on time and budget delivery, which makes the application of more agile R&D approaches challenging.

The D2D CRC case study highlighted that there are often numerous opportunities for policymakers to propose changes to legislation and policy constraints that are currently unintentionally inhibiting innovation. Such changes require organisations to adopt a more entrepreneurial mindset that looks to digital transformation and innovation to keep pace with increasingly frequent technological disruption. While legislative change isn’t easy, it was recognised that many legislators are looking to boost industry and bridge the public–private divide.

Key points

  1. Fear of failure restricts innovation.
  2. Project failure is inevitable in innovation, and organisations need to be able to stop projects when it becomes obvious that success is unlikely.
  3. Innovation projects need strong champions.

Innovation in the private sector: a case study of Oracle

Oracle provides essential services and products for companies to pioneer innovations and drive new business models. For example, Oracle embeds machine learning into several management and security offerings to help monitor, troubleshoot and predict potential outages and security breaches. Its corporate focus is on integrating artificial intelligence into analytics to help discover hidden patterns and enable automated and personalised interactions across applications via digital assistants. Oracle helps customers develop road maps, migrate to the cloud and take advantage of emerging technologies from any point: new cloud deployments, on-premises environments, and hybrid implementations.

As a large multinational organisation working across industries in both the private and public sectors, Oracle provided the workshop with a series of insights into how to develop and promote an innovation culture.

Oracle’s innovation framework centralises ‘innovation management’ to be able to identify sources of innovation and then direct resources towards economically profitable innovation.11 It uses a five-step structured process, known as the Oracle Innovation Design Engine, that supports end-to-end innovation: frame, ideate, share, test and scale. This can also be conceptualised as building an ‘innovation pipeline’.12 Using this structured process, the best ideas can be chosen and finessed.

Discussions on profit suggested that the private sector’s profit motive could be replaced with a balanced return on investment consideration, in which a reasonable profit return sits alongside a longer term revenue flow.

Importantly, Oracle emphasises benefits from continual, at times incremental, innovation and moving away from the idea that adding or creating value can only come from radical change and innovation—an idea that should be emphasised in creating a CLEIF.

Additionally, Oracle seeks to inculcate and nurture a culture of innovation. Principally, the argument is that culture is the key catalyst for innovation. However, to be successfully developed the innovation must be championed at a high level within the organisation.

Oracle argues that organisations can’t adopt a business-as-usual approach to innovation, which is why leadership engagement is essential. To be successful in the private sector, innovation and the processes for managing it must be continuously adapting.

Key points

  1. Culture is a critical input to innovation.13
  2. An innovation framework should be viewed as a prioritisation tool that promotes the creation of an endless line of potential opportunities and possibilities; however, inevitably, most will never reach full implementation.
  3. The decision-making in a public-sector innovation framework would need to be driven by a balanced scorecard return-on-investment calculation that also considers the opportunity costs of not adopting specific innovations.
  4. Innovation needs to be viewed through two lenses: radical change and incremental change.

Constructing a law enforcement innovation framework

Each of the case study sessions resulted in substantial discussion among the participants. That conversation, while broad ranging, revealed that more can be done to enhance innovation in federal law enforcement. More specifically, the workshop’s first four sessions revealed that a CLEIF was likely to be needed and demanded.

The final session was used to undertake a SWOT analysis of such a framework.

Strengths

During the workshop, strengths were conceptualised as characteristics that could give a CLEIF an advantage over other approaches to innovation. The following specific strengths were identified during the workshop:

  • There are already good examples of collaboration underway, such as the Fintel Alliance and the D2D CRC. It’s easier to conceptualise and construct a framework when good examples are already thriving.
  • There’s also much goodwill, intent and interest in continuing these existing arrangements, which could lead to interest in establishing new ones.

Weaknesses

Weaknesses were conceptualised as characteristics of a CLEIF that may place it at a disadvantage compared to other systems. The following specific weaknesses were identified during the workshop:

  • One of the principal weaknesses is the public sector’s fear of failure and its risk-averse attitude. That attitude has a very legitimate basis: the misallocation of taxpayers’ funds is rightly a significant concern for all public-sector agencies and entities, and failure on innovation can often be characterised as waste. However, as much as possible, that attitude should be minimised, including by being able to derive benefits and lessons from ‘failed’ innovation. Organisations need to nurture innovation cultures and promote engagement with risk.
  • A CLEIF could place too much emphasis on creating new products constantly instead of reusing, recycling and adapting existing and appropriate technology. It would need to give some focus to regular stocktakes or near-real-time management of current technology and projects.
  • Centralised objectives and resourcing make it difficult to enunciate and change priorities and objectives as quickly as needed.

Agility and the ability to adapt quickly are necessary for innovation to thrive, so this will have to be addressed in any CLEIF model proposed.

There have been some concerns that not enough future policymakers from younger generations are involved in the innovation and project process, and that they should be better nurtured and given senior leadership support as they engage with risk.

