Welcome back from the break! We’ve kicked off this year’s blogging with Rod Lyon on the security landscape in Asia for 2014 and Peter Jennings on lessons from the 1987 white paper. But if you’ve already made your way through those, here are a few more interesting things to read:

First, Fred Kaplan on Slate takes on a New York Times’ editorial calling on President Obama to grant Edward Snowden ‘some form of clemency’. Distinguishing Snowden’s actions from those of Daniel Ellsberg who leaked a top-secret Pentagon study on the Vietnam War, he argues:

But Snowden did much more than [leak documents on the NSA’s domestic surveillance]. The documents that he gave the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman and the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald have, so far, furnished stories about the NSA’s interception of email traffic, mobile phone calls, and radio transmissions of Taliban fighters in Pakistan’s northwest territories; about an operation to gauge the loyalties of CIA recruits in Pakistan; about NSA email intercepts to assist intelligence assessments of what’s going on inside Iran; about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls “worldwide,” an effort that (in the Post’s words) “allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.” In his first interview with the South China Morning Post, Snowden revealed that the NSA routinely hacks into hundreds of computers in China and Hong Kong.

These operations have nothing to do with domestic surveillance or even spying on allies. They are not illegal, improper, or (in the context of 21^st-century international politics) immoral. Exposing such operations has nothing to do with “whistle-blowing.”

Read the rest here.

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The current spat between Australia and Indonesia, now centred around intelligence gathering, is also ensnaring Australia’s management of its maritime domain after Indonesia suspended intelligence cooperation on maritime people smuggling. The Coalition’s asylum seeker policy has an inherent risk of undermining its operational application (PDF, pages 69-72) through its potential to irritate Indonesia. But it might be an early administrative decision of the government that has more serious implications for Australia’s management of its maritime domain.

This is the transfer of the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (ACBPS) from the Attorney General’s portfolio to the control of the Minister for Immigration—another example of policy in this area being driven by reaction to political crisis. Most such changes have paid scant attention to the range of Australia’s maritime interests or to the best ways of managing them (PDF, p14 on).

Managing these interests is complex and difficult because of what I characterised recently as three problems of size. The first is physical, because Australia’s maritime domain is truly vast, with the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) covering 10.4 million square kilometres, 35% more than the Australian land mass. The second is the complexity of the legislative and administrative arrangements (PDF, pages 15–20) that confer authority to manage the maritime domain, with 28 Commonwealth agencies and six generic types of State body playing a role. The third problem is that the agencies responsible for conducting on-water and aerial maritime operations, Border Protection Command (BPC) and Customs’ Maritime Unit, are buried within the vastly larger and more diverse ACBPS. Read more

That Australia spies on Indonesia comes as no particular surprise—most people would assume that our security agencies keep an eye on what is going on in the region. However, what has generated the current furore is not the general picture but rather the specifics that Australia has been monitoring—or at least has made very good attempts to monitor—the private conversations of President Yudhoyono, his wife and his entourage.

People in Australia—up to and including the Prime Minister—who try to shrug this off as business as usual seem to miss a couple of important points. The first question to consider is what could possibly be the benefit to Australian security of monitoring these private conversations? The answer is ‘none’. Secondly, Australian politicians from all sides have repeatedly made the perfectly logical and fair point that Indonesia is a very important friend. In which case, why has this sort of monitoring been taking place? Are we also listening in to the private conversations of John Key, the New Zealand Prime Minister and his wife? In the (hopefully unlikely) event that were to be true, then our agencies are completely out of control and are acting against the national interest by putting at risk a very important relationship. Read more

In a previous post, I detailed a number of recent incidents that have occurred involving Indonesia in the South China Sea, pointing out that the these incidents have occurred out to the furthest extent of China’s ‘nine dash line’ map. While I didn’t address the larger questions of China’s intentions and strategy in the South China Sea in that post (primarily for reasons of space), these larger questions were picked up in a reader’s response by Daniel Grant and are worth a closer look.

These are complex issues that are difficult to address with limited space, but I’ll attempt to condense them in two posts. This one deals with the implications of these incidents for China’s claims in the South China Sea, and the next will look at China’s strategy to enforce these claims in order to protect what it views as its maritime rights and interests in the area.

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This week, I participated in the 39th meeting of the Australian Member Committee of the Council for Security Co-operation in the Asia-Pacific (Aus-CSCAP) in Darwin. This year’s theme was the US ‘rebalance’ and Southeast Asia, with a specific focus on the implications for Australia–Indonesia defence cooperation.

Comprising officials, academics and journalists from both countries, the discussions were open, frank and refreshing. For me, one of the key messages during the meeting was that Indonesia increasingly sees defence cooperation with the US as both a strategic and a tactical asset amid power shifts in Southeast Asia. My clear impression was that, if push comes to shove, Jakarta will side with Washington against Beijing’s attempt to establish a hegemonic position in Southeast Asia. Read more