Security

The Australia Day event at The Lobby in Canberra has become all about Tony Hodges, Kim Sattler, Barbara Shaw, Michael Anderson, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, the police and a bunch of idiots who saw fit to hijack the day. It wasn’t supposed to be about them.

Our political leaders had gathered at the restaurant to bestow the new National Emergency Medal on 26 Australians who, paid or unpaid, did extraordinary work during the Victorian Bushfires and Queensland floods.

In her speech before the event was hijacked by an appalling set of bad decisions the Prime Minister said: “Today we award these Medals to a group of Australians who inspired us with their courage and service during two of the most devastating summers of natural disaster Australia has ever witnessed: the Victorian bushfires of 2009 and the Queensland floods and cyclone of December 2010 and January 2011.”

Continue reading "This is who Thursday’s event was supposed to be about" »

So we now know who is responsible for putting Julia Gillard into the most peril she’s been in since she became Prime Minister - her own office.

A senior member of the Prime Minister’s team has tonight resigned after it emerged he was the one who tipped off an Aboriginal Tent Embassy contact that Tony Abbott was in the Lobby restaurant yesterday - information that led to the Prime Minister being dragged to her car in undignified scenes that are now world news.

Tony Hodges, who was the one trawling the Press Gallery yesterday afternoon trying to sheet home blame for the ugly scenes to the Opposition Leader, is tonight no longer working for the PM. If it wasn’t so disgusting it would be funny. This came a day after a member of senior Cabinet Minister Anthony Albanese’s staff saw fit to send his boss off to the Press Club armed with a raft of fantastic quotes from a Hollywood movie.

Continue reading "When is this sorry mess going to end?" »

Julia Gillard should be congratulated for maintaining even a shred of dignity after being dragged minus a shoe through a crowd at a speed she couldn’t keep up with. Most Australians were horrified by the images from the steps of the Lobby restaurant, and in turn would have been relieved when a composed PM, with two fresh shoes on, reassured everyone from outside The Lodge that she was fine.

She should never have been placed in that terrible position in the first place, and there are many questions unanswered about how and why she was.

1. The location for yesterday’s inaugural emergency services medal presentation was poorly chosen.

Continue reading "How was yesterday’s drama ever allowed to happen?" »

In one of the earliest scenes in The Social Network, the nerds are shown using the net to rank the hotness of women at their university. That nerds are still using Facebook for these very same purposes a decade on should surprise few.

In recent days a private Facebook group has been exposed as trading in images of women. Of pilfering snaps from the pages of friends, of reposting them, of ranking the women like cuts of meat.

In a surprising twist, a group which clearly demonstrates no ethics apparently has a code of conduct for members including a mandate to never discuss the group, a rule I daresay imposed for fear of outing oneself as a geek, a letch and as a perv rather than to preserve any Stonecutter secrets.

Continue reading "Facebook ‘friends’ can pimp you out for kicks" »

Position Vacant. One (1) Villain. A unique, high-profile opportunity has arisen for the role of Chief Enemy of the West. Wide-ranging experience in terrorism, mass murder and threats of worldwide destruction essential. Applicants must look evil (long beard and walking cane preferable). Extensive travel required.

The full story is still unfolding, but what is clear is that almost 10 years after the September 11 attacks, the US finally has their man. Their pursuit of Osama bin Laden has been relentless, as well it should have been: The man admitted to plotting the murder of over 2,500 people.

But the victory is a double-edged sword for the American government and its allies. In killing bin Laden, they have brought a murderer to justice, but they have also lost their poster boy for the ‘war on terror’.

Continue reading "Uh oh, we’re gonna need a new Chief Enemy of the West" »

In yet another extraordinary exclusive, The Punch has obtained a transcript of the last minutes of Osama bin Laden, his wife Amal and courier Abu in his Pakistani compound…

AMAL: (Sigh…) Well I guess it’s another night in.

OSAMA: What’s that supposed to mean?

Continue reading "EXCLUSIVE: The bin Laden tapes" »

The death of Osama Bin Laden will make no difference to global terrorism inspired by Islamic fundamentalism, and it will have scant impact on the war in Afghanistan. 

But the way that the US killed Osama Bin Laden needs recognition; it was the sort of precise, human intelligence-driven operation that must be employed ruthlessly in Afghanistan to capture or kill insurgent leaders as we enter another fighting season.