Opportunities to be seized

The workshop identified the following opportunities:

  • New and innovative partnerships are starting in a whole range of areas. Consideration could be given to how those relationships could be further leveraged from a federal law enforcement community or whole-of-government perspective.
  • There are numerous opportunities to propose changes to legislation and policy constraints. Doing so in the context of innovation may perhaps be particularly attractive to legislators who are looking to boost industry and bridge the public–private divide.
  • There’s an opportunity to explore new and meaningful key performance indicators to give a more realistic assessment of how law enforcement technology is progressing.

Threats to be controlled

Several threats need to be considered while planning a CLEIF:

  • In technology, crime is outpacing law enforcement every day of the week, mainly because it’s opportunistically hitchhiking on wider commercial innovation and technology.
  • The pace of innovation in the broader community continues to increase. In response, law enforcement will have to constantly scan the horizon to anticipate changes, and it needs partners immersed in commercial innovation to add their own scanning capacity.
  • Organisational structures can be a threat to the implementation of innovative practices. For example, at the state and federal levels, law enforcement agencies have different, and sometimes competing, priorities. The jostling for resources and attention could be managed in an integrated system to ensure the most effective use of time and resources. Related to this will be how priorities are set so all stakeholders see that they’re getting the maximum value-add for their contribution.
  • During decision-making, there may be conflicting objectives between decision-making and what will address the issue. This will have to be mitigated by open analysis and frank conversations about issues and priorities.
  • Public engagement about the reasons for shifts in concepts of operation and technology and, where relevant, legislative change to enable those shifts will require well-designed public engagement and communication if community support is to be achieved.
  • As financing is a clearly identified issue, all key law enforcement agencies and departments need to find a dedicated budget line or other sources of funding for innovation, which might be best channelled through a centralised hub to achieve critical mass and efficiency. This should be an attractive prospect for central government agencies involved in financing as it will streamline the cost of innovation into a single location.

The framework

To be successful, an optimised CLEIF would:

  • integrate all levels of law enforcement and national security activities
  • have reliable and flexible funding
  • take into consideration the wide range of stakeholders and their needs
  • widen the sources of innovation and innovation scanning beyond law enforcement agencies to include capable commercial partners.

An entity structured similarly to the CRC model would offer flexibility and opportunity to create innovative solutions for law enforcement. However, while having a model that sits outside of government has advantages, there are legislative barriers that would need to be considered. For example, certain provisions of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cwlth) will make it extremely difficult to share the necessary information from law enforcement and national security agencies with a CRC, hindering its capacity to properly address problems and create solutions.

In all likelihood, a well-designed CLEIF will have to integrate a number of different approaches in order to ensure that the agencies involved continue to meet their legislative obligations.

Considering all of the issues discussed in this workshop, consideration could be given to the next steps:

  • the signing of a memorandum of understanding (MoU), initially by all relevant federal agencies, to inculcate a culture of innovation in this space
  • the creation of a law enforcement innovation hub in the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Memorandum of understanding

The MoU would articulate a principles-based commitment by federal law enforcement agencies to work together on innovation. However, this early federal focus should be a starting point only; the end goal would be the inclusion of state and territory agencies.

The MoU could be focused, at least initially, on four key priority areas:

  • developing and documenting the agencies’ innovation cultures
  • documenting and sharing innovation projects
  • working within legislative and regulatory requirements, a commitment from each agency to resource innovation projects
  • a commitment to burden share law enforcement community challenges.

Law enforcement innovation hub

At this initial stage, a collaboration research hub could provide a starting point for creating and developing new technologies for law enforcement. While some stakeholders may be tempted to adopt a CRC-type structure, a stronger starting point might involve building on initial interest in cooperative innovation among law enforcement stakeholders.

A committee supported by a modest secretariat in either the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission or the Department of Home Affairs could be used to promote exchanges of knowledge on innovation. It could focus on sharing current and future innovation investments and challenges. The secretariat could be used to develop central innovation challenges and projects registers with the aim of identifying opportunities for burden sharing and collaboration.
 

Conclusion

Partnerships and co-creation are crucial to the future successes of Australia’s law enforcement agencies. The workshop, supported by ASPI’s earlier report, made a solid case for a cohesive and coherent CLEIF to encourage change in law enforcement’s innovation culture and behaviours. A focus should be on preventing innovation silos. While the workshop identified a need for change, and this report has provided some initial steps, further research and collaboration are needed before a definitive framework can be developed.

Before engaging in a program of change, it’s imperative to acknowledge that a great deal of innovation, both technology-based and not, already occurs within and across the various stakeholders who attended the workshop. That work has also had very real positive impacts on community safety. Similarly, the commitment of those from the public, private or not-for-profit sectors who attended the workshop, as well as those who participated in the preceding research projects, speaks volumes of their contribution to collaboration and innovation. The central thesis here isn’t a critique of what’s being done, but rather a strong argument for how to leverage current efforts to achieve even more.

