Page 58 - Australian Defence Magazine March 2019

SECURITY
INTELLIGENCE
that informed recent government strategic policy documents have been called into question including the 2016 defence white paper’s confident assertion that the US will remain the pre-eminent global military power indefinitely. There is now a consen- sus among the leaders of our intelligence agencies that Australia’s strategic outlook is more uncertain than at any time since 1942.
The global effort to defeat Islamist terror- ism commencing in 2001 and the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan transformed the make-up, operations, and foreign liaison ar- rangements of our spy agencies. For almost twenty years the Australian intelligence community, led by ASIO, have had a relent- less focus on counter-terrorism, with enor- mous resources being deployed in collecting operational intelligence at home and abroad.
The foreign intelligence collection agen- cies, led by the Australian Signals Direc- torate (ASD) and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS), have been heav- ily engaged in supporting military deploy- ments in Iraq and Afghanistan, tracking and eliminating terrorist cells, disrupting people-smuggling syndicates and assisting border protection operations.
These collection priorities have placed a heavy emphasis on tactical, actionable in- telligence such as locating an Islamic State munitions site for an RAAF strike mis- sion in northern Iraq or tracking a people- smuggling kingpin across the Indonesian
archipelago. The combination of the dif- ferent skillsets of the various agencies, now applied in a far more deliberate fashion, has been effective in blunting the threat of a major terrorist attack in Australia.
The years since September 11, 2001 have seen successive governments pour billions of dollars into the intelligence community with key organisations doubling, trebling or, as in ASIO’s case, nearly quadrupling staff numbers. Together with commensu- rate budget increases this has led to a greatly expanded geographical reach and a sharp upgrade in technical capabilities across all intelligence agencies.
Digial concerns
The continuing technological revolution particularly in the digital realm is also changing in the way our agencies co-oper- ate. Joint intelligence centres have emerged in key areas such as cyber security and coun- ter-espionage drawing on expertise from right across the intelligence community as well as the private sector. The sheer breadth of the cyber challenge means that agencies like ASD are having to undertake a cultural shift away from the cloak of secrecy that has always hidden them from public view.
Coming to grips with issues such as big data, biometrics and surveillance technol- ogy, encryption, artificial intelligence, and cyber security has had a significant impact on the way the national intelligence com-
munity goes about its business, influenc- ing the culture and practice of intelligence at the tactical and operational level right through to strategic assessment. For the collection agencies, including ASIS which remains heavily reliant on gathering intel- ligence from human sources (HUMINT), crucial investments are now being made in data analytics.
The end of the US’s long-held strategic predominance in East Asia and the arrival of China as a genuinely global power are now dictating an important shift in collection agency priorities from the all-consuming focus on counter-terrorism of recent years. For agencies like ASIO this means a swing back to more traditional counter-espionage work. For assessment agencies, led by ONI, non-traditional security threats such as cli- mate change and cross-border people flows are drawing greater attention.
The tension between the service of the current intelligence needs of government as against the requirement to provide compre- hensive assessments on issues of strategic sig- nificance, such as the rise of China, has been an enduring issue for the intelligence com- munity. Many senior intelligence sources testify to the primacy of “the urgent over the important” when it comes to preparation of broad scale national assessments relevant to Australia’s long-term national security.
ONI is led by Nick Warner who, as Di- rector-General National Intelligence, is also charged with the overall co-ordination of a national intelligence community consisting of more than 7,000 people and an overall annual budget topping $2 billion.
Warner’s new position is equivalent to a departmental secretary and he sits on the Secretaries Committee on National Secu- rity (SCONS) which advises Cabinet’s Na- tional Security Committee. He also has two newly-created deputy secretaries responsible for Assessments (Andrew Shearer, a former international adviser to PM’s Howard and Abbott) and Enterprise Management (for- mer ASD head, Paul Taloni) respectively.
ONI will eventually have 300 staff— double the size of the former ONA. Its analytical arm is expanding to over 100 area specialists and its Open Source Centre which collects and sifts publicly available in- formation from around the world will have 40 people. The government’s expectation is that the expanded intelligence assessment function will promote greater contestabil- ity of views, including more active engage- ment with external experts in think tanks and universities, to inform ONI’s product.
58 | March 2019 | www.australiandefence.com.au
GETTY