Director-General's CEPS Keynote Speech

Director-General of Security Address to

Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security

International Conference

8 October 2010

Hyatt Hotel, Canberra

I have been asked to speak today about the nexus of Australian security and intelligence. As the head of an Organisation whose business – and raison d'être – is security intelligence, both subjects are a somewhat necessary preoccupation of mine, and the other officers of ASIO.

The nexus is simple: good intelligence contributes to enhanced security decision-making, both at a strategic and a tactical or operational level – in the Cabinet Room or on the battlefield, at the negotiating table, in police headquarters or even by individual citizens deciding about travel overseas.  An intelligence apparatus that improves your ability to make decisions on the basis of well-informed assessments about the capabilities and intentions of those who may in some way threaten our nation, its citizens or interests, has long been recognised as a real advantage.

Recognised for how long?  The great Chinese strategist Sunzi wrote sometime between the 5th and 8th century BC that “the enlightened ruler and the wise general will use the highest intelligence of the army for the purposes of spying, and thereby achieve the greatest results.”

In other words, the business of espionage and intelligence has been around for a very long time.  If it did not add value, people would not still be putting so much effort into the intelligence business.  In short, I consider an effective intelligence community to be a national asset.

The Defence White Paper 2009 described national security as being concerned “with ensuring Australia's freedom from attack or the threat of attack, maintaining our territorial integrity and promoting our political sovereignty, preserving our hard-won freedoms, and sustaining our fundamental capacity to advance economic prosperity for all Australians.”

Sir David Omand, a former Permanent Secretary of the British Home Office and Cabinet Office, described security as a key objective of public policy:

“national security today should be defined as a state of trust on the part of the citizen that the risks to everyday life, whether from man-made threats or impersonal hazards, are being adequately managed to the extent that there is confidence that normal life can continue.“ [1]

Good intelligence is essential to achieving these two conceptions of security: the effective management of external threats both to the integrity and safety of our nation and to our way of life.

What do I mean by intelligence? In my organisation the term refers to a process that involves the collection of individual pieces of raw, unevaluated information, often acquired covertly; the evaluation and analysis of that information as to its reliability or plausibility; and the assembling and weighing up of that information against other relevant information to produce intelligence assessments that help inform decision-making on issues of national security as defined in the ASIO Act (1979).

Role of ASIO

ASIO is Australia’s national security – or security intelligence – service. A national security intelligence organisation has a significant role in contributing to that “state of trust” Sir David Omand mentioned. At its core, the purpose of security intelligence is relatively straightforward: to provide a dedicated capability to help Australia defend against activities deemed to threaten seriously our social cohesion, the institutions and processes of our democracy, our national secrets, the lives and safety of our citizens, or their freedom to make independent choices within the limits of our laws.

ASIO’s responsibilities cover challenges to our nation’s security from a range of sources which can put institutions of state, people, economic assets and technology at risk. These challenges include espionage, foreign interference, terrorism, politically motivated violence, border violations, cyber attack and, possibly, organised crime.

ASIO is required to identify, investigate and advise government on threats to Australia’s national security, wherever these threats arise – at home or overseas.

This defensive effort will necessarily include the covert collection of information on Australians or within Australia on matters relevant to security – regardless of whether or not a crime has been committed or suspected. It is through this intelligence collection – and later analysis – that we begin to understand the security environment, and the threats within it – and what to do about it.

This seems straight forward enough. Yet, while we broadly understand the concepts of security, popular understanding of the concepts of intelligence is more mixed and bedeviled by misconceptions.

Some of us see intelligence as frequently unreliable conjecture, or wishful thinking, perhaps slanted to serve a partisan political purpose. And there no doubt have been examples of that over the centuries. Some see it with all the romantic delusions of the avid reader of spy novels, giving succor to the Walter Mitty in all of us. Others are deeply skeptical about information obtained in secret and not always able to be subjected to the withering analysis of public scrutiny. Yet others expect intelligence assessments should be incontrovertible truth, able to predict every eventuality, and are scathingly critical when this proves not to be case. For some it is axiomatic that every man-made disaster or terrorist incident is simply yet another intelligence blunder.

Indeed, in this last respect, it is one of the truisms of the intelligence business that intelligence failures are more widely known, and reported as such, than intelligence successes which, by their very nature, must remain secret.

