We need better tech to combat terrorism

Police commissioner Karen Web vists site of anti-Semetic graffiti. Picture: Thomas Li

Australia faces an escalation in the threat to our domestic security that has no parallel.

The confluence of the rise in neo-Nazi activity is mirrored by far-left ambitions to generate violent “revolutionary” circumstances and the Islamist extremists emboldened by the exploitation of the war in the Middle East. This is approaching a perfect storm.

The discovery of the explosives-laden caravan found in Dural amplifies the urgency of the situation. The question has to be asked as to how these explosives were accumulated in the first place without detection.

For our agencies this coincides with the increasing technical threats from state-based sources including traditional and industrially related espionage challenges; now amplified by cyber warfare threats to institutions and infrastructure, and advances in AI. Added to this workload is the evolution in the past 10 years of the sophisticated information warfare deployed collaboratively by Russia, Iran, China, North Korea and their willing autocratic partners, which has played into and helped feed the domestic social challenge.

This threat is insidious in poisoning minds, particularly but not exclusively, of our kids, through the effect of bias-confirming algorithms. Now we have reports of possible direct foreign interference relating to financial arrangements to pay for arson attacks. We have not empowered all our agencies to fight back in these circumstances.

While there has been a significant investment in increased Australian Signals Directorate capability and the cyber security issue has drawn much attention, other civil agencies have suffered from a lack of investment. There are extraordinarily effective technology tools available now with the AI revolution, but this requires an investment in infrastructure upgrades to take full advantage of them. All of the civil agencies who need to play a part in fighting the anti-Semitism and Islamophobic threat are not properly funded to undertake this modernisation rapidly. Nor are they properly funded, organised and equipped to more effectively cut across the silos that impede their co-operation domestically and internationally.

This relates particularly to how classified material can be shared rapidly while still safeguarding the aspects that require protection, even in some respects in relation to other domestic and international agencies. The information must be managed in a way that does not detract from the probity and admissibility of evidence. The way information is collected and shared must comply with regulatory requirements necessitating the deployment of built-in access controls and permissions regimes.

Some agencies have resorted to in-house attempts to develop technical tools but this has often been a blind ally and a financial black hole. In-house solutions have been plagued by delay and inadequate delivery. They are also vulnerable to dependence on the individuals who developed them, and compatibility issues with other institutional tools or collaborative agencies. With the exception of the ASD, most government agencies and departments suffer from a dearth of top technology talent as they can’t compete with the commercial sector for these highly sought-after personnel. This also compounds in the difficulty they have assessing commercial technology options in procurement. The number and cost of IT procurement mistakes or substandard delivery in Australian governments is appalling.

In relation to the enhanced AI cyber threat former US president Joe Biden issued Executive Order 14028 establishing a “zero trust” regime to protect federal government networks. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology has published several guidelines for implementing zero trust in organisations and the US Department of Defence has released a Zero Trust Strategy and Reference Architecture. There are DoD gateways set out for this policy that are focused on achieving a threshold level of security by 2027 and an advanced level by 2032.

The US DoD has set up a rigorous program of testing capability against its Strategy and Reference Architecture. The process is intensely rigorous involving skilled and aggressive “red teaming” and “insider threat” analysis that is well resourced and staffed, and is extremely intrusive for the solutions under test. We have nothing like it here in Australia and would struggle to create it. We will likely need to collaborate closely with NIST and the US DoD to glean the benefit of their work, and this should be included in our AUKUS Pillar Two framework.

The US Defence Advanced Research Project Agency has initiated three efforts to address the information warfare threat. These are the Influence Campaign Awareness and Sensemaking, Modelling Influence Pathways, and Deepfake Defence Tech Ready for Commercialisation Transition Initiative projects. We should look to include collaboration within AUKUS Pillar Two.

We need a standardised approach to the national education curriculum to equip kids to navigate social media, to promote critical thinking, the evaluation of sources and to do reliable research. At the school level we need to invest more in education to ensure kids are not vulnerable to the othering, grooming and radicalising pursued by malevolent actors, and enable intervention with vulnerable individuals.

We need to better police the domestic social threat by properly enforcing the law and requiring offenders to undertake remedial education. The urgency and multidimensional nature of the problem requires the establishment of an interdepartmental taskforce headed up ideally by a person with appropriate experience such as an ASIO background.

This taskforce must be mandated to engage with civil society and community organisations to enhance human intelligence input that assists in the prevention of radicalisation, and obtain information on potential illegal conduct and terror. It requires the government to prioritise urgent funding to address agency technical deficiencies so the extensive information relevant to this effort can be effectively shared, analysed and acted on in a timely manner.

Mike Kelly is a former Labor minister and army officer, and co-convener of Labor Friends of Israel