Tag Archive for: 2024 Independent Intelligence Review

Drifting into danger: will we ever see the independent intelligence review?

The road to hell is apparently paved with good intentions. But often, it’s tarmac laid with thoughtlessness and passivity.

Two years ago the Albanese government described Australia’s immigration policy as broken, owing to unplanned, temporary migration flows since 2005. It claimed this ‘happened without any real policy debate or discussion. It happened not through thoughtful planning and strategy, but by negligence and continental drift.’

Today, a similar drift threatens to break a model of intelligence review, strategic direction and public engagement that has served Australia well for more than two decades.

It’s been more than 210 days since the 2024 independent intelligence review report was given to the prime minister. As noted in The Strategist back on the first anniversary of the review’s commencement (and two and a half months after the review was completed):

The Albanese government did well by instituting this latest review … but the job isn’t finished until the report and recommendations are made public. Then the hard work of implementation and accountability begins.

Back in August 2024 the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet confirmed the report’s receipt before its 30 June 2024 deadline. There’s no public indication of anything abnormal or deficient about the report or its findings—hardly surprising given the eminence of the authors, Heather Smith and Richard Maude. There’s also no hint of a great clash of competing visions or principles to guide our National Intelligence Community (NIC), or of a fundamental intelligence failure requiring remedying, not least given the transformative investments in and fundamental restructuring of the NIC following the last review in 2017.

This only exacerbates frustration with the government’s failure to respond to the review and release a public version of the report. There are two possible explanations. Either it’s timidity or they’re unable to exercise sufficient direction to end this damaging delay.

It bears repeating that the world has not stood still since June 2024—and certainly not since the last inputs into the review, which date to late 2023. Since September 2024 alone we’ve seen civil and military unrest across the globe, including the most audacious intelligence operation in recent history—Mossad’s supply chain attack on Hezbollah—as well as the eruption of antisemitic violence in Australia and the change of administration in Washington.

One interpretation is that for seven months the NIC has been beavering away implementing the classified report. But even this ignores the importance of the public report, including to the NIC itself.

The benefits of public intelligence review reports were outlined in a Strategist article last year.

In short, they enable intelligence reform and transformation, given the NIC’s reliance on the public for workforce recruitment, technology and industry partnerships and social licence. Public reports also help hold government accountable for the implementation of recommendations.

Also, an unclassified version of an otherwise very sensitive and restricted top-secret document is the best way of engaging not just the public but all the NIC’s staff, and officials across the broader bureaucracy.

While Australian voters will make their call at the ballot box later this year, we suspect few votes will turn on this issue alone.  But there is now a much, much bigger problem, which doesn’t just affect the value and future utility of this particular review.

The implication that the Smith-Maude review may never see the light of day places us all on the precipice of a government, albeit without malice aforethought, breaking the system of public intelligence review that has existed in Australia for over 20 years.

Before the 2004 inquiry by diplomat Philip Flood, Australian governments’ understandable but unsustainable historical refusal to engage publicly on intelligence resulted in a series of crisis-response, judicially led inquiries: two Royal Commissions, led by Justice Robert Hope in 1974–77 and 1983–84, and the Samuels-Codd Commission of Inquiry in 1994–95.

Other reviews were also carried out entirely behind closed doors, such as the post-Cold War Richardson and Hollway reviews (both 1992), and the Cook 1994 counter-intelligence inquiry.

It was Flood who gave Australia the significant benefits of intelligence review through scheduled check-ups focussed on the future, and an effective balance between secrecy and openness. Since then, we have had the 2010–11 Cornell-Black review, the 2016–17 L’Estrange-Merchant review and now the Smith-Maude review, as well as the Richardson review of the NIC’s legal framework.

This is an invaluable, internationally unique, bipartisan system that would be sorely missed.

In the 1970s and 1980s, complete nonsense filled an intelligence community-shaped information hole in Australian public life—and that was in a more regimented media ecosystem.

Without the substantive public engagement built into the independent intelligence review system, what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s misinformation hellscape?

Decrypting diversity in Australia’s intelligence community

Under its terms of reference, one of the tasks of the 2024 independent review of Australia’s national intelligence community is to consider whether the NIC’s workforce decision-making reflects ‘a sufficiently strategic response to current and future workforce challenges’. This represents a critical moment to raise longstanding issues about the degree to which our national intelligence agencies represent our nation.

Independent reviews of the NIC have been conducted regularly since the 2004 Flood Review—in 2011, 2017 and now 2024—to ensure oversight and establish the strategic direction for Australia’s national security sector. However, NIC reviews are yet to comprehensively apply a gender or diversity lens to this important work. The 2024 review therefore presents an opportunity to address the diversity challenges that continue to diminish the NIC’s operational effectiveness.

