Rachel Noble: Cyber spy boss pushes back on Five Eyes expansion

Rachel Noble has suggested it’s unlikely the nearly 80-year-old spy network of English-speaking countries will admit new members.

Director-General of the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) Rachel Noble. Picture: Sean Davey.

The head of the nation’s top secret signals intelligence agency has pushed back at the prospect of expanding the Five Eyes intelligence alliance to meet growing security threats.

Australian Signals Directorate director-general Rachel Noble said democracies needed to stand together, but suggested it was unlikely the nearly 80-year-old spy network of English-speaking countries would admit new members.

Japan last year expressed an interest in joining the tight-knit security alliance, while analysts have suggested India might also be a valuable additional member.

But Ms Noble declared: “The Five Eyes is the Five Eyes.”

She told an Australian Defence Force Academy event hosted by UNSW Canberra that the Five Eyes members – Australia, the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand – shared a close and historic bond.

“Certainly in the signals and cybersecurity space we go back to the second world war and even before that,” Ms Noble said in a Q&A session.

“So when you think about an alliance and a set of relationships, capability and integration that goes back nearly 80 years, it’s sort of a framing issue to go: ‘Oh, can someone just sort of join it today?’.”

Ms Noble said the alliance had helped give Australia a “global edge” over other nations, “and we fully intend to maintain that edge”.

But she said Australia also had valuable intelligence-sharing relationships outside of the Five Eyes alliance. “We will partner with other countries when it is in our interest to do so,” Ms Noble said. Her comments came as the US cybersecurity agency identified Iran as the backer of a hacking group responsible for recent ransomware attacks which had affected Australia.

Ms Noble declared Australia’s ability to wage cyber warfare was now a “mature” capability that could “greatly shorten” a ­future conflict by taking out enemy computer networks.

With AFP