Recruitment Drive

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Intelligence Officer

A career as an Intelligence Officer (IO) means you get to make the most of your skills. You’ll think, develop and apply yourself in unique, interesting, and challenging ways.

Helping to gather information and produce intelligence, you’ll play a crucial role in providing advice to government on matters of national security. It’s important work. Which is why you should take the time to understand if the role, and ASIO, is right for you.

If you’re looking for the chance to become the best you can be - you’ve come to the right place.

The Intelligence Officer Role

ASIO can help you develop a career that counts no matter your working background. Within a changing security landscape, the intelligence community is growing – meaning our operations are expanding. This growth has brought about unique opportunities to work at the very centre of security intelligence.

As an IO you’ll be more than just a talker, listener, thinker. You’ll be called upon to cross cultural boundaries, generating solutions to interesting and complex problems. Highly creative, your critical thinking and problem solving skills will adapt to meet the situation at hand.

Following the 12 month training program in Canberra, you’ll be posted to Collection, Analysis or other areas. These postings can be based in any capital city in Australia, with operational requirements and your geographical preferences being considered. It’s a mobile role, so you can expect significant travel and relocation throughout your career.

Expect a uniquely varied career. Further down the line you may have the opportunity to work across other functions, helping you develop new skills in areas as diverse as HR, Finance, IT and more.

As an IO, the two main investigative roles you’ll undertake involve the collection and analysis of information through overt and covert sources.

Collection

Communicate with a variety of people, including members of the public who are volunteering information.

Analysis

Evaluate and analyse information, providing verbal and written briefings concerning assessments and recommendations.

Overt

Collect information from publicly available sources, including talking to people externally, internet-based research and liasing with government departments.

Covert

Occasionally it’s necessary to use covert and sometimes intrusive methods of investigation, most of which require the approval of the Attorney General and a warrant. This can include the use of listening/tracking devices, interception of telecommunications, access to restricted information and the searching of premises.

Be an IO

Not just anybody can do this job. It takes a special type of person to succeed. Given the challenging and complex nature of the work we’re looking for unique people. Those who are at ease talking and listening to people from all walks of life; creative thinkers, critical minds, with the ability to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Are you that person?

Confident and astute, you’ll be adept at documenting information clearly and in a targeted manner. Mentally resilient, you’ll be prepared to undergo our psychological assessments and background checks.

Additionally, you’ll need to meet the following requirements:

• A university degree (any discipline), completed by 30 June 2010 for the July 2010 Training program
• Australian citizenship
• A driver’s licence
• Willing to relocate to Canberra for your 12 month training program
• Flexibility for a mobile career.

You can learn more about these and other things you should consider before applying for the IO role, on our 'Should I Apply'page.

We will offer successful IO candidates a salary between $59,223 and $75,403 plus superannuation for the period of the training program. In determining your starting salary, we will consider your education and employment history.

ASIO is a special organisation, but we’re focused on the everyday. Our people are supportive, down-to-earth and quick to encourage

Intelligence Officer Training

The IO Training Program and Probation runs across 12 months, commencing in July and January of each year. The program is based mainly in Canberra and includes class-based and on-the-job training, all carefully designed to equip you with the skills and knowledge you’ll need to be a successful IO. You’ll soon find your confidence, self-reliance and flexibility increase as you develop key technical and professional abilities.

The Program will:

• Introduce you to the concepts of intelligence collection and analysis work
• Develop your existing abilities and generate new skills, including management, leadership, critical thinking and information/communications technology
• Provide support throughout with regular feedback on performance.

As a competency based Program, you’ll need to demonstrate a satisfactory standard of performance to complete each section. We want all our trainees to succeed, so we’ll offer you as much support as possible to this end. If despite our assistance you’re unable to meet the required standards during or by the end of the Program, you may be offered another role in the Organisation, your probation may be extended, or your employment may be terminated in accordance with your staff agreement.

Meet Our People

Those who have made it through our recruitment process have a variety of life and work experience. From teachers, managers and lawyers through to psychologists, engineers and social workers, there’s no set mould or magic formula – it’s about you as a person.

Recruitment Process

The ASIO recruitment process is designed to test a range of role-specific competencies. You’ll need to be prepared to undergo various selection stages, including aptitude testing, interviews, assessment centres, psychological assessments and extensive background checking to obtain security clearance.