Acknowledgement

This report finds its origins in conversations between ASPI and Oracle staff on law enforcement innovation. At the time, Oracle wanted to make a contribution to Australian public policy dialogue on technology innovation in law enforcement. From these conversations Oracle kindly provided ASPI corporate sponsorship for an innovation research project. ASPI would like to acknowledge Oracle’s support for this project, without which this report would not have been possible.

Important disclaimer

This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in relation to the subject matter covered. It is provided with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering any form of professional or other advice or services. No person should rely on the contents of this publication without first obtaining advice from a qualified professional.

© The Australian Strategic Policy Institute Limited 2019

This publication is subject to copyright. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of it may in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, microcopying, photocopying, recording or otherwise) be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without prior written permission. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.

Notwithstanding the above, educational institutions (including schools, independent colleges, universities and TAFEs) are granted permission to make copies of copyrighted works strictly for educational purposes without explicit permission from ASPI and free of charge.

  1. John Coyne, Amelia Meurant-Tompkinson, ‘I can see clearly now! Tech innovation in law enforcement’, The Strategist, 19 July 2018, online. ↩︎
  2. Coyne & Meurant-Tompkinson, ‘I can see clearly now!’. ↩︎
  3. Coyne & Meurant-Tompkinson, ‘I can see clearly now!’. ↩︎
  4. SWOT = strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. ↩︎
  5. Coyne & Meurant-Tompkinson, ‘I can see clearly now!’. ↩︎
  6. Coyne & Meurant-Tompkinson, ‘I can see clearly now!’. ↩︎
  7. Colin Brinsden, ‘Australia faces daily threats: spy chief’, Canberra Times, 27 July 2019, online. ↩︎
  8. Jessica Kidd, ‘Intelligence on alleged meat grinder bomb plot came from Israel, Australia confirms’, ABC News, 22 February 2018, online. ↩︎
  9. Martin Callinan et al., Defence and security R&D: a sovereign strategic advantage, ASPI, Canberra, January 2019, online. ↩︎
  10. List of participants: Australian Federal Police, Attorney-General’s Department, Department of Defence, Government of South Australia, Office of National Intelligence, Department of Home Affairs, BAE Systems, Palantir, Basis Technology, Pivotal, AiGroup, Genix, Leidos, UNISYS, iapa, aiia, Teradata, Semantic Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University (Australia), Deakin University, eResearchSA, LaTrobe University, University of Adelaide, University of Technology Sydney, University of New South Wales, University of South Australia and Australian National University. ↩︎
  11. Oracle, What is innovation management?, no date, online. ↩︎
  12. Oracle, Build an innovation pipeline, no date, online. ↩︎
  13. Gary P Pisano, ‘The hard truth about innovative cultures’, Harvard Business Review, January–February 2019, online. ↩︎

Weapons of mass economic disruption

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

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

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

Anti-Money Laundering. A case study

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

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

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

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

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

3rd Australia-Europe Counter-Terrorism Dialogue: ‘Transforming the New Threat Landscape’

Europe and Australia are connected in many ways. As liberal democratic societies, they share a common normative foundation of values that set the parameters for what the state may or may not do.

Based on that background, in September 2017 a delegation from Australia composed of practitioners, policymakers and academics travelled to Germany and Belgium to participate in the 3rd Australian Strategic Policy Institute – Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Australia–Europe Counterterrorism Dialogue, entitled Transforming the New Threat Landscape.

The virtual meets reality: Policy implications of e-diasporas

Diasporas are global social formations of people who have been scattered from their country of origin. They carry with them a collective representation, myth or imagined sense of their homeland. The connection between the diaspora and its members’ original ‘home’ was, until the rise of social media, sustained by letters, tapes and print media.

E-diasporas originally emerged as online manifestations of diaspora communities. Although social media are just some of many technologies used by people to communicate, their rise has intensified the articulation and elaboration of diasporic identities several-fold.

With social media, e-diasporas recreate and expand a diaspora’s sense of shared identity and community by providing a virtual venue for affirmation and recognition.

Today, e-diasporas are combinations of self-interest and identity groups that share experiences through online media. The members share their country of origin and, at times—depending on the size of the community—their host country.

The 2017 independent review of intelligence: Views from The Strategist

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

‘Santa Muerte’, are the Mexican cartels really coming?

Whether in Mexico, the US or Australia, the image of the transnational serious and organised crime (OC) threat from ‘Mexican cartels’ used to construct policy doesn’t appear to engage with the reality that there’s no homogeneous Mexican cartel, cartels or OC group.

This report argues that, for Australia and Asia, the menace of Mexican OC is no longer looming on the horizon; it has already arrived.

However, the nature of the Mexican OC problem in Australia and Asia is not likely to be the same as that found in either the US or Mexico. To respond effectively to this rising threat, Australian policymakers need to approach the issue with a more informed perspective that engages with the complex nature of the various groups that collectively form what’s broadly considered to be Mexican OC.

Furthermore, the policy response to Mexican OC will need to more agile than the measures contained in Australia’s current National Organised Crime Response.