Many indicators paint the NIC as a community invested in diversity and inclusion. Everything from the appointment of Penny Wong as the third consecutive woman to be minister for foreign affairs, to the leadership of Rachel Noble of the Australian Signals Directorate and Kerri Hartland of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, and even general comments by leaders in the NIC about the relevance of diversity to the national security community attest to this.

However, while public interest in diversity evidently exists, it is challenging to gauge the extent to which this translates into the representation, leadership, and experiences of women and minority individuals working in the NIC. One-off accounts, decades old biographies, and the occasionally released workforce statistic or targeted recruitment round does little to convince us that the NIC represents Australia, or that well-recognised workplace issues, particularly in light of Respect at Work, are being effectively dealt with.

Uncovering the state of diversity in the community and whether rhetorical commitments translate into experience is therefore critical, and transparency is a vital first step towards this.

Foresight is central to Australia’s national security sector, creating a competitive advantage over our adversaries. Critically, a diverse intelligence community significantly contributes to this foresight, impacting everything from reducing groupthink to stronger performing teams and improved work cultures. For instance, research on the US intelligence community argues that diversity limits unpredictability by forecasting multiple futures and lessens the impact of shared biases. More recently, the RAND Corporation has highlighted that factors like cultural diversity and neurodiversity can strengthen national security organisations.

Yet women and minoritised groups are still under-represented in the NIC and analysis of publicly available data highlights progress in recent years has stagnated. Our situation also pales in comparison to US counterparts, with the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence publishing annual demographic reports on everything from gender to ethnicity and disability across 19 intelligence agencies. This goes beyond basic statistics to report on leadership, security clearance application and success rates, representation across types of work, professional development, scholarships, and student opportunities.

Australia’s reporting transparency on workforce demographics lags significantly behind our major ally. Some NIC agencies, like Defence, report data annually through women in the ADF reports. Others, like Home Affairs, report data through their annual reports. However, a large swathe of the NIC, including agencies, publicly reports little to no data on workforce demographics at all. This is a problem.

In our research on diversity in the NIC, approaches to diversity and inclusion were inconsistent among agencies. While some agencies had robust flexible work arrangements, they had no publicly available sexual harassment policies. A lack of transparency in even viewing critical workplace policies around these topics may inhibit the sector’s ability to recruit new talent and provide little public oversight of the support it does provide to employees.

Although the Protective Security Policy Framework outlines how official information can be shared, it and other frameworks are noticeably silent on under what circumstances employment data can be reported. That hampers access to vital information on diversity, equity and social inclusion in the NIC.

Elsewhere, we have argued that mechanisms such as security classifications can create an environment of obscurity and non-transparency. A classification halo-effect limits what is and can be known about people’s experiences in intelligence, where even non-classified information may be withheld from the public. This includes everything from demographic diversity in recruitment to retention, leadership and representation, harassment, power, resourcing and more.

The lack of transparency on this issue is not just out of line with our key alliance and AUKUS partners’ practices and the rest of federal government, it is also out of line with the evidence on what can help drive greater workforce diversity. This includes a greater degree of transparency needed to appeal to a wide range of prospective employees in an increasingly tight talent market, and in lieu of little other material being made public on what working in the NIC involves.

We argue that Australians ‘need to know’ that our national security sector is operating in its best capacity, is representative and ethical. Public trust in Australia’s government institutions is declining and transparency regarding diversity, equity and social inclusion is an area which could improve Australians’ perception of the NIC. While there is certainly a strong need for secrecy in most areas of the NIC’s work, diversity is an area where there can and should be greater openness.

Prominent figures in the NIC share this sentiment. Noble has said our spy agencies cannot continue to operate in the shadows. Similarly, ASIO director general Mike Burgess describes the importance of transparency and its usefulness for recruitment. These statements support the view that transparency is integral to the NIC’s operation.

With the review underway, it’s critical that the NIC reviews what it can—and must—do about diversity. Transparent data on NIC workforce diversity should be made publicly in some form.

Additionally, in light of AUKUS, there’s a need to understand US and UK vetting frameworks to ensure alignment on diversity and inclusion goals and targets.

In Australia’s increasingly complex security environment it’s apparent that a lack of diversity threatens national security. To meet the nation’s needs and protect its interests, it’s imperative that workplace diversity and inclusion is at the forefront of the review.

The 2024 independent review is the first such review co-led by a woman. Let’s hope this representation flows through in gender and diversity-responsive recommendations that the NIC clearly needs.

Putting global catastrophic risk on the Australian intelligence community’s radar

The 2024 independent review of Australia’s national intelligence community has kicked off. It will focus on the 10 agencies that comprise the NIC and comes at a time of increasing complexity and uncertainty in Australia’s strategic environment.