Al-Qaida has not been about Osama bin Laden for quite some time and the Taliban in Afghanistan have not received support from al-Qaida or Osama Bin Laden since the end of initial operations in 2001.  The global Islamic terrorist movement is now a leaderless jihad and is more likely to come from a young IT whiz-kid in his bedroom in one of our leafy suburbs than from an old man hiding in the mountains of the AfPak border. 

Continue reading "Terror: Coming to a leafy suburb near you" »

President Barack Obama, whose presidency has been instantly and spectacularly rejuvenated, will visit Ground Zero in Manhattan tomorrow and provide the next major rallying point for Americans to consider life after Osama.

Despite scenes of intense celebration, the reality is that gatherings outside the White House, Times Square and Ground Zero have been quite small.

The shock of the announcement saw people rushing out to the streets late at night to join with their fellow Americans, but the lack of any large screens for people to focus on, or any organised speakers, meant the gatherings burned out quickly and people went home.

Continue reading "The US now wants to bury the rest of Al Qaeda" »

As you can probably guess it was me who hacked into the email accounts of ten senior federal ministers.

I hacked into Julia Gillard’s because I wanted to know what it was like to run a country, I hacked into Kevin Rudd’s because I wanted to know what it was like to run the world, and I hacked into Stephen Smith’s because…well, I just really wanted to get some sleep.

But what I found was deeply shocking and in yet another extraordinary exclusive I can now reveal their explosive contents for the first time…

Continue reading "EXCLUSIVE! I hacked the Government’s emails" »

Few people, apparently, support the jailing of Julian Assange - Australia’s very own electronic Lord Byron,  the “romantic” hero of the Internet generation - for his organisation’s use and misuse (and, presumably, sale) of stolen US diplomatic documents. 

Fortunately, those rights he may have as an Australian citizen in a foreign country have been actively supported by the Australian Embassies in Britain and Sweden, as they should be. 

Perhaps even more fortunately for Mr. Assange, the United States Ambassador to Australia, Jeff Bleich, has decried the exaggerated claims of ideologues in US media and politics.

Continue reading "Julian Assange: Lord Byron of the internets?" »

The “St. Kilda schoolgirl” and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange have, surprisingly, a lot in common.

Bear with me. Just as Assange’s careful trickle of classified cables gave the broadsheets something to write about daily (The Wikileaks Saga: Day 255 -Assange grows beard), the St Kilda school girl’s systematic release of nude and suggestive photos gave her an upper hand over the mainstream news media.

While Assange comes from a journalistic and computer hacker background, and the closest Miss St Kilda has probably come is reading Dolly magazine and getting her MySpace spammed, their strategic release of classified information into the public sphere is, surprisingly, similar.

Continue reading "For all our eyes only" »

Julian Assange must be stopped. Not because he’s a traitor or an anarchist, a whistleblower or a terrorist – but because he’s a frigging killjoy. And he’s slowly ruining all our fun.

The world used to be a magical place, full of wonder and mystery. Ancient peoples still cut off from the modern world. Whole continents yet undiscovered. Nobody knowing who really shot JR. There was so much we didn’t know, and it was utterly fascinating.

We don’t have any of this anymore. Now we know everything. Now we have dark matter. Now we have third umpires. And now we have Wikileaks. And it’s boring as hell.

Continue reading "We can handle the truth Jules, we just don’t want it" »

Since its inception in the 1990s, governments have long since recognized the democratising functions of the web.

But control has always seemed impossible, even for a tool created by government.

Attempts to curtail online freedoms have come off looking like a girdle on a Leviathan.

Continue reading "We’re killing the internet with our own triviality" »

The latest Wikileaks disaster for the U.S. government may centre on the actions of its diplomats rather than its soldiers, but Cablegate and the Afghan and Iraq War Diary data dumps are all crises of information control and management.

In a press briefing on Monday U.S. State Department Assistant Secretary P. J. Crowley was quizzed about the government’s policies and practices of storing information.

There is, as Crowley said, tension between “the need to protect or the need to know” when it comes to information – and this is true in all spheres, not just government bureaucracies.

Continue reading "The Wiki leaks are not the end of all secrets" »

In October 2007 two unarmed Iraqi women were shot and killed by private military contractors working for Unity Resources Group (URG), the same firm that now guards the Australian embassy in Baghdad. 

