There is an “urgent” need for greater transparency around Australia’s spy agency following a tripling in its budget in the last five years and an increased role within the country, according to a new report.
The report by the Social Cyber Institute found that massive funding boosts for the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) have been mainly for combating foreign interference in Australia, coordinating with AUKUS partners and an “exaggerated” view of declining relations in the Indo-Pacific.
It said that more effective public scrutiny of the funding of Australia’s spy agency is “urgent” and better benchmarks for the effectiveness of this spending is also needed.
The ASD is a joint military and civilian organisation tasked with undertaking military and non-military cyber-related and intelligence activities, primarily through covert means.
The former Coalition government handed ASD a $10 billion over 10 years funding boost in 2022, with a focus on tripling its offensive cyber capabilities, doubling its persistent cyber hunt activities and hiring 1,900 people.
REDSPICE
This was under the guise of a new program dubbed Resilience, Effects, Defence, Space, Intelligence, Cyber and Enablers (REDSPICE).
Earlier this year the Labor government made a significant capital investment in ASD, with a focus on upgrading its technical systems.
This served to more than double the funding allocated to REDSPICE over the next decade, according to the report.
The report, authored by Professor Greg Austin at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), found that the total funding for ASD’s “electronic warfare development and integration” is as much as $3.7 billion annually.
Through these new investments, the ASD budget has tripled in size from 2019-20 to 2023-24, the report found.
This came at a time when the overall Defence budget increased by just 23 per cent, meaning ASD’s budget outpaced Defence spending by a factor of more than eight.
There has also been a recent “blurring of the agency’s traditional role as externally oriented”, with the ASD’s remit within Australia expanding, Professor Austin found.
But this is yet to correspond with an increase in scrutiny or transparency around the spy agency’s operations, the report said.
“The scale alone of Australia’s cyber surge dictates a corresponding doubling of effort in oversight of ASD activities by Parliament and the public, especially in respect of the agency’s apparent intent for expanded operations inside Australia,” Professor Austin said in the report.
“Compared with its US counterparts, ASD practices for public disclosure of its activities remain on the conservative side, in spite of its moves in the past decade to more openness.
“In these circumstances, given the lack of detailed information due to secrecy concerns, there are few reliable benchmarks for assessing the adequacy of the ASD spending growth.”
The real reason for funding boost
While the first REDSPICE funding injection was made soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the reasons behind it were likely more about countering foreign interference within Australia and the need to deliver new cyber operations as part of AUKUS, the report found.
Prior to this announcement, the then-Coalition government created an “alarmist atmosphere in public policy premised on the judgement that Australia should adjust its military preparations and readiness level for an increased possibility of war”, Professor Austin said.
This was continued by the Labor government, which in “simply carrying on with the sensationalist claims the new government defied its Labor Party heritage of being more balanced in such matters than its LNP opponents”, stated the report.
Professor Austin said that the appointment of Abigail Bradshaw as the new ASD director-general presents an “ideal opportunity to reconsider performance” in light of the “urgent” need for more public scrutiny of the billions of dollars going to the spy agency.
Earlier this year the ASD publicly attributed a series of cyberattacks to the Chinese government, and warned of an ongoing threat.
It came after the work of the ASD also led to the federal government publicly attributing the Medibank hack to a Russia-linked group.
In late 2022 the Labor government declared a war on cyber “scumbags” with the creation of a formal joint standing operation consisting of 100 AFP and ASD experts focused on combating ransomware and cybercrime.