The Process - July 2010 Training Program

September 2009	Applications open
October 2009	Application screening
November 2009	Aptitude testing
January to June 2010	Initial Interviews
	Background checking
	Assessment centres
July 2010	Training commences Should I Apply? Becoming an Intelligence Officer (IO) is not for everyone. Our IO selection process is necessarily both personally and professionally demanding. Unfortunately, due to the complexity and significance of the role many well-intentioned candidates will be turned away. Before considering applying you must: Be an Australian Citizen. We cannot accept anyone who has applied for, and is awaiting, citizenship Hold at least a Probationary Drivers licence for a 'C' Class Vehicle Be willing to move to Canberra if successful Hold an undergraduate degree from a recognised University Have not attended an IO and/or Analyst Assessment Centre in the past two years Be able to attend each stage of the recruitment process. We do not have the capacity to conduct assessments overseas so if you are an Australian citizen living overseas and do not intend returning to Australia in the near future, please reconsider whether now is the right time to apply. Once you have satisfied the technical aspects of your application, it is important that you honestly evaluate your motivation for this role, including the requirement to relocate to Canberra if you are from interstate. Ask yourself the following questions: Do you feel comfortable interacting with people from diverse backgrounds, idealogies, and opinions? Could you approach someone you don't know and strike up a conversation? Can you think on your feet, develop new ways of doing things, assess yourself objectively, and sacrifice your own interests for the bigger picture? Are you willing to change your life to be an IO? The life of an ASIO Intelligence Officer is not easy, but it is uniquely rewarding. If you meet all the above criteria and believe you have the personal and professional skills to succeed as an IO Apply Please make sure you have taken the time to read our'Should I Apply' page on this website before continuing. If having done so, you think you fit the mould of an Intelligence Officer please visit www.hitsubmit.com.au to apply. Due to the comprehensive nature of our application process, we advise you to start the process as early as possible to avoid disappointment. The closing date for applications is Friday, 2 October 2009. Applicants must be available to attend each stage of the selection process - unfortunately we're unable to alter our timeframes. You'll be advised of the outcome at each stage of the selection process, however we cannot provide detailed feedback to unsuccessful candidates. Please note: All applications for employment with ASIO are handled in the strictest confidence. It is essential that you DO NOT discuss your application with others as doing so may adversely affect your application. The recruitment process is lengthy, but necessary. We thank you for your efforts in submitting an application, and for investing your time in our selection process.

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Escapee from Nazis fought for Aborigines

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September 14, 2009

Hans Bandler.
Hans Bandler, 1914-2009

HANS BANDLER bore witness to two great struggles of the 20th century: the war against Nazism in Europe and the equal rights campaign in Australia for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples.

As a Jew in Vienna before World War II, Bandler was ordered to scrub street walls and pavements, while caustic soda was poured over his hands. He was incarcerated in the concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald.

In Australia, he married Faith Mussing, an Australian South Sea Islander who became a leader of the successful 1967 referendum campaign that changed the constitution, included Aborigines in the census and is often referred to as the first stage of the reconciliation movement.

Bandler, who has died at 94, was born in Vienna to Elsa Blumenthal and Ludwig Bandler, a typesetter. After the marriage ended when Hans was a toddler, he and his mother moved in with his maternal grandparents, and his aunt, Fritzi Blumenthal, although his father still took him on excursions. Both his grandparents had died by the time Hans was 12, and his mother had moved to Bulgaria and remarried. He never saw her again and his aunt continued to care for him.

Graduating in mechanical engineering, he worked with an engineer and taught English as a sideline. He had joined the student Labour Club and the Socialist Youth Movement. His Jewish origins and political activism made him a target when Hitler went to Vienna in March 1938.

The Germans took over the firm for which he worked and told him Jews could not work there. Failing to find work anywhere, he approached foreign consulates with a view to emigrating, while improving his English by guiding visiting doctors, including Australians, around the city.

Bandler was taken to Dachau in June 1938 and transferred to Buchenwald in September. Watching people die instilled in him a fervent love of life and an indomitable will to live. He was appalled by racism, injustice and inequality.

Fighting for her nephew's freedom, Fritzi Blumenthal sold much of what she owned, including paintings and furniture, went to the Berlin SS headquarters, bribed officials and guards and bought documents. Hans was finally released in January 1939, on condition that he leave Vienna within a week.

He flew to London, to be met by a penfriend, Olive, and from where he organised for his stepbrother, Bernard, to get out of Vienna. Olive, who had studied at Oxford University, arranged for Bandler to address the Ruskin Society on the horrors of the concentration camps.

