Tag Archive for: Policing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch the launch webinar here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Australia-China law enforcement cooperation

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

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

Opportunities abound abroad: optimising our criminal intelligence system overseas

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

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

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

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

Agenda for Change 2016: Strategic choices for the next government

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The defence of Australia’s interests is a core business of federal governments. Regardless of who wins the election on July 2, the incoming government will have to grapple with a wide range of security issues. This report provides a range of perspectives on selected defence and national security issues, as well as a number of policy recommendations.

Contributors include Kim Beazley, Peter Jennings, Graeme Dobell, Shiro Armstrong, Andrew Davies, Tobias Feakin, Malcolm Davis, Rod Lyon, Mark Thomson, Jacinta Carroll, Paul Barnes, John Coyne, David Connery, Anthony Bergin, Lisa Sharland, Christopher Cowan, James Mugg, Simon Norton, Cesar Alvarez, Jessica Woodall, Zoe Hawkins, Liam Nevill, Dione Hodgson, David Lang, Amelia Long and Lachlan Wilson.

ASPI produced a similar brief before the 2013 election. There are some enduring challenges, such as cybersecurity, terrorism and an uncertain global economic outlook. Natural disasters are a constant feature of life on the Pacific and Indian Ocean rim.

But there are also challenges that didn’t seem so acute only three years ago such as recent events in the South China Sea, North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs, and ISIS as a military threat and an exporter of global terrorism.

The incumbent for the next term of government will have to deal with these issues.

Launch Video

Special Report Issue 17 – The thin green line: Climate change and Australian policing

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This report examines the implications of climate change for Australia’s police forces and officers.

The report has a number of recommendations including the creation of an information hub and the development of risk assessments of the locations that will be most affected by climate change as part of a multi-agency strategic approach to climate change adaptation.

Tag Archive for: Policing

Cleo Smith, Gabby Petito and viral crime on social media

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The abduction and extraordinary rescue of Cleo Smith in Western Australia has played out as a dramatic and ultimately heart-warming story of dogged police work and a little girl returned to her family. For hundreds of thousands of social media users, however, her disappearance became a kind of true-crime whodunnit in which they could play detective in real time.

Earlier this year, the case of 22-year-old American woman Gabby Petito went viral on social media. Her disappearance, the discovery of her body, the vanishing of her fiancé, Brian Laundrie, and the finding of his remains were picked up, pored over, repackaged and consumed as entertainment by millions of social media users across multiple channels.

On TikTok, mediums and tarot readers declared that they could sense not only that Petito was dead (before her body was found) but how she was murdered. On YouTube, content creators made daily video updates about the case, and on Facebook, groups with tens of thousands of members, and in some cases hundreds of thousands, speculated and exchanged theories about what happened and who was responsible. Books about Petito are already available on Amazon and Etsy, people are selling ‘Gabby Petito’-branded merchandise and even items accusing the Laundrie family of being involved in Petito’s murder. Petito was a small-scale aspiring Instagram influencer during her life, but her account gained over 1.2 million new followers after her death.

While the attention on Cleo Smith’s case had not reached the fever-pitch surrounding Petito, the same dynamics were emerging. Multiple Facebook groups dedicated to the four-year-old were set up, one with over 60,000 members by the time she was found. On Twitter, harassment campaigns were launched against Cleo’s parents by accounts asserting that the couple had murdered their daughter and alleging that they were engaged in other crimes as well. A TikTok tarot reader declared that Cleo was dead, just like in Petito’s case.

In some instances, the same people were spreading this misinformation. As fewer developments occurred in the Petito case, the social media machine looked for new fuel. Posts about Cleo were shared into Petito Facebook groups, and influencers who’d built a following talking about Petito incorporated updates on the Smith case.

Many have linked these online subcultures’ treatment of real crimes as a kind of hobby with the rise in popularity of the true-crime entertainment genre, in which audiences are taken through the gory details of real crimes and often encouraged to see themselves as detectives. But Petito’s case was an ongoing investigation, not a polished Netflix docuseries.

Intense, prurient interest in criminal cases isn’t new, but the role of social media platforms adds new and powerful dynamics.

Once, a disappearance or a death might have interested only a local or national audience, but social media has erased any boundaries on who can engage with a case. A significant number of those creating content about Cleo were American. The people at the centre of a case—investigators, families, witnesses and anyone who may fall under suspicion—are put under an intense spotlight.

Algorithms help social media companies curate and amplify information to can keep users on their platforms by feeding them content they’re likely to engage with. When, as an experiment, I followed one of the largest Gabby Petito Facebook pages, Facebook instantly recommended that I follow several other Petito pages, the page for ‘Dog the Bounty Hunter’, pages for several other missing women and a page for true-crime enthusiasts. The platform actively encourages users to fall deeper and deeper into such content.

Social media platforms use algorithms to heighten a conversation’s intensity by amplifying the most engaging content—often the most extreme or incendiary. We’ve seen the impact that can have on conspiracy theory movements like QAnon, which (while it has many contributing factors) has been powerfully shaped by algorithmic amplification. When you take that dynamic and apply it to an ongoing criminal investigation, it’s likely that the most extreme theories about how the crime may have been committed and who may have been responsible will gain traction.

