When photos of beheadings taken by an Australian jihadist surfaced, they were manna from heaven for Australia’s intelligence agencies. The spy elite were given a reason for the national security legislation they were planning to sheepdog through parliament anyway.

We need to ask how, beyond jihadists, the new national security and data retention laws will be used. Is it possible, for instance, that Asio and its “affiliates” will use their new powers to legally tap the mobile phones and laptops of presidents and prime ministers attending the G20 in Brisbane in November?

The preparations for the G20 have been far more extensive than the attention being paid to jihadists overseas: thousands of security operatives and state and national police are banned from taking leave; parts of inner-city Brisbane will be locked down on a war footing; snipers will occupy rooftops and armoured vehicles will patrol empty streets. There’s even a new $457m telecoms network being built, which could make it easier to snoop on the rest of the world’s leaders.

Tens of thousands of residents could be corralled inside their homes or barricaded out of their properties during the event. “The unprecedented security arrangements will keep road closures secret and effectively trap people from moving around the city,” the Courier Mail’s Neil Doorley reported in July.



“Residents will learn of closures only a short time before and will not be allowed to leave or enter their properties inside the ‘declared area’ except in an emergency,”

The proposed laws will allow Asio to declare “special intelligence operations”, making it an offence punishable by 5-10 years jail to disclose anything Australia’s spooks are doing. Will Asio be mounting a special intelligence operation at the G20? Given the scope of the event, they would be derelict in their duty if they didn’t. But from next month, you won’t be able to say so – the laws are being rushed through the current session of parliament, which sat again today.

The proposed laws also include an extraordinary provision that allows Asio to bring in “affiliates”, who basically absorb all Asio’s brand-new powers and immunities on being officially designated. Affiliates are very loosely defined in the National Security Legislation Amendment Bill put by George Brandis, the attorney general. They could be any person or group from anywhere:

ASIO affiliate means a person performing functions or services for the Organisation in accordance with a contract, agreement or other arrangement...

This definition is so broad, it could easily mean the arrival in Brisbane of a nest of spies from the America’s CIA and National Security Agency, Britain’s GCHQ and similar agencies from Canada and New Zealand – the other partners with Australia in the “Five Eyes” surveillance agreement. GCHQ has form at the G20: the agency engaged in phone tapping and data collection at the 2009 summit in London.



More broadly, the laws mean that leaks to journalists from whistleblowers in the security community will dry up, but Australia’s intelligence agencies will be free to share intelligence with private companies. In the US, contracting out intelligence services to private companies is already common, and Australia has started doing the same. It is easy to foresee that a group of “special corporate friends” of Australia’s spy agencies will emerge, in secret. We will also never know if these select companies are making donations to a particular party at election time.

The new laws aim to shut down completely public discussion of how Australia’s security and intelligence services use their powers. The draft legislation is so wide and ill-defined – as with the term metadata – as to make writing about or analysing intelligence operations risky.

The parliamentary committee is so out of touch with reality that it is floating a scheme for journalists to submit stories to a “prescribed authority” to have them vetted, in order to protect them against accidentally publishing something that might reveal an ASIO special operation. The intent of such a scheme was to prevent “inappropriate conduct” by the media in advance, Liberal Senator David Fawcett said at hearings in Canberra on Monday.

Who decides what is “appropriate”? Under the parliamentary committee’s proposal, an appointed government official would be the decision-maker. Does that sound as much like censorship to you as it does to me?

How would this system actually work? Say I submit this article to the prescribed authority. Immediately, I’m ordered not to publish – but not told why. Then taps are put on my phones and computers. I’m followed whenever I leave my home. Anyone I talk to in person, by phone or computer, becomes a leak suspect – and the potential subject of Asio and AFP raids.

Should Australia monitor phone and data traffic at the G20? What are the ethics and morality of doing so? That’s a debate worth having. But if these laws pass, it won’t happen. For Asio, it’s much easier to “sell” the proposition that the new laws target Muslims bent on jihad.