Arriving in Australia, with the help of Australian doctors he had met in Vienna, Bandler pursued a new life. He took jobs washing dishes before working on the design of a Holden car assembly plant in Sydney. When his Austrian qualifications were not recognised, he enrolled in a civil engineering diploma course at the Sydney Technical College.

Wanting to contribute personally to the fight against fascism, he tried to enlist in the army but was told he was an enemy alien. His application to the RAAF was similarly rejected. He finally joined the Ministry of Munitions and became an Australian citizen.

Bandler met Faith Mussing at an Australian Peace Council musical evening, where she was a speaker and he, a member of the Sydney Film Society, screened documentaries about Aboriginal culture. He had a spare ticket to a Sydney Symphony Orchestra concert and asked her to join him. She already had a ticket and they attended together. Music proved a binding force.

He worked with the Hydro-Electricity Commission in Tasmania, where he was tracked by ASIO, before joining the Sydney Water Board in 1952 as a design engineer.

Bandler had been married, briefly, in Australia but the 1952 Youth Carnival for Peace and Friendship brought him and Faith together again. He was helping to build a huge map of Australia for the carnival, featuring scientists' visions for the future of the continent. It was called Australia Unlimited.

They met at concerts at Sydney Town Hall and he showed Faith a block of land he had bought in Frenchs Forest, and architect's plans. He started to build in his spare time; soon she was joining him. They married in 1952, with Margaret Fulton providing the wedding breakfast.

Bandler loved water - damming it, piping it, making it potable, conserving it, reading about it and writing about it. He worked as a senior design engineer on the Warragamba Dam, responsible for the inside of the dam, with its complex network of tunnels and corridors.

He walked and camped in the Australian bush, particularly the Blue Mountains, and became an ardent conservationist, taking a postgraduate course in environmental studies at Macquarie University in 1973 and a master of science degree in 1978.

He published on environmental engineering, lectured overseas and became a potter.

Hans Bandler is survived by his wife, Faith, his daughter, Lilon, her husband, Stephen Llewellyn, and their daughters, Olivia and Nicola.

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Habib case raises complex issues

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VINCENT MORELLO
September 14, 2009 - 7:19PM
Civil action brought by former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib against the Australian government will require the Federal Court to pit national sovereignty against human rights to determine if his torture case should go ahead.

Mr Habib is suing the government over allegations that Australian authorities were complicit and sometimes present during torture he allegedly endured while detained in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

Commonwealth solicitor-general Stephen Gageler, SC, argued before a full bench of the Federal Court in Sydney on Monday that Mr Habib's claims could not be heard by an Australian court because of the "act of state" doctrine.

The principle, acknowledged in previous court cases in Australia, states that a nation is sovereign and its domestic actions may not be questioned in the courts of other nations.

The government is arguing that Mr Habib's case should be struck out on the basis of this doctrine.

In its submission to the Federal Court on Monday, the government referred to a ruling by the US Supreme Court case that "rejects the notion that the act of state doctrine is inapplicable merely because international law (such as human rights) has been violated".

The commonwealth also referred to a position of the Australian, Swiss and UK governments that "the creation of a federal cause of action against foreign lands would interfere fundamentally with other nations' sovereignty" and would "complicate international law and local efforts to halt and punish human rights violations".

Mr Habib's claims that Australian Federal Police and ASIO officers were complicit and sometimes present during his torture were not enough to usurp the act of state doctrine, the government submitted.

"The fact that the alleged conduct constitutes a serious violation of international law is not sufficient to give rise to an exception to the doctrine," its submission states.

Mr Habib's legal team also presented a submission to the Federal Court, arguing the application of the doctrine in Australia was unclear in relation to human rights violations and "may be subject to an exception in respect to international law".

"...it is sufficient to say that the doctrine does not apply in certain circumstances," their submission reads.

A "grave" breach of international human rights laws may be enough to supplant the doctrine, it says.

"However, a violation of this kind identified in these proceedings is more than sufficient," it adds.

Court documents show Mr Habib was first detained in Pakistan in October 2001, and was moved to Egypt a month later, to Afghanistan in 2002 and finally to Guantanamo Bay in May 2002 where he was held as a terror suspect until his release in January 2005.

His legal team will conclude its submission before the Federal Court on Tuesday, when it is expected the bench will reserve its judgment to a later date.

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Keep courts out of Habib case: Government lawyers

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JOEL GIBSON
September 14, 2009 - 3:37PM
Australian courts should stay out of a dispute between former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mamdouh Habib and the Commonwealth because passing judgment on his alleged foreign torturers could damage Australia's relations with other states, Government lawyers argued today.

