Australian spy agencies may have monitored the WikiLeaks spokesman Julian Assange, and the Attorney-General would welcome prosecution of the group's members if offences could be proved.

The new claims come less than three weeks before the expected publication by WikiLeaks of another tranche of secret US government documents, this time about the war in Iraq. It is expected to contain four times as many documents as the Afghan logs published two months ago by the website.

Julian Assange ... set to publish more secret documents.

Speaking at the launch of an international cyber security exercise, the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, expressed disapproval of WikiLeaks's publication in July of tens of thousands of secret US documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. He said the publication, of 77,000 documents, had put lives at risk and criticised WikiLeaks for making such a decision ''from the comfort of an office''.

''Anything that puts those people - who are serving their country and protecting our security - at risk is entirely reprehensible, whether it's done for notoriety or whether it's done for commercial interests,'' Mr McClelland said.