The recent revelations that ASIO raided the offices of Timor Leste's lawyers and detained its star witness just before its case against Australia (alleging that it bugged Timor's cabinet office during the negotiations in the run-up to the signing of the CMATS deal over division of oil reserves) highlights, once again, the question of the linkage between national and commercial interests.
Attorney-General George Brandis will not say why ASIO raided the offices of Bernard Collaery and, indeed, the ASIO offices executing the warrant allegedly refused even to show it to those present in his offices at the time. Nevertheless, if the raids do relate to the upcoming arbitration, it would be hard to see how they come within the powers of ASIO, the functions of which, by s.17 of the ASIO Act are clearly restricted to security (i.e. threats to borders or from espionage, sabotage, political violence and the like).
In short, ASIO's governing statute does not permit it to engage in economic espionage. Unfortunately, however, the distinction between government and commercial interests is growing increasingly hard to draw — especially when there are no significant controls on people moving between government and corporate worlds. The Australian foreign minister who signed the deal with Timor which is currently in question, Alexander Downer, is now a lobbyist for Woodside petroleum — the company exploiting the oil reserves which are the subject of the CMATS.
The Snowden revelations published in the Guardian and elsewhere reveal that this is not an exclusively Australian problem: the US and its allies have also allegedly been spying on foreign competitors in Brazil while the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance is reported to have spied on G8 and G20 meetings. The Anglophone spies, in short, seem to have gone well beyond their remit of protecting national security — participating in activities which undermine the very ideals of free trade in an open market for which their countries claim to stand.
The problem of commercialisation lies not only with the spies' targets but with the spooks themselves. Traditionally, spy agencies were clearly arms of government with chains of command directly accountable to political leadership. While spies themselves may have had a variety of motivations for acting as they did, national agencies were the places where their information ultimately went and was acted on. While much of the discussions of the Snowden revelations has centred around national security and terrorism, the assumption that a national government is overseeing intelligence collection and can hold it accountable no longer holds.
Not only have politicians in the US and Britain been discovering how little they knew about their agencies' activities, with at least one senior US intelligence official openly admitting that he lied to Congress, it is worth noting that Snowden was not, at the time of his revelations to the Guardian, a government employee at all but was employed by Booz Allen Hamilton, a private firm incorporated under the law of Delaware, USA.
In this capacity, he had access to a trove of secret documents from around the world including those of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate, Britain's Government Communications Headquarters, the United States' National Security Agency, New Zealand's Government Communications and Security Bureau and Canada's Communication Security Establishment. One is almost nostalgic for the days of the Cold War when at least you knew who was supposed to have access to secret information and who was trying to wrest it from them.
All of this conflation of the interests of business, their unelected shareholders and governments leads to worrying possibilities. The last word on these should probably go to Mussolini who famously said, 'Fascism is when you cannot slide a cigarette paper between corporations and government.'
Justin Glyn SJ is a student of philosophy and theology in Melbourne who holds a PhD in international and administrative law.
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