Vince Connelly (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020. Some of the current events in Afghanistan really bring into sharp focus the reality in this life that there are those who would seek actively to do us harm, both to our freedoms and to our way of life. We entered Afghanistan 20 years ago, and that was in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Our aim was to work alongside the US, NATO and our other partners to find Osama bin Laden and those responsible for the September 11 attacks, and also to prevent their freedom of action in being able to plan and execute operations of mass destruction on those sorts of scales. Sadly, in 2002, we saw what have now become known as the Bali bombings. We saw the death of 202 people, including 88 Australians.

However, it's not the case that all attacks on our persons and on our freedom necessarily occur in the physical realm. There are certainly attacks and crimes which occur in digital spaces. As I lead into this bill, I'll make some brief commentary about what those spaces look like. We hear about the dark web and anonymising technologies. To give a brief description of what this actually means, the dark web refers to areas of the internet which are intentionally hidden. These cannot be accessed without using specialised browsers. These are not the Google, Chrome or Mozilla Firefox browsers that we might normally use; these are absolutely and intentionally hidden. Many of the sites on the dark web which are of concern to law enforcement include forums and marketplaces which are dedicated to criminal activity, and they are hosted anonymously. In conjunction with the specialised browsers that I mentioned, the dark web uses other anonymising technologies, such as virtual private networks and cryptocurrencies for any transactions that may occur. These approaches help to ensure that the true identities and locations of criminals remain unknown and unseeable.

I talked about anonymising technology. I'll touch briefly on what we mean when we use this term. Anonymising technology refers to technologies which can be used to disguise a person's activities, location or true identity. These include dedicated closed encryption communications platforms, some of which are operated and designed specifically for use by the criminal market, such as bespoke encrypted handsets. Some of these are EncroChat and Cipher, for example. They are used by criminals as devices that operate on a closed network without the normal applications and connectivity that our mobile phones and normal handsets have. Also, virtual currencies, such as bitcoin, allow purchases and funds transfer to be made with a minimum degree of traceability. Virtual private networks help to conceal the location of devices using the internet or incorrectly report a person's IP address, making it appear as if they are in another jurisdiction—for example, even completely offshore. So that's a description of what some of these technologies and activities look like.

Since the Liberal Party came to government in 2013, our successive administrations have enacted legislation that continued to safeguard the laws that protect Australians. The Morrison government, of which I'm an extremely proud member, continue to demonstrate our resolve in combatting all of those who would seek to do us harm. Whether those challenges relate to national security, to defence or to criminal behaviour, we never shy away from tasks despite, at times, their great difficulty.

It is a desperately saddening and deeply troubling fact that some individuals, even within our own communities, seek to exploit and to harm our nation's most vulnerable and, in particular, our children. Like many others in this place, I am a parent, and I will always fight to strengthen laws that provide protection to our children. That's why I fought last year, along with members on this side of the House, when unfortunately Labor and the Greens teamed up and joined forced on Monday 15 June 2020 to oppose what was a really important component of the Morrison government's proposed legislation to keep our children safe from paedophiles. The Attorney-General made the case that, in the previous financial year, there were 39 per cent of federally convicted child-sex offenders who spent no time behind bars. I will just repeat that important statistic: the Attorney-General made the case that, in the previous financial year, 39 per cent of federally convicted child-sex offenders spent zero days behind bars. Thank God that, along with others, we were successful in our advocacy and the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Sexual Crimes Against Children and Community Protection Measures) Bill has now passed and been introduced.

That bill sees minimum mandatory sentences and toughened-up sentencing. It's yet another example of the Morrison government's commitment to protect children in Australia and overseas from the dangers of sexual exploitation and abuse and to improve justice outcomes for survivors of child-sex offenders. Some of the measures contained in that bill included minimum mandatory sentences for the most serious child-sex offences, including for repeat offenders, and increased maximum penalties right across the spectrum, including up to life imprisonment.

I will now reflect on the current bill and other new ways that the Morrison government is seeking to protect those most vulnerable, including children, who are online. The agencies that operate in this space are, namely, the Australian Federal Police, or AFP, and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission. We cannot and should not underestimate the complexity and the challenges that these agencies need to deal with. The tools that are proposed in this legislation will enable them to do their job properly, because advancements in anonymising technologies have made it very much harder and more time consuming for law enforcement agencies to take action against dark web users—a group that includes drug and firearm traffickers, terrorists and child-sex offenders. For example, currently over 90 per cent of content being intercepted lawfully uses some form of encryption, with expectations that soon nearly all of this content will be encrypted.

I've mentioned VPNs, cryptocurrency and closed encrypted communications platforms, and these types of anonymity really allow transnational, serious and organised crime groups to operate in a fashion that is borderless and is also significant in scale. It makes it difficult for those law enforcement agencies to identify individual people, organisations, premises or devices.

The AFP-led ACCCE identified a 163 per cent increase in the amount of child abuse material downloaded on the dark web between April and June 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. This, again, is part of the reason why we need to drive forward with these enhanced operational capabilities for our law enforcement agencies. But, even having said that, the true picture is difficult to ascertain because we haven't got that full visibility, and law enforcement estimate that that increase may represent only 50 per cent of the files that are available for download on the dark web.

The scale of organised criminal activity which was uncovered by Operation Ironside in recent times is quite vast. In fact, I have some statistics here. As of 23:30 hours on Saturday 1 August 2021 the domestic Australian statistics were as follows: 696 search warrants were issued, 290 offenders were charged, 728 charges were laid and 139 weapons or other types of firearms were seized—some quite frightening statistics indeed.

This power will enable law enforcement to modify or delete exploitation material to prevent its further distribution. As I mentioned, there are some quite significant and important changes. Firstly, one of those introduces network activity warrants. These enable the AFP or ACIC to collect intelligence on the most harmful criminal networks who are operating online. This includes those who are on the dark web and using some of those anonymising technologies I mentioned earlier. A practical example of the need for this power can be found in the operation against Phantom Secure, an encrypted platform. When Phantom Secure was shut down in 2018, the AFP was aware of 10,000 Phantom Secure handsets being used in Australia. But, back then, without network security warrants, law enforcement would likely needed to have obtained warrants for every individual handset of those 10,000, which would have been unfeasible given the sheer number of devices in use.

Secondly, this bill introduces data disruption warrants. These will enable the AFP and the ACIC to disrupt serious criminal activity online, authorising those agencies to modify data belonging to individuals who are suspected of criminal activity. This will frustrate the commission of serious offences, such as the distribution of child exploitation material.

Thirdly, the bill introduces account takeover power. This will enable law enforcement agencies to take control of a person's online account for the purposes of gathering evidence about criminal activity, to be used in conjunction with other investigatory powers. This could be used, for example, to prevent a suspect from accessing online forums that might be used to spread child exploitation material.

It does go without saying that these powers, whilst necessary, do require appropriate safeguards. This bill provides strict oversight mechanisms that will take into account whether the power is necessary and proportionate to the types of offences being investigated or targeted. The robust oversight will take the form such that the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security will provide oversight of network activity warrants, and the Commonwealth Ombudsman will provide oversight for the data disruption warrants and the account takeover warrants. These robust reporting requirements balance those operational sensitivities with important accountabilities.

In summary, this bill will appropriately empower our law enforcement agencies to identify and investigate perpetrators, both at home and abroad, of some of the very worst types of online criminal activity. I therefore commend this bill to the House.

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