Lincoln Wright – Defence Minister Robert Hill has rejected claims from a whistleblower that the Defence Signals Directorate spied on journalists to discover who was leaking sensitive intelligence material about East Timor.
The whistleblower is a former senior Defence security official, who worked in the department during the days when DSD was gathering intelligence on the politically tricky situation in East Timor, in 1999 and 2000.
DSD is a top-secret signals intelligence gatherer, but its charter specifies that it must collect only foreign intelligence. It must not focus on Australians unless they are involved in criminal acts overseas or breaching national security.
The leaks about what Australia knew about the activities of East Timor's militias severely embarrassed the Government. As a result, Defence set up an official team of plumbers, called the Special Investigations Unit, to find the leakers.
The team's activities eventually resulted in several house raids in Canberra and Sydney by the Australian Federal Police, including the home of the adviser to the then Opposition's foreign affairs spokesman, Laurie Brereton.
The whistleblower alleges that DSD housed the security unit which used the "Echelon" eavesdropping system to track errant military officers, public servants and the journalists who received the leaks.
The Echelon system allows an officer to capture electronic communications by punching a word or phrase into a computer. The computer then filters electronic signals to pick up a communication with that phrase in it.
The whistleblower insists that the head of the unit, a former ASIO officer who cannot be named, worked from within the DSD building at Russell Hill during the investigation.
"He was there to use all the equipment," the whistleblower said. The officer sat next to a senior, named, DSD security officer, and used the Echelon facilities, a world-wide intelligence network, to track and intercept telephone calls, the whistleblower alleges. The DSD security officer would not comment.
Senator Hill told a media briefing yesterday, "It's not DSD's job to track down who leaks to journalists. You know that there are very strict restraints on DSD in terms of Australian citizens. We're in the business of international intelligence."
Earlier this year it was alleged that DSD had bugged telephones to monitor the situation on the Tampa, a ship carrying asylum-seekers to Australia last year.
That led to an investigation by the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Bill Blick, which concluded that there had been some accidental breaches of the DSD rules, but that no raw intelligence had been passed to the Government.