Among the review’s terms of reference is a direction to consider the NIC’s ‘preparedness in the event of regional crisis and conflict’ and whether the NIC is positioned effectively to respond to the evolving security environment.

In our view, the review should demand special attention to one particularly complex problem: global catastrophic risk.

Global catastrophic risk, and its crueller cousin existential risk, are threats that could cause harm on a horrific scale. Nuclear winter, engineered pandemics, extreme climate change, space weather. Millions—even billions—could be killed. Recently, artificial intelligence experts have called out the extinction risk from AI.

In its 2020 Global Trends report, the US intelligence community warned the country’s new president, Joe Biden, and his administration of these concerns, made increasingly pressing by technological acceleration:

Technological advances may increase the number of existential threats; threats that could damage life on a global scale challenge our ability to imagine and comprehend their potential scope and scale, and they require the development of resilient strategies to survive. Technology plays a role in both generating these existential risks and in mitigating them. Anthropomorphic risks include runaway AI, engineered pandemics, nanotechnology weapons, or nuclear war.

It’s time for Australia’s intelligence community to be equally proactive.

The pathways to global catastrophe might seem unlikely. But that’s the role of intelligence: to identify, analyse and warn about threats to global and national security. Should the NIC assess global catastrophic risk, it will see that the risk is uncomfortably high.

Take nuclear. A full-scale nuclear war between, say, the US and Russia could lead to the deaths of about five billion people within two years. An aggregate of expert estimates puts the annual probability of a nuclear war at around 1%. The same figure was produced by a recent quantitative risk assessment. That’s roughly a coin toss’s chance out to 2100.

Or take extreme climate change. Surprisingly little work has been done to assess catastrophic climate-change scenarios. The three most relevant studies put the chance of a catastrophic climate-change event at between 5% and 20%. The environmental, economic and security consequences in a world where warming is significantly higher than the 1.5°C target remain extremely uncertain.

Or take engineered pathogens. Advances in biological engineering could increasingly empower less skilled actors to synthesise novel diseases that are both highly lethal and highly infectious. In 2022, a world-leading bioengineering expert assessed that ‘within a decade, tens of thousands of skilled individuals will be able to access the information required for them to single-handedly cause new pandemics’. Biorisk experts forecast an 8% chance that a genetically engineered pathogen could kill more than a hundred million people by 2050. AI might accelerate those timelines.

This scale of risk is falling through the gaps. Australia, unlike many of its peers, doesn’t have a robust national risk assessment and it’s unclear if any NIC agency is giving the risk the attention it deserves. The clock is ticking on all of these threats. In many cases, policy interventions or well-researched response plans could be relatively straightforward and highly effective. The necessary first step is assessment.

The intelligence review is the perfect opportunity to put global catastrophic risk on the radar and to correct course.

The 2018 legislation that governs the Office of National Intelligence is silent about whether these critical considerations are within its scope. One option is amending the act to explicitly include global catastrophic risk as a focus area. A simple addition to section 7— which sets out the duties of ONI—along the lines of ‘and global catastrophic risk that would threaten Australia’s survival, security and prosperity’ would ensure that the NIC doesn’t short-change these risks by focusing only on short-term requirements. Equally, a finding or recommendation that these risks are in scope for the NIC could catalyse action.

Going further, an extreme global threats mission within ONI could work across the NIC to collect data on, analyse and monitor these risks. A recurring ONI-led national assessment of global catastrophic risk would track the trends and strategic dynamics that could lead to global catastrophe. ONI could also lead a Five Eyes working group, including collaborating with the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which is beginning to prepare its next Global Trends report.

Regardless of the mechanism, NIC agencies must focus on pathways to, scenarios for and contributors to global catastrophic risk. Immediate priorities should be assessments of the impacts of AI on nuclear stability, AI-enabled cyber weapons, advanced autonomous weapons, geomagnetic storms on critical infrastructure, and engineered pathogens. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation should track and assess the catastrophic risk emanating from domestic non-state actors and the potential for increasingly available AI and biotechnology tools to boost terrorist capability.

Intelligence is critical for helping policymakers navigate the future, which is at increasing risk of a global catastrophe. The NIC must be Australia’s eyes and ears.

Australia’s intelligence community must adapt to stay ahead of the game

The next independent review of Australia’s intelligence community received welcome funding in this month’s federal budget. That should put Canberra on track to meet the five- to seven-yearly schedule set by the post-Iraq Flood review in 2004, which established regular intelligence community assessments rather than relying on post-mortems.