Response to Mexica cartels report to his Excellency Ambassador Armando G. Alvarez

For the right reasons, in the right ways (Part 1): A four-nation survey of information sharing about organised crime

This special report examines how government, business and the community in four nations share information about organised crime. Its key finding is that the Australian Government, businesses and community as a whole must be open to new kinds of information sharing partnerships.

The field work involved over 80 interviews, including visits to or discussions about a range of information sharing mechanisms in Israel, the UK, the Netherlands and the US.

This is an abridged version of a report submitted to the Churchill Memorial Trust in June 2016.

Tag Archive for: Law Enforcement

Encrypted messaging apps: a persistent challenge in fighting organised crime

Last month, about 700 Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers executed arrest warrants nationwide under Operation Kraken. This operation targeted Jay Je Yoon Jung, the alleged architect behind Ghost, an encrypted messaging app explicitly designed for organised crime groups.

While Operation Kraken showcased Australia’s ability to disrupt sophisticated criminal networks, it also highlighted a pressing issue: the persistent challenge posed by evolving encryption technologies that organised criminal groups are so quickly adopting, allowing them to outpace law enforcement efforts.

Ghost represented a significant leap in the technological capabilities of organised crime. Allegedly developed by Jung as a business venture, it facilitated a range of illicit activities, from drug and weapons trafficking to money laundering. An estimated 800 devices were in circulation globally, 376 of which in Australia. Disguised as standard smartphones, they allowed users to create anonymous profiles and communicate securely. The breadth of activities coordinated through Ghost reinforces the escalating sophistication of organised crime groups and, just as importantly, their ability to adopt and operationalise new technology.

Ghost was brought to the AFP’s attention by Europol, the European Union’s international policing division. Europol prompted formation of a global task force, with the AFP joining forces with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Through technical ingenuity and undercover operations, the AFP accessed Ghost’s software. This replicated the success of previous operations, such as Operation Ironside, which had effectively dismantled another encrypted messaging app, AN0M.

Despite these victories, the operation highlights the broader implications of encrypted messaging apps for law enforcement. While they challenge law enforcement with their encryption, they also raise significant questions regarding privacy and mass surveillance.

Operation Kraken exposes three significant challenges for Australian law enforcement when targeting organised crime groups: disrupting their current use of encrypted technology, accelerating law enforcement adoption of new technologies and preventing criminal exploitation of future advancements.

The success of Operation Kraken hinged on the delicate interplay between human intelligence and technological expertise. The authorities’ initial breakthroughs in identifying and infiltrating Ghost were achieved through human sources in organised crime groups.

But another encrypted messaging app will surely emerge to take its place. So collaboration between human intelligence and cutting-edge technology must remain a cornerstone of law enforcement strategies to stay one step ahead of evolving criminal threats.

Australia’s 2018 encryption laws have enabled law enforcement to compel tech companies to grant access to encrypted communications. However, this has sparked a debate over the potential creation of backdoors that could compromise user privacy and safety. Both the debate and government policy responses must recognise that encryption is essential to modern life and that security is key to tech companies’ commercial success. It’s little wonder that achieving a delicate balance between safeguarding privacy and ensuring public safety remains a contentious issue that requires careful navigation.

The Australian government and law enforcement agencies must prioritise ongoing innovation and international collaboration to stay ahead of criminal use of encrypted messaging. Maintaining operational secrecy while maximising intelligence gains is essential to ensuring that authorities can remain proactive in their fight against organised crime. Investment in training and resources for law enforcement agencies will empower them to combat these evolving technologies.

To ensure sustained success, Australia should consider establishing a dedicated task force focused on proactively assessing encrypted messaging apps and investing in training for a new generation of digital investigators. Engaging in ongoing dialogue with technology firms will be crucial, enabling law enforcement to strike a balance between privacy concerns and the necessity of access to encrypted communications during critical investigations.

As we navigate the complexities of organised crime in the digital age, the insights from Operation Kraken should catalyse Australia’s law enforcement community to embrace innovation, foster cooperation and remain agile in the face of emerging challenges. Only through a multifaceted approach can we ensure the safety and security of our communities while effectively countering the threat posed by organised crime.

Artificial intelligence and policing: it’s a matter of trust

From Robocop to Minority Report, the intersection between policing and artificial intelligence has long captured attention in the realm of high-concept science fiction. However, only over the past decade or so has academic research and government policy begun to focus on it.

Teagan Westendorf’s ASPI report, Artificial intelligence and policing in Australia, is one recent example. Westendorf argues that Australian government policy and regulatory frameworks don’t sufficiently capture the current limitations of AI technology, and that these limitations may ‘compromise [the] principles of ethical, safe and explainable AI’ in the context of policing.

My aim in this article is to expand on Westendorf’s analysis of the potential challenges in policing’s use of AI and offer some solutions.

Westendorf focuses primarily on a particular kind of policing use of AI, namely, statistical inferencing used to make (or inform) decisions—in other words, technology that falls broadly into the category of ‘predictive policing’.