Beyond the mechanics of the social media platforms are social dynamics within the ‘communities’ these processes have created. Many social media influencers built a following around their Gabby Petito content. Feeding that audience meant creating more content and competing with rivals to put forward the most engaging theories and information and speculation about Petito’s death. That got harder as Petito updates dried up, which probably drove some to pivot towards Cleo Smith and missing Californian woman Heidi Planck.

Once social media communities have enough people invested in keeping them going, they develop their own momentum. That appears to be happening in the community which started with the Petito case.

While not every investigation will receive such attention, where it does happen it’s likely to affect how police, welfare bodies and other parties approach the case.

Global harassment and abuse may create a need for additional support for family members or witnesses subjected to vicious speculation, as were the parents of Cleo Smith. The intense harassment and abuse of Brian Laundrie’s family included protesters camping outside their home and a woman with a bullhorn shouting at them during the search and after the discovery of his body. The parents said they wouldn’t have a funeral for their son, and police pleaded with the protesters to go home and leave the family to grieve in peace for at least one night. That underscores the threat to the mental health, wellbeing and reputation of anyone linked to the case.

Along with mental health support, families may need practical assistance to adjust privacy settings on social media and lock down their digital footprints. Police officers may also become targets.

Managing the sheer volume of public tip-offs and sifting through them to find potentially useful information is likely to be challenging for investigators. Another impact may occur when police are narrowing in on a suspect but don’t wish to alert the person that they’re under investigation. If the target’s name starts to trend on social media, or if sensitive information is published about investigators’ activities and movements, that could alert the suspect to destroy evidence or change behaviour.

Then there’s the role of social media platforms. While speculation about criminal cases and disappearances is well within the bounds of free speech, it’s reasonable to consider whether platforms should prevent their algorithms from driving users down ghoulish rabbit holes or amplifying poorly founded speculation about whether an individual may be a murderer to millions of people around the world. It’s worth considering whether measures applied in other contexts, such as preventing relevant hashtags (or people’s names) from trending, and turning off recommendations for related groups and pages, should be implemented here.

At the heart of this phenomenon are real human tragedies. The transmutation of the suffering of people like the Smith and Petito families into social media content for the dissection of true-crime hobbyists raises a range of practical questions, but it should also spark a deeper ethical conversation about the consumption of tragedy as entertainment.

What does social cohesion mean in Australia?

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Our basis for thinking about social cohesion in Australia continues to be embedded in traditional multiculturalism. It is yet to catch up with the digital world where cyberhate, foreign interference and violent extremism thrive.

Social cohesion combines with economic prosperity to drive a secure and resilient nation. The benefits are significant; reduced economic isolation and economic exclusion, and enhanced economic participation are just a few of them.

Inclusion and social cohesion have been described as the ‘the bonding between people and groups or “glue” that binds people in positive relationships’. These bonds are a commonly invoked theme in regional communities, but loneliness is increasing in our high-density cities. This is apparent as we navigate our way through the Covid-19 pandemic and the increasing concern that we’re becoming more distant as we deal with the resultant sensory overload.

The Australian Human Rights Commission defines social cohesion in the context of a society that ‘works towards the wellbeing of all its members, fights exclusion and marginalisation, creates a sense of belonging, promotes trust and offers its members the opportunity of upward mobility’.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison frames things differently. In his address to the OECD in June, he said our ‘economic model as market based economies, business led economies, is what enables social cohesion to be most successful’. And he told participants at a multicultural roundtable last October that ‘if we focus on the things that actually enable communities to succeed and individuals to succeed, then multiculturalism and social cohesion is the by-product of that’. Morrison went on to emphasise that low English-language capability can be an impediment to economic and social participation.

This is a multicultural framing from the past but one that is consistently reinforced through the government’s immigration messaging.

The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping social cohesion survey reports provide details of attitudes in Australia towards specific national groups. In the 2013 survey, 13% of respondents indicated negative views of Chinese nationals; by July 2020, the proportion had increased to 47%. While negative views of Iraqi and Sudanese nationals were higher at 49% and 56%, the rise in negative views of Chinese nationals was considerable. It’s also significant that 60% of respondents to the July 2020 survey agreed that immigrants should be expected to adopt ‘Australian values’.

We know that the link between social cohesion and economic prosperity is strong. We experience it as second- and third-order impacts of defence spending, particularly in remote parts of the country, and we know how it can achieve ‘peace, stability and prosperity’ through a strengthened democracy and enhanced resilience.

However, some claim that aiming to achieve social cohesion sets up barriers to free speech.

Around 62% of Australians use social media daily. The small number of people and groups engaging in hate speech or messaging of an extreme or violent nature through Facebook, Twitter and other platforms know that they can have a fast and devastating impact. They’d argue that they are exercising their right of free speech.

Violent extremism is on the rise and more visible given the ease of engagement in a digital world. Extreme messaging is reaffirmed through online ‘echo chambers’ and can desensitise individuals to violent messages and extreme ideology and imagery.

