There are so many things wrong with this story. Mostly the use of the word ‘A-Team’. This is embarrassing, and ASIO should stop it immediately.
The other thing they should stop doing is refusing to name the politician because it could give away ‘sources and methods’.
I suspect the Chinese know who they recruited. They don’t need the ASIO director-general to tell them.
There’s a pretty good piece on it over at The Interpreter.
The fact that ASIO has chosen to reveal, rather than use, its knowledge of the A-team tells us two things about the current state of intelligence competition.
Secrets have a reduced shelf life.
The first is that the age-old trade-off between preserving and using intelligence is shifting in favour of use. Burgess says that “while we want the foreign intelligence service to know its cover is blown, we do not want it to unpick how we discovered its activities”. But to achieve the former he’s plainly willing to risk the latter. The United States and United Kingdom similarly sought to operationalise intelligence in the lead-up to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, declassifying and disseminating material with extraordinary speed and breadth.
The shift in favour of operationalising intelligence is driven by both intensifying geopolitical competition and the rapidly evolving information environment. The digital revolution is disrupting “business as usual”, including by breaking down Cold War categories of “secret” and “open-source” information. Secrets have a reduced shelf life.
The second thing Burgess’ speech tells us about current intelligence competition is that ASIO’s knowledge of the A-team’s operations doesn’t give it the edge it once did. Directly confronting the A-team leader didn’t end its operations, and we don’t know whether the latest revelations will do so. It’s possible the A-team will continue with its business.
Burgess said the A-team’s “appetites” are wider than just classified material. “This form of espionage is low-cost, low-risk, low-effort – and can be conducted at scale.”
I also suspect that the reason Burgess released this story, knowing how wild the press (and a lot of pollies) would be when he didn’t identify the perp, wasn’t to warn the Chinese. It was to warn the potential targets.
If “directly confronting the A-team leader didn’t end its operations”, then, uh, those operations are still ongoing. Dropping this turd in the punchbowl might well have shocked a few other perps into freaking out and fucking up. Again, Burgess made the point that multiple approaches have been made to multiple targets in all of the parties.