While predictive policing applications pose the thorniest ethical and legal questions and therefore warrant serious consideration, it’s important to also highlight other applications of AI in policing. For example, AI can assist investigations by expediating the transcription of interviews and analysis of CCTV footage. Image-recognition algorithms can also help detect and process child-exploitation material, helping to limit human exposure. Drawing attention to these applications can help prevent the conversation from becoming too focused on a small but controversial set of uses. Such a focus could risk poisoning the well for the application of AI technology to the sometimes dull and difficult (but equally important) areas of day-to-day police work.

That said, Westendorf’s main concerns are well reasoned and worth discussing. They can be summarised as being the problem of bias and the problem of transparency (and its corollary, explainability).

Like all humans, police officers can have both conscious and unconscious biases that may influence decision-making and policing outcomes. Predictive policing algorithms often need to be trained on datasets capturing those outcomes. Yet, if algorithms are trained on historical datasets that include the results of biased decision-making, it can result in unintentional replication (and in some cases amplification) of the original biases. Efforts to ensure systems are free of bias can also be hampered by ‘tech-washing’, where AI outputs are portrayed (and perceived) as based solely on science and mathematics and therefore inherently free of bias.

Related to these concerns is the problem of transparency and explainability. Some AI systems lack transparency because their algorithms are closed-source proprietary software. But it can be difficult to render even open-source algorithms explainable—particularly those used in machine learning—due to their complexity. After all, a key benefit of AI lies in its ability to analyse large datasets and detect relationships that are too subtle for the human mind to identify. Making models more comprehensible by simplifying them may require trade-offs in sensitivity, and therefore also in accuracy. Together these concerns are often referred to as the ‘AI black box’ (inputs and outputs are known, but not what goes on in the middle).

In short, a lack of transparency and explainability makes the detection of bias and discriminatory outputs more difficult. This is both an ethical concern and a legal one when justice systems require that charging decisions be understood by all parties to avoid discriminatory practices. Indeed, research suggests that when individuals trust the process of decision-making, they are more likely to trust the outcomes in justice settings, even if those outcomes are unfavourable. Explainability and transparency can therefore be important considerations when seeking to enhance public accountability and trust in these systems.

As Westendorf points out, steps can be taken to mitigate bias, such as pre-emptively coding against foreseeable biases and involving human analysts in the processes of building and leveraging AI systems. With these sorts of safeguards in place (as well as deployment reviews and evaluations), use of AI may have the upshot of establishing built-in objectivity for policing decisions by reducing reliance on heuristics and other subjective decision-making practices. Over time, AI use may assist in debiasing policing outcomes.

While there’s no silver bullet for enhancing explainability, there are plenty of suggestions, particularly when it comes to developing AI solutions to enhance AI explainability. Transparency challenges generated by proprietary systems can also be alleviated when AI systems are owned by police and designed in house.

Yet the need for explainability is only one consideration for enhancing accountability and public trust in the use of AI systems by police, particularly when it comes to predictive policing. Recent research has found that people’s level of trust in the police (which is relatively high in Australia) correlates with their level of acceptance of changes in the tools and technology used by police. In another study, participants exposed to purportedly successful policing applications of AI technology were more likely to support wider police use of such technologies than those exposed to unsuccessful uses, or not exposed to examples of AI application at all. In fact, participants exposed to purportedly successful applications even judged the decision-making process involved to be trustworthy.

This suggests that focusing on broader public trust in policing will be vital in sustaining public trust and confidence in the use of AI in policing, regardless of the degree of algorithmic transparency and explainability. The goal of transparent and explainable AI shouldn’t neglect this broader context.

Reducing illicit drug use in Australia isn’t all about cutting supply   

The development of evidence-based strategies for dealing with illicit drugs has always been challenging for governments. One of the most complicating factors is that a health issue, addiction, has been criminalised to combat those seeking to profit from the misery that it brings. The global criminalisation of the illicit drug trade and drug use reduces the visibility of the scale and scope of the problem.

The covert nature of illegal drug supply chains and their serious and organised crime facilitators then obfuscates all but the most visible impacts. Australian law enforcement’s seizures before, at and after our borders are impressive, but the correlation between these successes and decreased drug availability and consumption has been difficult to measure. Until now.

In early 2017, many of the country’s top police predicted that the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission’s National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program would make surprising discoveries about the scale of our national drug problem. And they were right.

The program involves the analysis of wastewater from treatment plants across Australia. These samples are analysed to identify markers of illicit and licit drugs. With this data, the ACIC has provided an estimate of the quantities of illegal drugs consumed in Australia.

In October, the ACIC released the 14th report of the program. As you’d expect, there are many variances in usage across drugs and locations. The data does, however, provide a robust evidence base for policymakers. It tells the story of whether and how law enforcement operations affect usage rates across different types of drugs. It also shows where the hotspots are in terms of use.

Let’s for a moment consider the use of methamphetamine or ‘ice’. For more than a decade, methamphetamine use has had a devastating health and safety impact on Australian communities from the bush to our cities. The stories from medical professionals, police and family members tell a tragic tale of violence and heartache.