However, Australia also continues to link social cohesion with countering violent extremism programs. In fact, these programs are generally described as ‘broad-based social cohesion measures through to rehabilitation of terrorist offenders’.

ASPI’s Danielle Cave and Jake Wallis recently highlighted that disinformation and cyber-enabled foreign interference target the fissures of social cohesion in democracies. They acknowledged recent efforts to rebuild capability to counter foreign interference but said governments are struggling with a ‘different set of complicated challenges from online attribution and enforcement, to protecting citizens from harassment and threats from foreign actors’.

The Australian Human Rights Commission has posed the question about whether it’s possible for democratic societies to ‘contain diverse populations while still maintaining harmony’. The ultimate goal, of course, is to (at least) maintain, if not enhance, social cohesion.

So how should Australia frame social cohesion now and into the future? And how do we ensure that it is prioritised in its own right and not merely included as an input to economic prosperity?

ASPI’s John Coyne noted recently in The Strategist that governments need to ‘develop a social-cohesion initiative dealing directly with the divisive impacts of increased economic inequality as well as the compromises made in responding to Covid-19’.

An alternative view is offered by Andrew Markus in research he carried out with the Scanlon Foundation which outlined five domains for social cohesion in Australia. They are ‘belonging’ to build pride, ‘worth’ to provide satisfaction, ‘social justice and equity’ to give economic opportunity, ‘participation’ for political engagement, and ‘acceptance and rejection’ as setting levels of discrimination.

While these domains provide an opportunity to measure social cohesion beyond the traditional multicultural dimensions, they don’t provide guidance on how much ‘free speech’ is appropriate and helpful for a democratic society.

Unkind cuts will hinder police work

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In February, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner, Andrew Colvin, told the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee that he faced a supply and demand challenge at a time of budget cuts. ‘The demand for our services is increasing, the crime environment is increasing, and like any police commissioner I have to make sure that I appoint my resources as best I can against that demand,’ Commissioner Colvin said.

This week Colvin provided further frank and fearless advice to the committee. The $204 million being cut from his budget by efficiency dividends over the next four years may result in the scaling back of enforcement activities targeted at gangs, drugs and corruption. He said he wouldn’t assume that there’d be a reduction in crime rates, but there’d be changes in the types of crimes police had to deal with. ‘And there’s always more crime than we can deal with.’

The difficult decisions that Colvin faces have real effects on community safety, but they’re made tougher by funding cuts. We should expect better from a tough-on-security Turnbull government.

The cost of policing is rising dramatically. Today, police face a complex environment in which a vast array of new technological skills and specialisations are needed, from forensic and data scientists to specialist victim liaison officers. These skills cost money.

Drones, artificial intelligence and ‘big data’, and a myriad of other technologies are also changing the nature of policing. For the AFP to remain effective, it must be able to innovate through investments in technology. But this will hardly be possible for years to come given its budget position.

The AFP’s financial woes originate from the duel effects of lapsing funding agreements and an efficiency dividend that cuts deeply. Since 1987, this dividend has been an annual percentage reduction in each Commonwealth department and agency’s budget.

The dividend initially did what it was intended to do: it reduced inefficient expenditure in non-operational areas within agencies, which was long overdue.

But as efficiency improved and the number of available non-operational cuts decreased, decision-makers inevitably had to make cuts in operational areas. These cuts have become commonplace, even in agencies such as the AFP.

The 2009 independent federal audit of police capabilities, ‘New Realities: National Policing in the 21st Century’ by Roger Beale AO, noted ‘a series of ad hoc budget and capability initiatives taken by government, often to respond to crises, has left the AFP with the legacy of a seriously disjointed budgetary framework’. Beale also noted that these budget arrangements ‘inhibit flexibility in responding to changing priorities as well as long term planning for capital, equipment and its workforce’. But little has changed.

In 2015 the Australian government released the ‘Counter-Terrorism Machinery Review’. To the surprise of few, the review reported that security agencies had identified risks to national security outcomes if their base funding continued to be eroded.

The review’s authors provided an assessment of the effects of the efficiency dividend in terms of frontline staff reductions and diminished collection and analytical capabilities. They recommended that the AFP be exempted from the dividend. It wasn’t.

The dividend remains, and it has had very tangible negative effects on Australia’s police capability. The AFP’s network of international liaison officers, once described as the ‘jewel in the crown’ of Australian law enforcement, is receding at an alarming rate, with drastic reductions in the number of police operating overseas. And this can be linked to the pressures on the police to make the cuts required to meet the efficiency dividend.

Arguably, government needs to reconsider the recommendations of the 2015 ‘Counter-Terrorism Machinery Review’ and remove the burden of broad efficiency dividends from law enforcement agencies. Secondly, it needs to reconsider Beale’s findings, and make a consistent, long-term financial commitment to domestic security and law enforcement.

One solution could be to establish a minimum law enforcement commitment as a percentage of Australia’s gross domestic product. The government has done that in the case of Defence by setting a target of 2% of GDP by 2020–21.

If the funding issue isn’t resolved, in four years we’ll have a smaller and less effective AFP. Unless crime rates drastically decline, we’ll be less safe as a result.