Just over a year earlier, contractors from the same company shot and killed a 72 year old Australian academic for failing to stop at a checkpoint.

The Defence Department recently told a Senate committee it was aware of the incidents when it awarded URG the embassy contract, but based on third party reports from “American, Iraqi and British authorities” decided the shootings were justified.

Continue reading "Private military firms need greater scrutiny" »

A common saying in Afghanistan is “we’ve got the watches they’ve got the time.”  A perfect metaphor to describe the Western obsession time and the Taliban’s eternal patience.  That is why U.S Secretary of Defence, Robert Gates’ statement that the United States will not be leaving Afghanistan is exactly the message to send to the Taliban.  If you don’t have the time don’t start a war in Afghanistan.

The simplicity of life in Afghanistan is also a camouflage for the Afghan’s ability to withstand asymmetrical threats from the climate, terrain or a foreign military.  We have failed to recognise their historical capacity to adapt.  Ahmed Rashid, one of the best contemporary authors on Afghanistan, suggests that the devastation of the Soviet invasion and subsequent civil war influenced the Taliban state of mind.  The longer we engage the more they evolve – both politically and violently.

They know they don’t have to win the war.  They just have to outlast our domestic time constraints and out-govern Karzai and his corrupt Provincial representatives.

Continue reading "We’ve got the watches, they’ve got the time" »

I’ve written before about how, at the age of 25, I discovered that my father was a very senior member of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

I was visiting him in Washington, where he was serving in what had once been Kim Philby’s job - as the SIS liaison with the CIA. One reason that he chose to tell me on that visit, I think, was that during my stay at his house in Washington, some of his colleagues from London would also be visiting.

He needed to know that I would not say or do anything untoward. I was, after all, a long-haired journalist working for the Sydney rock station Double-Jay. Not exactly prime security material.

Continue reading "How ASIO got it right during a time it got so much wrong" »

The Clash of Civilizations is a theory, proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington that people’s cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.

With plans underway to build an Islamic centre and mosque near Ground Zero, New York, where the September 11 attacks took place, many are once again are questioning this theory.

A recent poll by Quinnipiac University showed 67 per cent of voters across New York state want the mosque and community centre to be moved further away from Ground Zero than currently proposed (which is two blocks away). The poll also found 80 per cent agreed the project was legally allowed to go ahead.

Continue reading "What I learned from meeting the Ground Zero Imam" »

Way back in 2003 it must have seemed like a great idea to have the Commonwealth Games in colourful, on-the-move Delhi instead of the other front-runner, Hamilton in Ontario Canada.

But in 2010 the decision by the Commonwealth Games Federation General Assembly to send hundreds of fresh-faced athletes from 72 nations into a hotbed of terror threats and general chaos now looks, at the very best, reckless.

At worst, the Federation could end up sacrificing athletes and spectators to an unjustified cause. While acknowledging the strength of the argument to pull out now would “mean the terrorists win” – knowingly putting people in harms way won’t achieve anything.

Continue reading "Let’s just pull the pin on Delhi 2010 now" »

Advisory: The following post contains graphic content which some people may find distressing.

Everyone suffers in war. No exceptions. I have been travelling to Afghanistan now for over three years. Covering the conflict from an outsider’s perspective, not getting involved or emotionally attached to the people I photograph. This is hard. Maintaining perspective and impartialility each day is challenging.

Watching soldiers die on the battlefield for a belief in something so far remote from them, is at times very difficult. They fight because they are told to and because if they do not, they will probably be killed by an ill-equipped and under trained Afghan insurgent - or a farmer with a grudge and no money to feed his family.

Continue reading "Into an Afghan hot zone with a ‘Dustoff’ crew" »

There’s a tendency in some circles to see disclosures like the Wikileaks publishing of 90,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan as an inherently good thing.

Many people – from all parts of the political spectrum – see the release of secret government information as desirable as a rule because it allows people to look into the inner workings of the state apparatus and its agents. This makes governments accountable. Others, more insidiously – especially in technology and new media circles – welcome events like this mainly because they involve the internet.

The Afghanistan war logs are a watershed moment in government control over intelligence data. It’s not that battlefield information was published – that’s nothing especially new – but that the release of the information was so huge and co-ordinated between three countries and on the web simultaneously.