In April 2015, the government established a national ice taskforce to advise on the impacts of ice in Australia and drive the development of a national ice action strategy. The taskforce delivered its final report to the prime minister in October 2015 and it was publicly released in December of that year.

The ACIC’s wastewater monitoring reports show that, despite the best efforts of health professionals and law enforcement, the amount of ice consumed in our community skyrocketed from 2018 to 2020.

This didn’t happen because law enforcement wasn’t doing its job. The ACIC’s illicit drug data report for 2019–20 reveals that law enforcement seized 9,408 kilograms of methamphetamine during that year—up a whopping 1,415% from 2010–11. They also arrested 44,847 alleged offenders, up 322% from 2010–11.

Earlier this year, the multinational Operation Ironside led by the Australian Federal Police resulted in the seizure of 3.7 tonnes of drugs, 104 weapons, $45 million in cash, and assets expected to run into the millions of dollars.

So, what’s the problem? Well, it seems from the latest ACIC report that these operational results are not actually having a marked impact on illicit drug supply or use. Law enforcement’s role in Australia isn’t to seize more drugs but to reduce criminal threats and promote safety and security in our communities.

Report 14 shows that, nationally, the average daily level of methylamphetamine use remained at approximately 40 doses per 1,000 people for December 2020 and April 2021.

Australia’s federal, state and territory governments are still very much resistant to treating illicit drug addiction as a health issue. While that remains the case, they have no better option than to make better use of the National Wastewater Drug Monitoring Program. Now that the program has run for more than three years, its data needs to be used to guide policy decisions on strategies to reduce supply and demand and to cue geographically targeted harm-minimisation efforts.

As a starting point, the federal government should consider adopting total illicit drug consumption, as measured by the wastewater monitoring program, as a key performance measure for its primary law enforcement agencies: the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Border Force and the ACIC. In doing so, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Law Enforcement could undertake an annual inquiry into the effectiveness of law enforcement in reducing the consumption of illicit drugs.

This approach needn’t mean that law enforcement shouldn’t still focus on and measure seizures. Instead, this additional measure will afford government and law enforcement an opportunity to better quantify the effect of these seizures and arrests. Initially, doing so will likely reveal problems with some of our supply-reduction strategies. However, it will have substantial long-term benefits in making our communities safer and more resilient.

Australia needs a Magnitsky Act

Australia’s war against organised crime has hotted up. The arrest of accused drug lord Tse Chi Lop and allegations of large-scale money laundering in Australian casinos have exposed to the public the deep economic connections transnational and organised crime syndicates have established here, and the scale of the threat we face.

The extent of these connections adds urgency to the recent call by the human rights subcommittee of the parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade for Australia to adopt Magnitsky-style legislation.

The US Magnitsky Act began as an effort to hold officials of foreign countries accountable for human rights abuses. The legislation, which applies globally, gives the US government the legal means to the freeze assets of and ban US entry to those it lists for involvement in human rights abuses. Canada and the UK have introduced similar legislation.

The US, Canada and Britain have sanctioned very few people and organisations. Instead, they have reserved Magnitsky powers to assert fundamental tenets of international humanitarian law, such as objections to ethnic genocide, murdering journalists, mass murder and forced labour in prison camps.

Last year, the human rights subcommittee recommended that law enforcement agencies be given similar powers, to boost Australian and international efforts to counter corruption and human rights abuses globally. Though sanctionable actions should indeed be defined broadly, as the report recommends, Magnitsky legislation should be used as a targeted law-enforcement tool to curb the financing, production and importation of narcotics as part of Australia’s regional policing efforts.

If used in the right way, the powers to seize assets and prevent the entry of foreign nationals implicated in organised criminal activity could become a powerful instrument in the fight against the regionalised production and globalised distribution of drugs, and associated money laundering, by transnational organised crime syndicates.

As a targeted law-enforcement tool, Magnitsky legislation could give the Department of Home Affairs, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission and the Australian Federal Police additional options for disrupting and dismantling transnational organised crime groups, especially those being led by an emerging cohort of more innovative and entrepreneurial criminal leaders.

The effects of the recent arrests of Tse and one of his money-laundering chiefs, Chung Chak ‘John’ Lee, would be bolstered if the AFP could use Magnitsky legislation to sanction their known close associates, like syndicate leader ‘Broken Tooth’ Wan Kuok Koi. Broken Tooth is a member of the Chinese Communist Party and senior figure in the 14K triad, a Hong Kong–based criminal organisation. US law enforcement alleges that Broken Tooth has embedded his criminal operations and investments into Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Victoria signed onto a framework on the BRI in 2019. That makes it vital that the AFP have the power to sanction criminal syndicate members and entities that might build profitable connections to the Victorian economy through this agreement, which the US Treasury claims is a strategy already being widely used internationally. Even if BRI business with Victoria happened through the clean side of organised crime networks, that could sustain the criminal side.

