The latest round of updates to our national security laws are useful and important, but a needless focus on secrecy could undermine the very agencies they aim to strengthen.

In the main, the amendments to Australia’s national security legislation introduced last year are a sensible and measured — and arguably long overdue — response to the fact the world has changed dramatically since the Cold War era, when much of its framework was developed.

They reflect a growing view within Australian security agencies that the biggest threat the country faces is not Islamist terrorist cells — though that threat is real — but state-sponsored hacking and other online attacks.

The internet has not only made it easier to spy, it has made it far easier to sabotage critical national and commercial infrastructure.

Last year, Russian-backed hackers crippled infrastructure and government agencies in Ukraine, caused billions in damage to companies across Europe, and even managed to shut down the Cadbury manufacturing plant in Tasmania.

The Federal Government’s new laws are aimed at making it far easier to prosecute any Australian arm of such an attack.

(Mind you, the new laws don’t specify that Australia’s chocolate factories count as critical national infrastructure, which seems a major oversight.)

Similarly, Cold War-era laws don’t account for the use social media can be put to in sowing disinformation, dissent and division.

It has worked in the US, Britain and across Europe where armies of online trolls have used the advertising tools at the core of Facebook, Google and Twitter’s business to pitch false or exaggerated stories to a receptive audience, but playing on their existing prejudices.

And the clear aim of current campaigns is enough to mark another major difference between the Cold War practises of the USSR throwing money at dissident Western leftist groups in the hope glorious socialist revolution would ensue.

There’s no underlying clash of ideologies involved, and no need for even the pretence of political consistency in the message — sowing discord is enough to achieve your aims. Russia’s online trolls can back a left wing cause today, and the far right tomorrow.

Those same social networks make it far easier for unfriendly countries to track, monitor and intimidate their own dissident nationals, sometimes with a little paid local help.

Again, the new legislation seeks to target the kind of new hostile activity which clearly undermines the wellbeing of the overwhelming majority of Australians, but which falls well short of previous legal definitions of espionage and sabotage.

But where the legislation falls down is in its reflection of growing governmental — and that’s not a criticism confined to the current Government — love of secrecy, and disdain of public criticism of policy and practice.

Among the rest of the measures, the Government is seeking new penalties for government employees and others holding or sharing “inherently harmful information”.

A broad range of organisations, including The West Australian and other major news outlets, the Law Council, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the Government’s own independent watchdogs — the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) and the Commonwealth Ombudsman — have single out these provisions for criticism in submissions to a Senate review of the legislation.

These provisions would make it a criminal offence to possess or “deal with” inherently harmful information — which includes, but is not confined to, classified secrets.

Among other broad provisions, the laws make it a crime to use that information to cause “harm to Australia’s interest”, interfere with or prejudice the performance of functions of the Australian Federal Police, or harm or prejudice relations between the Commonwealth and a State or Territory, or a foreign nation.

(As an extreme example, that last item could, arguably, put this newspaper’s campaign for GST justice for WA under the guns of a criminal investigation — unlikely, but not impossible.)

There are carve-outs for journalists, but they are narrow.

And, ultimately, protections for the media are not enough.

Reading the legislation and submissions it is very clear that those most in danger from the new laws are whistleblowers — people who tried to expose wrongdoing internally yet eventually conclude they have no choice but to make their concerns public.

The most telling submissions to the Senate review come from the IGIS and Commonwealth Ombudsman.

Both make it clear they believe the changes make it likely that public servants could face criminal sanctions if they report concerns, even if they start with internal channels. Both say they believe whistleblowers will be less likely to report problems and even co-operate with investigations if there is a threat they could face criminal sanctions for doing so.

Almost all of the submissions make the point the Government has made no case for expanding the secrecy provisions.

Even the submission of Attorney-General Christian Porter fails to make any strong case for the move — its best argument is that Federal secrecy definitions haven’t been updated since the 1960s and “have not been amended to reflect modern drafting styles”.

Bad behaviour thrives in darkness and, in these difficult times, Australians must have confidence in our security agencies. Those agencies must also have the confidence of the people they are protecting to be effective,

They need to act in secrecy, obviously. But where the objective of hostile nations is to divide our community and sow dissent between us, we need to have absolute confidence that their public warnings and secret actions are above reproach.

While not universal (it never is) that is overwhelmingly true today. But it was not always the case.

The IGIS was established in the wake of the Hope royal commissions in the 1970s and 80s, which examined concerns within the mainstream Left of politics that ASIO, in particular, struggled to differentiate between legitimate political dissent from foreign subversion, and was too busy looking for reds under the beds to focus on actual foreign spies and terrorists.

Increased transparency and an independent watchdog did much to re-establish the trust those agencies enjoy today.

If the concerns of watchdogs suggest this legislation could erode that transparency and undermine that trust, their warnings should be heeded and the laws amended.