While there’s been no intelligence failure, the strategic context is shifting rapidly, with rising global instability, Moscow’s war in Europe and an increasingly aggressive Beijing. At the same time, we have the growing abuse of technology by authoritarian regimes and the spectre of Australia’s largest trading partner and closest ally seeking to technologically decouple.

A general check-up geared to confirm the status quo will be insufficient. The review will need to grapple with some revolutionary changes already happening as well as those on the horizon, foremost among them technological game-changers such as generative artificial intelligence and the enormous growth in open-source opportunities beyond what was foreseen at the time of the last review in 2017.

That will create two imperatives. First, the intelligence community, expert at acquiring and understanding secrets (expressed so well by the Australian Signals Directorate’s motto of ‘reveal their secrets, protect our own’), needs to continue to adapt to the new realities of open-source intelligence, known as OSINT. Democracies have, on the whole, slipped behind authoritarian countries in exploiting the rapid expansion of publicly available information.

Second, and equally important, we cannot make the mistake of thinking OSINT can solve all problems and let our covert intelligence capabilities take a back seat or even wither.

We need to do both, and do them well, because the nations whose intelligence agencies and governments are best able to distinguish fact from fiction, and derive quality from the quantity of information, will gain an upper hand in the sharpening strategic competition we face over the coming decades.

Like Moore’s law in computing power, the amount of information being created and consumed worldwide is nearly doubling every two years. There’s a corresponding increase in disinformation and misinformation, which is one reason why we need to excel at identifying, aggregating and assessing the near-boundless quantity of information available online and turning it into quality analysis.

Outfits like Bellingcat and our own Australian Strategic Policy Institute have shown how OSINT can be used to expose globally significant crimes and misconduct, from uncovering Russian skulduggery over the past decade to mapping Beijing’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

However, there is a risk of democratic hubris when it comes to OSINT. The West has shown the tendency in the past to mistakenly assume that greater connectivity equals greater openness and that this means the technological chips are necessarily going to fall the way of freedom.

The Economist has written that the ‘emerging era of open-source intelligence’ offers ‘cause for fresh hope’ that authoritarians might have the narrative pried away from their control. The magazine boldly declared OSINT to be ‘a welcome threat to malefactors and governments with something to hide’.

The problem is, the West has had these excitable notions before, first misjudging the possibility of controlling the internet as akin to ‘nailing jello to a wall’—in the words of former US president Bill Clinton—and then making the same mistake with social media after the Arab Spring briefly suggested that network platforms would be too anarchic for authoritarians to corral.

In fact, Beijing and Moscow quietly watched events unfold and set about building apparatuses that have proven our optimism to be completely misplaced.

Consider the ways open-source information about democratic societies has already been weaponised against us—from Russia’s election interference in the 2016 US election (which still has America gripped by division) to disinformation and conspiracy theories on Covid-19 vaccines.

To counter these authoritarian regimes and respond with our own innovation, greater investment in new skills and—yes, inevitably—new resources will be needed, building on the enhancements made to intelligence agencies in the March 2022 and May 2023 budgets.

Without this commitment to continuous evolution, Western intelligence agencies could fall further behind adversaries who have for years been adapting—including using methods that are alien or unacceptable to us, such as a military–civil fusion model in which the state owns, operates and directs civil society.

While vital, development of open-source capabilities should not be done at the expense of, or by offsetting, secret intelligence capabilities. OSINT and secret intelligence are not interchangeable; they best work hand in hand.

If anything, the abundance of OSINT adds to the work of secret intelligence collection and analysis. In order to identify information and disinformation, to separate truth from errors, and sometimes to decipher ‘faction’ (the blend of fact and fiction), OSINT must be complemented and calibrated by secret intelligence.

We need secrets to do three things: confirm what is in open source, identify and attribute open-source disinformation, and reveal what simply isn’t in the public domain.

Secrets are not redundant when they confirm what is already in the open. Learning that what a government says publicly is what it actually believes in private provides critical insight when trust is otherwise low.

Secrets can also be wielded. US declassification of intelligence ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine served many purposes. It created doubt in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s mind, likely delayed his original timeline and prevented him from controlling the narrative as he had done so well in the past.

None of that would have been possible without first collecting secrets. As British diplomat Roderic Braithwaite once observed: ‘Secret intelligence is needed to combat secretive adversaries.’

In a digital age in which technology is at the heart of strategic competition, and in which much of the innovation is taking place in the private rather than the government sector, the coming intelligence review will need to keep the intelligence community at the forefront of the most cutting-edge capabilities.

That competition is not limited to major-power rivalry between Beijing and Washington. It’s a contest in which regional powers like Australia have an active interest and must play their parts.

To meet this responsibility, our government must have a decision-making edge over its foreign rivals and will therefore need Australian intelligence to be at the top of its game on both open-source and secret intelligence.