The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has assessed Tse’s syndicate, ‘the Company’, as having a ‘well-established network of contacts across many governments as well as legitimate business and company structures, that enables them to mask and support their criminal activities.’ The AFP could use Magnitsky powers to work with the partner agencies in foreign jurisdictions to identify and sanction syndicate members and their contacts. The avenues this would present for seizing assets and blocking funds are extensive, as shown by the US sanctions against the 14K triad leader and affiliates.

Tse himself never entered Australia, yet the Company allegedly engaged in money laundering here. Crown Resorts has been found unsuitable to hold a gaming licence in Sydney due to allegations that criminal syndicates, like the Company, have used its casinos to launder money. The substantial financial and reputational costs of these findings will hopefully prompt all gaming companies in Australia to improve their anti-money-laundering efforts. If the AFP could now freeze the assets of criminal contacts involved in this operation, it would make Australia a more dangerous and costly place for would-be money launderers.

The challenge for governments is that the long-term impacts of Magnitsky-type law must be considered on a case-by-case basis before a decision is made to use them. In the Indo-Pacific, these laws could be perceived regionally as Australia acting as a self-appointed police force and moral arbiter that feels entitled to project domestic legislation beyond its borders.

Australia could use Magnitsky-type legislation as a tool to influence political mechanisms in certain circumstances. The US sanctioned 17 individuals implicated in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018. This clearly announced that Washington would not tolerate the extra-territorial murder of journalists, while allowing the Trump administration to continue leveraging its positive relationship with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman, who approved the capture or kill operation to begin with.

There’s a risk that policymakers could use such laws to assert Australia’s ethical and legal standpoints abroad by sanctioning people and companies extra-territorially, at the expense of relationships through which those standpoints could be more effectively communicated. Confusing politics with law-enforcement tools could damage Australia’s police-to-police ties and reputation in the Indo-Pacific.

Magnitsky-style legislation could be a powerful tool in Australian law enforcement’s armoury to fight organised crime. However, it’s a sharp instrument that needs to be applied carefully to ensure that any actions taken align with and support Australia’s broader foreign affairs policies and strategies. It could also be a timely policy option for Australia’s response to the coup in Myanmar.

The future of police command

Critical incidents, such as the 2014 Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney, evolve rapidly, are inherently ambiguous and may be challenging to define. When they include significant novel aspects (in their scale, complexity or unprecedented nature), they morph from routine emergencies to crises and are unlikely to be resolved using precedent-based approaches. Novelty can be identified by the anomalies that occur when a routine solution proves ineffective or results in an unexpected outcome.

The coronial inquest into the Lindt Cafe siege demonstrated the level of scrutiny that police commanders can expect after a critical incident. This places great pressure on them as they try to manage government and community expectations, which are based on responses to traditional emergency situations that aren’t relevant to the novel problems confronting them during a crisis. One approach to enhancing performance in such environments is to better integrate technology-enabled decision aids like mixed reality into police command.

Police commanders should ideally have the capacity and cognitive ability to frame complex problems and imagine solutions. They need to make high-consequence decisions in temporally constrained environments, during times of great uncertainty. This requires significant cognitive effort as they seek to gain situational awareness and consider possible actions. Time constraints alone can reduce the cognitive resources available to commanders for critical decision-making, which can be further diminished when they’re required to consider highly complex tactical options and authorise the one they believe to be most appropriate and likely to succeed.

Technology can help to reduce constraints and optimise the commander’s cognitive resources by reducing the need to mentally interpret data and simulate outcomes. However, most law enforcement agencies are still primarily operating in an analogue paradigm. Despite exponential increases in the volume of information available to commanders, including real-time video and data streams, the way the information is processed, analysed and presented to them isn’t yet fully optimised. A commander can be overwhelmed by the volume of data, further reducing their ability to make time-pressured decisions.

Emerging mixed-reality technology has the potential to revolutionise police command and control and to better prepare agencies for future challenges. Mixed-reality headsets, which immerse the wearer into a digitally represented scene, could enable commanders at different locations to simultaneously view an incident site, rendered as a 3D image, to rapidly develop situational awareness. They could thus be more fully briefed on options to resolve the incident, including tactical ones, suggested by those on the scene. They would no longer be required to interpret information presented in a 2D format and would be able to use more of their cognitive capacity for decision-making.

Police commanders often mentally simulate the likely actions of offenders before authorising police actions, such as a tactical assault to rescue hostages. War-gaming scenarios are thus tools in decision-making. New artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as artificial neural networks, combined with mixed reality, could allow resolution options to be played out and evaluated, taking into account what’s known about the offender’s skill set.

While AI is faster than approaches such as red-teaming, it currently suffers from potential biases. Research is now underway to address algorithmic bias, and law enforcement agencies will need to ensure that any AI system they use to support command decisions is built using non-biased training data.

Command is a core police capability that needs dedicated investment in the selection, training and continuing professional development of those who are to command. Any tendency to reduce that investment and become over-reliant on guidance from AI systems, effectively removing the human from decision-making, should be resisted.

