Australia’s top spy has strongly defended the nation’s surveillance framework, dismissing claims of mass snooping on the basis that that only “a few thousand” people come to the notice of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (Asio) each year.



Appearing before a Senate committee hearing on Monday, the Asio chief, David Irvine, reaffirmed his calls for the government to introduce a mandatory data retention scheme, while arguing telecommunications providers must take responsibility for safeguarding consumers’ privacy as part of a requirement to store customer data for two years.

Irvine also revealed more details about the 150 people in Australia who are alleged to “have some involvement with, are supporting or actively recruiting for, or financing” extremist elements in Syria and Iraq – a key focus of intelligence agencies at present.

“Not all of those people are necessarily threats to national security, not all of those people will go beyond expressions of verbal support, and indeed you do pick up a lot of bravado and passionate support for these extremist violent groups without that translating into an active national security threat, but the point is we don’t know that unless we look at them,” he said.

Irvine, the security director general, was appearing before the Senate’s legal and constitutional affairs references committee, which is conducting an inquiry into possible changes to the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Act 1979.

The inquiry comes as the government pursues a raft of national security reforms to increase the powers of intelligence agencies and as the attorney general, George Brandis, considers adopting a mandatory data retention scheme. It also follows worldwide debate about the extent of surveillance activities triggered by the disclosures of the former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden which were published by the Guardian.

Interception is a 'key tool' in terror prevention

Irvine said he was “quite frustrated” to hear some of the claims being made about the conduct of legal communication interception in Australia, including “terms such as 1984-style Big Brother surveillance, mass surveillance, gross invasions of privacy and so on”.

He said the interception of telecommunications was a key tool in the detection and prevention of terrorism and espionage and in the investigation of major crimes.

“Without it and without our ability to access telecommunications call data and intercept communications Asio and law enforcement bodies cannot guarantee the level of safety assurance that people expect,” Irvine said. “The fact is that in the last eight or nine years we have stopped four mass casualty terrorist attacks occurring in Australia and nipped quite a number of others in the bud at the very early planning stage.”

Irvine said Asio did not have the legal authority, the infrastructure, the resources, the inclination or need to conduct “mass-scale surveillance”.

“The fact is that in any one year only a very small minority of the Australian community, a few thousand at most, come to Asio’s notice and it’s on this group that we seek telecommunications data and only a small proportion of those require the use of more intrusive powers including interception of content,” he said.

Irvine said this figure of “a few thousand” people coming to Asio’s notice covered the entire remit of the organisation’s work including counter-espionage, counter-sabotage, activity against covert foreign influencing of government, and politically motivated violence which covered terrorism.

Irvine – who last week revealed “tens” of Australians had returned from the Middle East conflicts, mainly Syria – said agencies used a “variety of methods” to collect intelligence on Australians here and overseas but “only where we have been given reason to deem there is a possible security risk”.

These methods included physical surveillance, receiving disclosures from people with information, and monitoring communications to determine people’s intentions and whether they had been dealing with other people of concern.

Irvine told the committee that agencies were aware of about 60 Australians who were involved in the fighting in both Syria and Iraq. Not all of those people were “necessarily fighting for the most extreme al-Qaida derivatives” but it had been a worrying tendency for the young people to then “gravitate towards the most extremely violent end of that particular spectrum”.

Encryption and avoidance 'becoming more prevalent'

Speaking more generally about methods used to avoid detection, Irvine said targets were using other people’s phones, anonymous phones, phones taken out under false names, and social media in ways that escaped obvious observation.

“And I have to say that in the last six to nine months the prevalence of those evasive techniques, particularly since the Snowden revelations, has increased dramatically. The other is the use of commercial cryptology, commercial encryption,” he said.

The Greens senator Scott Ludlam asked whether widespread community concern about continually expanding surveillance powers was driving more people towards encryption, in a form of “arms race”.

Irvine replied: “It’s certainly driving a lot of what I’ll call my customers into encryption because they’ve got very obvious reasons to hide what they do.”

Asked to define customers, Irvine said: “The persons who are subjects of interest, if I put it formally, from a national security point of view.

“We are not the United States,” Irvine said. “We have in my view a very adequate surveillance regime which strikes an excellent balance between the privacy of the individual on the one hand and the needs of national security on the other.

“In my view, the needs of national security and law enforcement are crucial and the public should not be concerned that there’s going to be gross misuse in terms of invasions of their privacy by law enforcement and the security intelligence organisation.

“If you’re going to be concerned about that, frankly, then you’re going to be concerned about the way in which commercial concerns use your call data, the content of your messages which we don’t access without a warrant, and so on in order to sell you a new BMW or a new whatever. For the life of me I cannot understand why it is somehow correct for all of your privacy to be invaded for a commercial purpose and not allow me to do it to save your life.”

Irvine added: “Is that dramatic enough?”

The Victorian Labor senator Jacinta Collins said: “It’s an amusing defence because I think you’ll find most people are concerned about the other also.”

Ludlam said: “I think it’s probably heading towards melodrama rather than just drama.”

'Not seeking a big brother arrangement'

During the Senate hearing Irvine also laid out the case for a mandatory data retention scheme forcing telecommunications providers to store customer data for two years. He said companies often kept data for billing purposes, but increasingly did not have a commercial need to store it for as long as they had in the past.

Irvine said he did not want any change to the existing arrangements surrounding access to call data and was “not seeking a Big Brother arrangement whereby the government itself stores all that data”. Irvine acknowledged that if large volumes of data were stored, the government would have to consider provisions to ensure the security of that data from unlawful access.

“This is an issue that relates in my view to the responsibilities of telecommunications providers and doesn’t only relate to stored data,” Irvine said.

“In my view, responsible telecommunications providers have an obligation regardless of whether they store your data or not … to protect your privacy when you use their services. Secondly they have an obligation to ensure that your services are not interrupted by hackers and whatever. In our view that obligation to protect the continuity of the service and the privacy of the information contained in it would also apply to their retaining of metadata.”

Irvine said telecommunications providers must take appropriate steps to protect the customers’ information from external attack and protect the continuity of the service.

“If your telecommunications service goes on the blink and you can’t get an email message off that’s uncomfortable. If all of our national infrastructure which hangs off the internet now and is totally dependent on telecommunications suppliers and their reliability, if they fall down and their reliability falls down we start to have major concerns. And of course in modern warfare the ability to interrupt your opponent’s crucial warfighting and/or national survival capabilities by electronic means is the warfare of the 21st century,” Irvine said.