Australia's top spy chief has revealed "relentless" acts of international espionage, including attempts to infiltrate a media organisation, break into restricted laboratories, seduce information from individuals, and target talent on sites such as LinkedIn, warning that the level of foreign spy activity has surpassed that of the 1980s.Mike Burgess, director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), detailed for the first time the billion-dollar economic cost of covert operations to Australia during a speech at the Hawke Centre in Adelaide on Thursday night.
"We need to understand espionage is not some quaint, romantic fiction; it's a real, present and costly danger," Burgess said.
He warned that "a new iteration of great power competition" had led to an "insatiable appetite for inside information", with ASIO stopping 24 foreign intelligence operations in the last three years.
The ASIO director-general directly referenced the charging of two Russian Australian individuals for alleged espionage last year, and also confirmed a group of Russian spies were expelled in 2022, a story first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in 2023.
SBS LINK.
$12Bn eh..... any outrage at such expense?
worth a read.