It is important, too, to understand that even the best intelligence services in the world can rarely predict absolutely the precise time and location of the next mass casualty attack, or whether a suspect will actually go through with plans to conduct such an attack. It is the nature of the intelligence function that security based on intelligence alone will never be absolute.

The first thing to say about good intelligence is that, to be any use, it has to be predictive. We want it to tell what may happen, usually so that we can prevent it – rather than to tell us what has happened so that we can prosecute the perpetrators. Therein lies a key difference between the security intelligence function and that large part of the law enforcement function which investigates and prosecutes crime.

Because its main function is predictive, intelligence can at times be very subjective. It frequently deals with reasonable probability rather than absolute certainty. Yet, because national security and the lives of our citizens are so important, the Director-General of Security is required to make calls on the identification and pre-emption of threats according to a reasonable assessment of probability based on the intelligence available. In doing so, he is aware of the consequences of getting it wrong.

A second characteristic of intelligence is the covert nature of much of the intelligence business. It goes without say, "We need secret intelligence against secretive enemies."[2]

Intelligence is a business designed to collected and interpret all possible information on a particular topic, including information its owners may not want us to have – be they foreign governments, terrorists, purveyors of weapons of mass destruction or common criminals.

So a good deal of intelligence work deals with secrets and is conducted in secret – using secret means to obtain secrets. That means running sources covertly to collect information, intercepting communications, bugging or surveilling persons of interest and investigations conducted largely in secret.

We need ongoing secrecy not simply to avoid alerting the subjects of our security investigations, but also to protect both our specific sources and our operational methods. To be effective our officers should remain as anonymous as possible. Most important is our ability to protect the identities of our sources or the provenance of our intelligence information (some of which may come from foreign partners). Secret sources will quickly dry up if they think we cannot protect them. Such is the nature of the business that human sources risk serious retribution if, to use well-understood jargon, they are “blown”.

Of course, intelligence agencies are not the only ones who need to protect sources. The Australian media is keen to see enshrined in law the right to keep its own sources secret. At the same time, the media also has to grapple with its own variations on the theme. Should it publish the identities of the secret sources of national security intelligence operations, thereby putting the lives of those sources at risk - as we saw recently in the Wikileaks saga?

A third element of the intelligence business is the concept of risk management. We manage risk in our collection activities, the risks of discovery, the risks to our sources, the risks involved in ensuring we achieve the right balance between the rights of privacy and freedoms of an individual Australian and the rights of the Australian people to be safeguarded against that person conducting an act of terrorism, or sabotage or espionage against us.

ASIO and the Law

Australian Governments, certainly since 1979, have sought to fulfill their dual responsibilities for the protection of the nation and the lives of its citizens and for the protection of civil liberties. In terms of the covert security intelligence function, governments have sought to do this in a number of complementary ways.

Given that much of the work of ASIO is conducted covertly, in secret by people who by law cannot be named publicly, the Organization is necessarily governed by very precise and prescriptive legislation, the ASIO Act of 1979. Through this Act, Australians have been given a legal and moral guarantee that their intelligence agencies will conduct their business in accordance with the rule of law.

The Director-General is specifically required to ensure the security intelligence function is not used for partisan purposes or to prevent the rights of persons to engage in lawful advocacy, protest or dissent.

The Organisation is over-sighted, administrately by a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security and, on a daily operational basis by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, an independent statutory officer.

Within the parameters set by the ASIO Act, the Organisation’s processes and procedures are designed to assist it meet its responsibilities to protect not only the lives but also the rights of Australians; to avoid unnecessarily or gratuitously intruding into their lives and their privacy.

Strict legal safeguards and thresholds must be met before the process of intelligence collection or administrative action can be commenced.

An important element in our risk management is the application of the principle of proportionality: the means for obtaining information must be proportionate to the gravity of the threat posed and the probability of its occurrence.

ASIO’s collection work is done in a methodical and intellectually honest manner, with little resemblance to high-octane dramatic representations of intelligence work. The information ASIO receives sometimes ranges between silly and sublime but every piece of information, every lead and every phone-in is assessed for its potential to assist us in our task.

A responsible intelligence service in a democracy such as in Australia will take these risks very conscientiously indeed. I cannot emphasise enough the seriousness with which ASIO officers take their responsibilities to operate both within the letter and the spirit of the law. Cavalier is not a word I would ever want to hear in the same sentence as with ASIO.

Role of Security Intelligence in Law Enforcement

Security intelligence and law enforcement are two distinct but complementary functions with separate methodologies, networks of relationships and constituencies.

