Attn Aussies: Out an ASIO agent and go straight to jail - our spooks have the best 'protection'

"Under s.92 of the ASIO Act, publicly identifying an ASIO officer other than the Director-General is a crime punishable with imprisonment for one year. "

From the latest Crikey:

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Why the blanket ban on identifying anyone in ASIO? A prohibition on ASIO officers working undercover would make sense, but the entire organisation, from the senior executive down? It applies even to their media liaison team.
Not even the American intelligence community has such a ban. In the US, only the identification of covert agents (but not other agents) is prohibited under the Intelligence Identities Protection Act of 1982. But the ban itself only applies to people who have "authorised access to classified material" -- that is, people in the intelligence community already, or in senior levels of government.

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So the spooks in ASIO get far more protection than US spies, even those operating undercover offshore.

The British have the famous Official Secrets Act, but revelation of the identities of, say MI5 or MI6 officers is a trickier business. The Official Secrets Act is drafted very broadly, and makes it a felony to communicate "information which is calculated to be or might be or is intended to be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy". In 2002, the BBC revealed the identities of some former MI5 agents and was never prosecuted. However, the British Government is able to muzzle the press with D-notices, which have been used to prevent reporting of the whistleblowing of former spy (and many other things) David Shayler, who claimed MI6 had provided extensive funding for al-Qaeda to kill Muammar Gaddafi and failed to prevent terrorist attacks in London in the 1990s.

So ASIO gets even more protection than British spies.

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5 September 2011
[link to www.crikey.com.au]