Key decisions made by police commanders at critical incidents will be subject to comprehensive review after the event. Ideally, this creates an opportunity to learn from the incident, while providing the transparency expected by the community. It’s well recognised that the public’s confidence and trust are integral to policing, and high-profile public inquests, especially those by a coroner, can influence that trust.

Such investigations can suffer from hindsight bias—a factor clearly acknowledged by the inquest into the Lindt Cafe siege. The use of mixed-reality devices has the potential to mitigate some of those impacts on public trust. Each incident in which the technology is used by commanders could be digitally recorded, including imagery and conversations. Members of a review team could then use the technology to examine the points at which key decisions were made. They would be embedded in an environment where they could see and access only the information that was available to the commander at the time of the event. This may provide clearer insight into the rationale behind police commanders’ decisions and enable commanders to be better prepared for future critical incidents.

The challenges facing police commanders are likely to increase in complexity and scope as global strategic trends continue to influence the local operational environment. Those in charge of the training of current and future police commanders should examine the potential benefits of mixed-reality technology.

Overcoming Australia’s fear of whistleblowing

The recent bribery allegations made against an offshore arm of Leighton Holdings in Iraq and Tabcorp in Cambodia shouldn’t be taken lightly in Australia. They come on the back of the Australian Wheat Board (AWB) oil-for-food scandal, and Securency International and Note Printing Australia bribery charges. In the background, Australia has dropped six places in the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index from seventh equal place in 2012 to thirteenth equal in 2015.

The first step in addressing the problem of bribery and corruption is improved safeguards for dobbing-in corrupt officials and those involved in corporate wrongdoing. The bottom line: Australians don’t feel secure in blowing the whistle. That needs to change.

Australia needs a stronger whistleblowing regime. That means we need better protection laws; a third party to report wrongdoing to; cultural change at the organisational and individual levels; and compensation for those suffering retaliation for speaking out.

Surveys have shown that of the 80% of Australian employees who feel ‘personally obliged’ to blow the whistle, only 49% would actually do so. The figure in the public sector isn’t any better—only 33% of Australian federal public servants feel confident to speak out about corruption and wrongdoing. It’s just as troubling to know that only half of those surveyed said they knew where to report corruption.

Having a strong whistleblowing regime has many benefits. First, whistleblowing is a common and effective way for corruption to be uncovered. Second, it complements government corruption detection mechanisms at no extra cost. Third, in the public service whistleblowing can help to ensure that tax money isn’t wasted on fraudulent activities. And in the private sector, it increases productivity and growth.

However, whistleblowing requires comprehensive protection laws. Australia particularly needs to strengthen whistleblower protection in the private sector which is much weaker than in the public sector.

Private sector whistleblowers can be protected under the Corporations Act 2001 only if they meet certain criteria. One is that they must have a current relationship with the company their disclosure is about. So they must be a current officer, employee, contractor or employee of a contractor. Former employees don’t have any legal protection when they come forward.

That’s a real limitation, as people with information about wrongdoing may feel safer in reporting it after they have secured a new job.

Another criteria is that whistleblowers must give their name to the person or authority they are making the disclosure to. Thus, anonymous disclosures or disclosures to third parties, like an MP or the media don’t receive legal protection. This means some whistleblowers may stay silent.

Whistleblowers must also have reasonable grounds to suspect that a law has been breached. This involves a high burden of proof, and likely would involve the whistleblower engaging a lawyer to work that out.

Often employees don’t report wrongdoing due to fears of reprisals, like disciplinary action or potential job loss. They may also be worried about acting against organisational culture, harassment, counter-allegations and a concern that the matter won’t be taken seriously.

The negative experiences of high-profile whistleblowers in Australia such as Brian Hood (Securency International and Note Printing Australlia), Jeff Morris (Commonwealth Bank financial planning), and Toni Hoffman (Dr Jayant Patel case) only add to this perception.  

These problems need to be addressed. A culture change is required, backed up by law.  

A change of culture within organisations is necessary, to one where employees feel comfortable raising issues to management. The right ‘tone from the top’ is crucial. A basic starting point is a clear whistleblowing policy on how matters should be treated.

The appointment of a whistleblower ombudsman is also needed. Having a third-party to report wrong-doing to would encourage those fearing retaliation from supervisors to still come forward without necessarily passing through the chain of command.

Needless to say, anonymity also factors into the effectiveness of whistleblowing protection. It would be helpful to have a crimestoppers-like hotline where anonymous calls can be triaged and investigated.

That, of course, would require a cultural change at the individual level too. Australians need to take the ‘if you see something, say something’ approach from the street to the office.

Enhancing protection against reprisals is also particularly important. Australia can learn a lot from the US, where criminal penalties against those who retaliate against whistleblowers can be imposed.

But punishing retaliators isn’t enough. Australia should again follow the US example, and offer compensation to whistleblowers as well. This proposal already has the support of Australian Securities and Investments Commission chairman Greg Medcraft.

Before the Government commits itself to the creation a new regulatory body or other solutions, any successful anti-corruption strategy should endeavour to overcome the fear of blowing the whistle.