ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess has revealed alarming details of foreign espionage in Australia. Photo: ASIO.
ASIO has intervened to disrupt 24 major foreign espionage operations against Australia in the past three years alone, according to the domestic spy agency’s director-general Mike Burgess.
That is more than the total of the previous eight years combined and has revealed an “unhealthy interest” from foreign actors in trying to access AUKUS’s military technology secrets.
They are helped by too many people in Australia letting the world know through their social media profiles and posts that they are working on the project.
“Nation states are spying at unprecedented levels, with unprecedented sophistication,” Mr Burgess said.
“ASIO is seeing more Australians targeted, more aggressively than ever before.”
The director-general shared alarming statistics and details of threats against Australia uncovered by his agency.
Countering the foreign espionage is costing Australia more than $12.5 billion a year, he said, adding that Australia expelled “a number” of Russian intelligence officers in 2022.
Russia, China and Iran were again named by the spy boss as the three main culprits of espionage activity in Australia, but Mr Burgess described as shocking the number of other countries involved in such activities here.
“Foreign intelligence services are proactive, creative and opportunistic in their targeting of current and former defence employees: relentless cyber espionage, in-person targeting and technical collection,” he said.
“In recent years, for example, defence employees travelling overseas have been subjected to covert room searches, been approached at conferences by spies in disguise and given gifts containing surveillance devices.
“Defence is alert to these threats and works closely with ASIO to counter them.”
But the director-general bemoaned the “head-spinning” complacency of some public officials and private sector companies in relation to the threat of espionage.
He said too many public servants revealed too much detail online of their jobs, with about 7000 posting they worked for Defence and almost 400 being explicit about their connection to the AUKUS pact.
“Nearly two and a half thousand publicly boast about having a security clearance and 1300 claim to work in the national security community,” Mr Burgess said.
“While these numbers have fallen since I first raised the alarm two years ago, this still makes my head spin.
“Surely these individuals, of all people, should understand the threat and recognise the risk?
“I get that people need to market themselves, but telling social media you hold a security clearance or work on a highly classified project is more than naive; it’s recklessly inviting the attention of a foreign intelligence service.”
The director-general gave a number of examples of espionage activities ASIO had become aware of.
They included one of a state-based public servant being convinced to log in to databases to retrieve and share information on people considered dissidents of a foreign government.
Other examples were of attempts at foreign infiltration into Australia’s intelligence services, bribes for information, collaboration offers to researchers working on sensitive technologies, and even attempts to buy land near military sites.
There was even a case discovered of a foreign delegation visiting a “sensitive Australian horticultural facility” and stealing snapped off branches of a rare and valuable fruit tree that took two decades of Australian research to develop.
Politicians, public servants, academics, students, and law enforcement officers are being targeted in the thousands through online networking sites.
“The vast majority resist, report or ignore the approaches,” he said.
“Unfortunately, though, some are sucked in and end up being used — recklessly or consciously — to gather information for a foreign country.”
Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said the Federal Government had invested more than $70m in the past four years to counter espionage activities against Australia.
He added that Mr Burgess’s speech was deliberately framed to raise awareness of the threat bad actors were posing to the nation.
“We need to be clear-eyed that there are people wanting to steal secrets, some of them government, some of them commercial,” the minister said during an ABC radio interview on Friday morning (1 August).
“And when you’re clear-eyed about what’s happening, you can then sensibly take the measures to make it as hard as possible for them to do that.”
Mr Burke also confirmed he had met and dined with visiting United States FBI director Kash Patel on Thursday.
The minister described the meeting as “really good”.
“There’s a whole range of issues we cooperate on, from things that people would think about in terms of counter-terrorism, but right through to some issues of foreign interference, but other issues of child protection,” Mr Burke said.
“The cooperation is very real, very strong.”
