Right: Senator John Faulkner and Dr Kristine Klugman, President of CLA, meet earlier in 2014 to discuss security and democracy issues
The Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence and Security has made a grab for greater power over all Australian spook activity.
Its intentions were largely overlooked when PJCIS reported on Tranche 2 of new security legislation, which – among other things – threatens to jail for 5-10 years journalists and other commentators who reveal a secret intelligence operation of ASIO…even if revealers didn’t know about the operation.
Tranche 2 is the Foreign Fighters bill, which will for the first time restrict the right of Australians to travel virtually anywhere they choose: in future, for many regions you will have to get government permission.
Tranche 3 is the data retention proposal, where everything you say and do over a comms network will be recorded for years so the government can spy on you retrospectively, as well as in real time.
Wrting about the PJCIS Tranche 12 report, Crikey’s Bernard Keane said:
“…what’s noteworthy about the report is that the committee (which, bear in mind, isn’t an ordinary committee but one established separately in legislation) wants to deal itself much more explicitly into not just future legislative reviews — such as for preventive detention orders — but in overseeing the designation process that the bill would set up.
“This will be a significant shift by a committee that has traditionally had a limited role, primarily in relation to administrative matters of intelligence agencies, unless a government has specifically requested it to consider an intelligence or security issue…
“…the committee thus also wants its role extended to encompass the counter-terrorism activities of the Australian Federal Police (including “anything involving classified material”). These changes to the role of JCIS, if accepted, would establish in legislation a substantially greater review function … in overseeing how established legislation is being implemented by the government – in effect codifying the role of JCIS.
“This reflects a desire on the part of some committee members to fill what is an increasingly obvious gap in the broken oversight of Australia’s intelligence agencies, especially compared to the way the Brits and the Americans run parliamentary oversight of agencies.”
– Bernard Keane, Crikey, 17 Oct 2014 http://tinyurl.com/lv9yndo
The PJCIS can be reached here: http://tinyurl.com/og7xuuf …if the Parliament House website is working properly, which it frequently is not.
CLA agrees with need, but not solution
Civil Liberties Australia agrees there is a need for greater supervision of all Australia security and intelligence agencies, including ASIO, ASIS and police and defence agencies and sub-agencies, and how the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security (IGIS) operates.
But we don’t agree the unbalanced PJCIS is the place for that scrutiny. Its members are largely chosen because of past experience in security (worked for a spy agency, high ranking military, or worked in government with the agencies).
Choosing such already imbalanced MPs for a committee reviewing security and intelligence is exactly the wrong approach: the outcome is always a spook-skewed view of propriety because of the MPs’ backgrounds. They are in and of ‘The Club’, rather than being external to it, and reviewing it.
The members of the PJCIS should represent the average Australian, not be self-evidently biased by their previous or existing connections and possible compromises they have already made.
There should be open and transparent public hearings, as in the Senate Estimates process, at which all security, police and intelligence-related agencies should be open to questioning by non-specialists MPs. Such hearings occur in other countries, like the US and the UK.
For those people – including MPs – who say IGIS already supervises most of the key agencies, that is just plain wrong. As CLA’s CEO, Bill Rowlings, told the PJCIS hearing into Tranche 1:
When CLA asked the current IGIS, Dr Vivienne Thom, to launch ‘own motion’ inquiries into highly relevant aspects of agency operations, she studiously avoided doing so.
CLA believes that all the agencies, IGIS included, need much better – and transparent, in public – supervision by the parliament than currently occurs. There should be open parliamentary hearings, broadcast live on radio and TV.
The PJCIS is making a power bid for that role as a “select” committee of parliament. Because of its “select” composition, it would be precisely the wrong body to have this role…unless membership is expanded to include people representing “average” Australians, not the military/police/intelligence/security elite.
Faulkner bids for upgraded PJCIS role
Senator Faulkner, a PJCIS committee member, said late last month that is was time for “a comprehensive review of the oversight of Australia’s security agencies”.
“It is the parliament to which the intelligence agencies are accountable and it’s the parliament’s responsibility to oversee their priorities and effectiveness.”
The PJCIS should have greater powers of oversight of security agencies and greater access to confidential and classified information, Senator Faulkner told parliament. http://tinyurl.com/m65a5ph
CLA says that, if the members of the PJCIS were all men and women with a track record similar to that of Senator Faulkner, his idea may be sensible. But they are not necessarily of similar quality to the Senator, who has announced he will not be returning to the Senate after the next election.
We also take issue with his notion that the Super CIS he envisages should comprise “experts’ in the security and intelligence field. Civil Liberties Australia believes there should be experts in civil liberties, human rights and freedoms equal in number to the spook experts on any such committee.
NOTE: Tranche 3 – data retention – was introduced into the House by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull in late October 2014. The government aims to rush it through parliament.