And yet, the subjective and predictive intelligence process I have described above is increasingly a tool in support of the forensic science of law enforcement, a cue for investigations leading to prosecutions. It is instructive that police forces now have their own intelligence units to collect and assess information in the fight against increasingly sophisticated crime.

It is instructive, too, that in the fight against terrorism in Australia, the identification, investigation and eventual prosecution of contravening the anti-terrorism laws increasingly requires a partnership between the capabilities of security intelligence and the capabilities of law enforcement.

Indeed, in the fight against terrorism, ASIO’s relationship with law enforcement agencies is paramount. Law enforcement and security intelligence must work together if we are successfully to address and defeat such threats. I am pleased that in recent years, ASIO and the AFP, along with State police forces, have been learning to work effectively together, as attested by a number of recent successful prosecutions for offences relating to terrorism.

ASIO can and does provide its intelligence material to assist in prosecutions. We must then strike a delicate balance between protecting our sources and capabilities and our domestic and international relationships with our obligation to support prosecutions in the interests of open justice.

There have now been no less than four occasions when I believe a mass casualty attack within Australia has been avoided only because of the work of intelligence and law enforcement agencies. It is the strengthening and deepening of the relationship, and the ever developing understanding of the differences – and complementarities - between intelligence and evidence that have been the greatest asset in thwarting the potential for terrorism attacks in Australia – and saved the lives of countless Australians.

Unfortunately, the threat of terrorism will be a persistent feature of the domestic security environment for many years to come.

This is despite the fact that those Australians attracted to the violent jihadist ideology are small in number, not representative of broader Australians or any particular community group in Australia. They are a tiny aberrant minority with a dangerously distorted set of beliefs. Sadly, it takes only one person to detonate a very large explosion in a crowded public place.

Security environment and interconnectedness

The security environment is more complex and challenging – one in which the global jihadist movement has the means to reach deeply and broadly into our communities, where terrorism threats are equally as likely to originate from home as they are from overseas.

In response, counter-terrorism agencies must be fully joined up and agile. We must be able to shift our priorities collectively and according to the threats that are identified, we must be able to respond rapidly, whenever and wherever a threat emerges – whether that be in Australia, overseas or in the cyber domain. And we must be connected, so that we can share our information seamlessly with one another, and ensure that it gets to those who need it, when they need it, whether that be a Commonwealth agency, a police force, or an overseas liaison partner.

As the Government’s White Paper on Counter-Terrorism earlier this year made clear, the Government takes the threat of terrorism very seriously. The Counter Terrorism Control Centre (CTCC), established in June this year as the key Commonwealth body for evaluating and integrating counter-terrorism intelligence, will play a pivotal role in ensuring that the full capabilities of Australia’s counter-terrorism agencies are harnessed. The strength of that body lies in the fact that it is staffed jointly by ASIO, DSD, ASIS and the AFP – the key Federal agencies responsible for fighting terrorism.

ASIO is also contributing to the national intelligence effort through important initiatives such as the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC) within the Defence Signals Directorate. Significantly, the CSOC has strengthened coordination of cyber security activities across the various agencies with cyber responsibilities.

Conclusion

As a former Ambassador to China, I cannot tell you how many times I heard a western speaker tell his Chinese hosts that there was an ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interesting times."

The irony of it is that I never heard a Chinese utter that curse, and indeed no-one has ever been able to find any reference to it in Chinese literature. It appears to be a western invention of the last century – clever, but not authentic.[3]

Nevertheless, at the risk of perpetuating a myth, let me say that faux proverb is strangely applicable to much of the security environment in which we currently find ourselves. The times, unfortunately, are very interesting. Terrorism, the threat of espionage and the prospect of them becoming less interesting for western democracies like Australia and its intelligence and law enforcement communities, is rather slim.

There are two other supposed ancient Chinese curses that are said to have been coined along with “May you live in interesting times.”

The first curse is “May you come to the attention of those in authority.”

The second is “May you find what you are looking for.”

Through the diligence and professionalism of the security intelligence and law enforcement authorities, it is to be hoped that would-be terrorists do indeed come to the attention of those in authority and that we do indeed find what we are looking for. For that is the business of security intelligence, the business of ASIO.

In concluding, I wish to acknowledge the role of the Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security in developing the next generation of policing and security scholars, in particular through the support it provides for research and training.

I hope these broad brush remarks have been of assistance.

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