Continue reading "Wikileaks: friend of the truth, enemy of the troops?" »

Like Samson and his hair, I’ve a long held theory that John Faulkner’s powers actually reside in his huge red rimmed glasses.

This may have been an optical illusion, but in moments when Faulkner’s significant consolatory powers were most in demand, such as sitting between Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard in the Prime Minister’s office two weeks ago, the glasses appeared to double in size.

Today, as the wise old owl of the Labor Party announced he would be moving back to the backbench, the size of his specs looked almost regular - or at least within the range of sizes recommended by OPSM before they give you long-term neck problems.

Continue reading "The PM needs to signal who will take charge of Defence" »

Tony Abbott said yesterday that if he was Prime Minister he would introduce a policy that sends asylum seekers “back” if they arrive without identity documents.

When I heard this, my stomach turned.  Like every other lawyer who provides advice to asylum seekers, I know this approach ignores the realities of obtaining identity documents in countries where persecution is rife.

Sensibly, Julia Gillard rejected “turning boats back”, saying that it would set Australian customs and defence officials up for sabotage. She also pointed out “the practical reality that there is nowhere to turn boats back to.” But for me what gets lost in the asylum seeker debate is the fact that we are dealing with unique people, with unique stories to tell.

Continue reading "Why are we so afraid of people seeking asylum?" »

The recent discussion of the Afghan deployment focus on the loss of more, young Australian lives as part of a mission which is not understood. It is a tragic loss, yet fundamental re-appraisal of western aims in Afghanistan seems highly unlikely.

The western presence in Afghanistan is not simply a lost decade of US led Osama hunting, nor is it merely a 30 year hangover from Cold War conflict. The Western presence in Afghanistan is part of a larger mission that has dragged on for hundreds of years.

The common acceptance of the logic that underpins both sides of the public debate about Afghanistan, illustrates that this mission is so acceptable to western polities that its existence is taken for granted and passes largely unremarked.

Continue reading "The real reason we’re fighting a war in Afghanistan" »

If I were ever going to rob a bank I would do so in character. Specifically, I’d go in wearing the giant green St George Dragon mascot suit.

Aside from the delicious irony of a bank being robbed by its own mascot, the stunt would serve as a timely reminder to Reverend Fred Nile- and others- that there are a range of uniforms, sporting apparel, masks and other coverings that conceal the face and the identity of the wearer.

Last week Nile from the Christian Democratic Party introduced a Bill in the NSW Upper House to make it an offence (maximum penalty $550) for “a person, without reasonable excuse to wear a face covering in a public place.” Note, that’s not just in banks or service stations, but in any public place.

Continue reading "Intolerance and censorship have no place in democracy" »

EAST Timorese Prime Minister Xanana Gusmao has taken in recent weeks to heavily bagging Australia, including a strange speech in which he, seemingly apropos of nothing, dug deep into the past and said Australia had selfishly cost the lives of 60,000 East Timorese by coming to Timor to “wage war” against the Japanese in World War II.

Gusmao has also been claiming Australian interference in its sovereign rights. Australia is studying the rhetoric closely, with good reason. As Gusmao slams Australia, his country’s biggest aid donor, Gusmao has allowed China for the first time to gain a small de facto military foothold in East Timor.

China now has naval training crews operating out of Dili aboard two gunboats which East Timor bought from China, and which were formally handed over last week. Gusmao’s attacks on Australia, and his newfound military cooperation with China, are seen as related.

Continue reading "Watching East Timor as China gets a military toehold" »

Update 10.30am: Acting chief of the defence force Lieutenant General David Hurley, and the acting defence minister Greg Combet have also just confirmed the deaths, and said the soldiers’ families had requested their names not be released.

Update 10.10am: Queensland Premier Anna Bligh has confirmed two Australian soldiers were killed. More here.

Details are still emerging but Australians are believed among the casualties in the most deadly day this year for allied forces in Afghanistan.

A spokesman for the Australian Defence Force confirmed an “an incident” involving the Mentoring Task Force and that next of kin had been informed, though did not provide further details. The Courier-Mail in Brisbane, where the MTF is based, is reporting two Australian soldiers were killed in the incident. If confirmed it will bring the number of Australian soldiers killed in Afghanistan to 13 since 2002.

