Central Australia's Pine Gap spy base has taken on a new electronic surveillance role, making it a "multi-purpose mega-intelligence centre," as Australia and our allies massively increase interception of global satellite communications, a new report by leading espionage experts has revealed.

The United States–Australia Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap is now engaged in foreign satellite intelligence collection as part of the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance's "collect-it-all" surveillance of global internet and telecommunications traffic.

An undated file of the radar domes of the top-secret joint US-Australian missile defence base at Pine Gap. Credit:AFP

The new report by Australian National University emeritus professor Des Ball, British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell, Canadian intelligence researcher Bill Robinson and Melbourne University professor and Nautilus Institute researcher Richard Tanter, an independent policy think tank, draws upon secret intelligence documents leaked by former American intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and a wide range of publicly available information.



The authors, all with decades experience in researching intelligence activities, reveal a massive expansion of satellite communications surveillance capabilities by the US National Security Agency and its other Five Eyes partners, the Australian Signals Directorate, the United Kingdom's Government Communications Headquarters, Canada's Communications Security Establishment and New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau.

The report shows the expansion of satellite communications interception has involved growth in the number of antennas located at Five Eyes intelligence facilities and the deployment of "multiple advanced quasi-parabolic multi-beam antennas, known as Torus, each of which can intercept up to 35 satellite communications beams."