Mr Habib is suing the Federal Government in the Federal Court for damages over his alleged torture as a suspected enemy combatant in Guantanamo Bay, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He was accused of training with al-Qaeda but was never charged and says he was in Afghanistan in October 2001 on a business trip that went awry.

He says Australian Federal Police and ASIO officers were complicit in the torture and, in some instances, were even present at the time.

But a legal principle known as the "Acts of States" doctrine meant courts in the US, Britain and Australia were usually reluctant to condemn the action of agents of foreign governments, in case they usurp the foreign affairs role of the legislature or the executive arms of government, Commonwealth Solicitor-General Stephen Gageler SC told the Federal Court this morning.

Only when there is a grave violation of international or human rights law would a court make an exception, he said.

Mr Gageler is expected to argue this afternoon that the alleged torture of Mr Habib did not fall into this category.

The "Acts of States" rule has been applied by Australia's High Court in the famous Spycatcher case, in which Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull as a young barrister took on Margaret Thatcher's British government when it attempted to stop an Australian publisher from releasing the memoirs of former British spy Peter Wright.

The hearing continues.

Joel Gibson is the Herald's Legal Affairs Reporter.

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Rudd hackers escalate threats against .gov.au websites

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The hackers who brought down the Prime Minister's website this week have already outlined their plans for round two, signalling a marked escalation in their attacks.

A new message posted on their website, which has been used to rally supporters of their anti-internet filtering hacking campaign, outlines plans to attempt to break into back-end government systems rather than simply knocking government websites offline by flooding them with traffic.

A security consultant, who declined to be named, said: "It won't take them long to get to a more dangerous and annoying skill level, which enables them to perform more successful and damaging attacks on the .gov.au domain space.

"Hope the Government has been performing their own penetration testing of their systems."

The website zone-h.org details a slew of government websites that have been hacked and defaced in the past few years, including 68 so far this year. Evidence of each attack is included.

But the hackers, who say they belong to a group called Anonymous, are now taking their attempts further underground after this website yesterday revealed embarrassing chat discussions between them, which occurred while they were carrying out the attacks on pm.gov.au on Wednesday night.

The chat logs revealed that the hackers considered their attacks to be a failure as they brought down Kevin Rudd's website for only a few minutes.

The logs also showed that their main aim was to achieve publicity for their campaign against Communications Minister Stephen Conroy's internet censorship policy.

They are calling for the policy to be dropped and for Senator Conroy to resign.

"It seems the Government isn't afraid of us and the media thinks we are a joke. We need to fix this," the call-to-arms message posted by the hacker reads.

Wednesday night's attacks are known as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and involved them flooding government sites including pm.gov.au with traffic.

However, now the hackers have signalled an attempt to move beyond DDoS and to start attacking government back-end systems in an effort to retrieve data such as usernames and passwords.

This could be achieved by using a method called "SQL injection", which exploits security vulnerabilities in websites' databases.

"DDoS is like trying to break into a building by making hundreds of people run into its walls," the hackers wrote.

"I'm talking trying to sql inject any gov.au page or just get into the back end and retrieve data aka Usernames and Passwords.

"If you do find anything do not talk about it in the IRC [internet relay chat] due to spais [spies] and the AFP being in there and they blocked us out from accessing a previous exploit found."

Yesterday, a spokeswoman for the Attorney-General's Department said the Cyber Security Operations Centre in the Defence Signals Directorate was providing IT security advisers in each of the targeted Australian government agencies to assist with monitoring and responding to the threats.

Today, the department refused to comment on the escalation in threats or whether the matter had been referred to police.

The Australian Federal Police also refused to comment, referring all queries to the Attorney-General's Department.

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2degrees partner rubbishes spy claim

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Huawei, the Chinese company that helped design and build 2degrees' mobile network, has brushed off a report that Australia's spy agency was investigating links between its technicians and the People's Liberation Army, hinting at dirty tricks by rivals.

The Australian reported Huawei employees in Sydney and Melbourne approached the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) with claims.

Huawei Australia managing director Guo Fulin says the allegations are false and irresponsible, and he is not aware of any investigation.

Earlier false allegations prompted the company to provide a briefing to ASIO on its business in June, he says.

Mr Fulin says the company has not engaged with any intelligence agencies in New Zealand. He pointed to another media report that said traditional American and European suppliers had their "noses put of joint by being undercut and rivalled technically by a growing Chinese upstart".

Bloomberg reported that Huawei's business in the United States had been stymied by security concerns that had also scuttled a US$2.2 billion takeover bid for rival 3Com.

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