Last night the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force confirmed an improvised explosive device incident that killed two soldiers in southern Afghanistan, where Australian troops are based.

Continue reading "Callous reminders of why Afghans still want to flee" »

AUSTRALIA needs to overhaul its travel warning system or end up looking like the boy who cried wolf.

We found out last week that 567,000 Australians visited our neighbour Indonesia last year.

This means more than half a million Australians either didn’t know about - or, more likely, happily ignored -  the Australian Government’s travel warnings when they flew off to Bali for a week of sun, surf, beer, braiding, tattoos and tummy upsets.

Continue reading "Our travel warning system is the boy who cried wolf" »

Who’s going to say it first? Surely in the prickly conversations going on through the ranks of Australian sport and diplomacy, many people are suggesting it: that we shouldn’t be going to the Commonwealth Games.

It is one thing to take your own life in your hands by getting on a toboggan and going down an ice chute but it is quite another for governments and sporting authorities to send athletes to a place where people are threatening to kill them.

Following today’s threat of a terrorist attack on the Games in New Delhi from an al-Qaeda offshoot the stakes have been raised to vertigo-inducing levels. Fox Sports reports today:

Continue reading "Game on? The Delhi question" »

The hottest story in the Information Security world right now is the much publicised hacking of Google’s corporate network in China.

If you were skimming the headlines, you might think this story is somehow related to Google blocked searches and Chinese Government censorship. That is how it is being presented in much of the mainstream press, both locally and internationally.

For those who missed the initial story: Early last week Google suddenly announced that it may suspend its operations in China due to a highly sophisticated attack against its corporate network. Within days, it was revealed that up to 30 other tech companies (including Adobe) had been targeted by the same attackers.

Continue reading "China vs Google, a thrilling tale of IT espionage" »

As a new year begins we should look at where we are with the struggle against Jihadi terrorism.

Retrospectively, we can now see a pattern in the role of Pakistani based Jihadists and new potential threats to Australia.

Three Australians, Gareth McEvoy, Nathan Verity, and Craig Senger, were murdered in Jakarta on July 17 by al-Qaeda’s South East Asian franchise, Jemaah Islamiyah.

Continue reading "On terrorism, we need to tell Pakistan enough is enough" »

Having survived the recession, swine-flu and my affair with Tiger Woods, it chills me to find out there’s a new threat - airport scanners.

Now, I’m used to scanners. Used to queuing for ages behind people who empty their pockets only when they get to the scanning belt. Used to my (completely non-metallic) shoes setting off the alarms. I’m used to getting through and then being stopped for an explosives scan because I just love being scanned that much.

But these new scanners, recent coverage suggests, are different. A perversion of the metal scanner I know and love.

These scanners emit x-rays that pass through my clothes and then flash up a monochromatic image of me, denuded of clothes and hair, for security officials to leer and peer at my bits.

Continue reading "If it gets me where I’m going, bring on the X-ray scanner" »

One of the most disturbing things about this morning’s counter-terrorism raids in Melbourne is the profile of the suspects, who were allegedly planning a Mumbai-style machine-gun attack on Australian Army barracks.

They were, The Australian reports, construction workers and taxi drivers of Somali and Lebanese descent, living in suburban Melbourne.

Combine this with the admission of Anglo-Australian terrorist Shane Kent that he was part of a terrorist organisation and it’s clear terrorists don’t look like anything in particular and could be living in your street.

Continue reading "Race profiles a blunted tool in fight against enemy within" »

Like Peter denying Jesus after the arrest, as dawn was breaking and the cock was getting ready to crow, Australia is given a third chance to acknowledge its inconvenient associations. Will we, like Peter, deny any association with or responsibility with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the detainees in Guantanamo? We probably will. We denied our own citizens in Guantanamo until the opinion polls started to turn dirty.

Australia, through the support of the Howard government for the actions of the Bush Administration’s war on terror, has as much responsibility for the Uighurs, who were found to have been wrongly detained, as does the US and the Bush Administration.

We should accept the Uighurs as refugees and permanent residents. If they are returned to China, they face certain persecution and, possibly, death. To do otherwise would display a flaw in our national character.

Continue reading "Haneef lawyer: Guantanamo inmates should come here" »