Pearls and Irritations

Collecting, sifting and presenting information on national security is not the toughest job in the world although it can be tricky.

There are now oceanic quantities of the stuff available. Modern technology can serve it up more or less in “real time” in ways that would startle, and probably charm, Sir Francis Walsingham, one of Queen Elizabeth’s spooks in 16th century England.

Yet many of the vexations of Sir Francis’s days remain, in particular sorting out the reliability of material collected from informants of one brand or another – what is known in the trade as HUMINT.

Then there is the planting of false and misleading information designed to confuse and to lead searchers up garden paths. It’s all part of the game which, combined with the needs for secrecy, requires of spooks a certain tolerance for moral ambiguity.

Governments can pressure intelligence gathering organisations to dig up “facts” that support their policy biases. When the Bush administration made clear its desire to invade Iraq, the CIA, relying on unreliable characters like Ahmed Chalabi and a person designated as “Curveball” to serve up a melange of “facts” about weapons of mass destruction that were, unfortunately, bullshit. General Powell never recovered, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis were killed and the US strategic standing in the Middle East was degraded and has never recovered.

The aura, if that’s the right word, enveloping national security information might not always be helpful. As they possess information that must be tightly held, there is a tendency, at least publicly, for governments quickly to endorse intelligence agency assessments lest they be seen as “soft” on security. And this goes down well with a public many of whom have insatiable appetites for “spy novels”, a hunger that doesn’t exist for works of fiction about more important government functions like collecting taxation or giving a leg up to the less fortunate.

In the circumstances it’s possibly not surprising that intelligence agencies around the world have missed so much and got so much wrong. Yet they’ve shown resilience of a kind. When a former Home Affairs Secretary missed calling the risk of anti-Islamist terrorism immediately before an Australian citizen murdered dozens at mosques in New Zealand, he broadened his next conspectus to rope in just about every danger imaginable including the possibility of a big, rogue asteroid banging into the planet and bringing its hosting of humans to an end.

Apart from their track records, how should intelligence information collected by security agencies be assessed? It would be nice if it could:

• be factually accurate
• provide as much dimension to factual information as possible (numbers etc)
• indicate the degrees of confidence that can be placed in the facts including the reliability or otherwise of sources
• clearly distinguish facts from opinions
• qualify threats by describing their associated risks
• avoid tendentious and pejorative presentation, and
• use precise and unambiguous language.

For better or worse, it’s now possible to apply these and other measures to the work of the ASIO, as its current Director-General, Mike Burgess, has been much more to the fore in public pronouncements about Australia’s national security conditions. Every year, he calls as many worthies as he can to ASIO HQ where, with grim visage, he delivers an annual security assessment. He regularly appears with the Prime Minister and Ministers in like posture where he gives all and sundry the benefit of his views to the accompaniment of much ministerial head-nodding. And he’s quite a media tart, regularly popping up on television news programs.

So how do Burgess’s formal statements stack up?

Not very well.

They lack coherence and are full of unevidenced claims and tendentious and misleading language. “ASIO is Australia’s spycatcher” he says, a distorting and self-serving description of his organisation’s legal responsibilities. There’s plenty more tendentiously unhelpful language in Burgess’s statements mixed in with lavish praise of his organisation and, by implication, himself. Some of his claims are at best misleading. Don’t believe him when he says that “the Indo-Pacific is home to some of the planet’s fastest growing populations.” It is not, a strategic problem in the area being that the populations of China, Japan and Indonesia are growing slowly or in decline.

Most importantly Burgess is either unwilling or unable to make critical intellectual distinctions between threats and risks. Indeed, the word risk doesn’t appear to be in his lexicon.

Threats can be found around every corner and under every rock. The critical point is the level of risk associated with each threat. This is a Burgess non-forte. “More Australians are being radicalised” he says. Yes, but how many more? “More Australians are willing to use violence to advance their cause.” What evidence is there of that in terms of numbers charged with related offences and found guilty by the courts? Burgess doesn’t say. He reckons “Trust in institutions is eroding”, a claim inconsistent with material recently published by the Australian Public Service Commission indicating trust in public service institutions has slightly increased since 2018.

Burgess complains, again without supporting evidence that “anti-authority beliefs are growing”. And if they are, so what? A certain anti-authority bias should be a healthy part of an open democracy as it helps the system correct against incompetence, neglect and corruption. The public was right to be anti the authorities who dreamed up Robodebt and the government was right to abolish the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in which citizens could not have confidence because its staffing had been ruthlessly politicised.

While withholding evidence, assuming it exists, Burgess lards his statements with much vagueness and obscurity. “The dynamics are raising the temperature of the security environment” and “some are combining multiple beliefs to create new hybrid ideologies.” What on earth does this jumbled verbiage mean? Meanwhile “ASIO anticipates an increase in politically motivated violence – including terrorism – across all ideological spectrums.” What? Including those parts of the “ideological spectrum” occupied by the major political parties and religious groups? So Burgess allows himself to slip into ridiculous territory in part because he fails adequately to distinguish between threats and risks.

When Burgess attempts to give dimension to the overall threat he sees, he’s tripped up by the ASIO’s hierarchy of “terrorism threat levels” – Not Expected, Possible, Probable, Expected and Certain. It’s hard to make much sense of these. Could it ever be that terrorism would not be expected and to say that it’s possible is surely not worth saying. Burgess defines probable as a “greater than 50% chance of an attack or attack planning in the next twelve months.” Obviously the more than 50% is nowt more than a figure plucked from the thin air. And how much more than 50%? 60, 70, 80? That’s not said. And if an attack is certain, surely the ASIO and other relevant authorities would know enough to neutralise it and make it “not expected”.

It’s just not feasibly practical to force the data ASIO is dealing with into these categories. Burgess has recently raised the threat level to “probable”: that is not helpful.

The threat hierarchy should be abandoned and Burgess and the ASIO should concentrate on risks associated with terrorist attacks. They should describe as clearly and precisely as they can the possible nature of those attacks including the people and institutions who are most vulnerable and what they’re going to do about them. They should explain where parties at risk can seek assistance and protection and what they might best do to look after themselves. Merely saying to the community (and to the government) that an “onshore attack is probable” is of little value.

Fifty years ago government and public attitudes towards the ASIO and related security agencies were such that a government minister, perhaps unwisely, raided ASIO headquarters in Melbourne. Public attitudes towards security agencies was, in Burgess’s terms, much more “anti-authority”. The degree to which the government interrogates advice from ASIO is unknown but when the Prime Minister stands by nodding away as Mr Burgess delivers his befuddling ex cathedra statements, it’s reasonable to suspect what he says is taken by the government as gospel. Meanwhile the mainstream media seems to have uncritically swallowed the lot of Burgess’s verbal flub. The citizenry should not feel reassured.

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