Patrick Walters, National security editor | August 08, 2009
Article from: The Australian
THE Defence Signals Directorate should be given new powers to spy on Australians at home or overseas to deal with evolving security threats including terrorism and cyber warfare, according to a leading national security expert.
Ross Babbage, an adviser to the Rudd government, says the DSD's charter, which strictly prohibits it from spying domestically on Australian citizens, should be changed to reflect the more fluid and dynamic outlook facing Australia.
His call for a change in the DSD's powers and a restructuring of the current tightly separated Australian intelligence community is backed by a number of senior government officials in Canberra.
Similar debates in Britain about extending the powers of GCHQ, Britain's main signals intelligence agency, and in the US, over the role of its National Security Agency, have sparked a political furore.
Giving DSD broader powers to spy on domestic communications would require new civil-liberty safeguards and major change to the existing legal framework covering the intelligence realm.
"We now face increasingly innovative transnational criminal, terrorist and foreign intelligence service operations that show no respect for national boundaries and operate aggressively overseas and also within Australia," Professor Babbage told The Weekend Australian.
"Current intelligence structures and boundaries were set in the Cold War. Australia's key intelligence agencies are structured to address either international threats or domestic threats, but rarely both.
"There's a need to shift from the traditional 'need to know' to 'need to share' and to 'need to team'.
"The Australian intelligence community needs to be restructured to permit the full weight of technical and human resources to be applied against priority intelligence targets -- whether they be international or domestic or both."
Professor Babbage's views reflect an emerging debate behind closed doors in Canberra on how to deal with a rapidly evolving set of security threats, including Islamist terrorism. The central issue facing national security planners is whether Australia's spy agencies, founded in the Cold War era and based on rigidly defined operational and legal boundaries, can be effective in an increasingly borderless world.
The debate revolves around how best to improve not just intelligence gathering but also information flows between traditionally separate agencies, including ASIO, ASIS, DSD and the Defence Intelligence Organisation and police forces.
Professor Babbage argues the existing tight legal and administrative barriers separating Australia's intelligence agencies preclude the kind of co-operation essential to protect Australia over the next decade.
Professor Babbage's views were echoed by Sydney University's Alan Dupont. "DSD should be able to work closely with domestic agencies on national threats in a way that they can't at the moment. Our intelligence structures are still out of sync with today's threats, even though we have made major improvements," he said.
Professor Babbage's views reflect an emerging debate behind closed doors in Canberra on how to deal with a rapidly evolving set of security threats, including Islamist terrorism. The central issue facing national security planners is whether Australia's spy agencies, founded in the Cold War era and based on rigidly defined operational and legal boundaries, can be effective in an increasingly borderless world.
The debate revolves around how best to improve not just intelligence gathering but also information flows between traditionally separate agencies, including ASIO, ASIS, DSD and the Defence Intelligence Organisation and police forces.
Professor Babbage argues the existing tight legal and administrative barriers separating Australia's intelligence agencies preclude the kind of co-operation essential to protect Australia over the next decade.
Professor Babbage's views were echoed by Sydney University's Alan Dupont. "DSD should be able to work closely with domestic agencies on national threats in a way that they can't at the moment. Our intelligence structures are still out of sync with today's threats, even though we have made major improvements," he said.
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