More Australians being targeted for espionage, warns spy chief

SYDNEY - Foreign spies have been targeting Australians more aggressively than ever, with attempts to influence or exploit a wide spectrum of public servants and professionals, the country’s spy chief has warned.

He said rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific region – due to the rivalry between the United States and China and to territorial disputes such as over the South China Sea – was leading to a “thirst for inside information and an appetite for covert influence”. Mr Burgess, in his ominous assessment of the current threats facing Australians, said: “Based on what Asio is seeing, more Australians are being targeted for espionage and foreign interference than at any time in Australia’s history.”“I want to dispel any sense that espionage is some romantic Cold War notion,” he said. “It’s not – it is a real and present danger.”

Mr Burgess also discussed a plot to target senior journalists and offer them an expenses-paid study tour to the foreign country, where spies posing as local officials would collect data from the journalists’ phones and laptops. First, Mr Burgess appeared to be genuinely concerned that Australians do not appreciate the extent of the threat from foreign agents. Indeed, he launched a deliberate attack on members of the business community, academia, and the bureaucracy who had told him that Asio should ease its operations to avoid upsetting foreign countries.

The Five Eyes is an intelligence alliance comprising [b]Australia[b], Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. These countries Five Eyes can also refer to the group of intelligence agencies of these countries.

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