Phone-tapping not a one-way street

IT HAS always been my belief that the damage done by so-called whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning is not so much in the actual information they leak, but the harm that information inflicts on the ability of countries to engage with one another.

So it is with Australia and Indonesia, now embroiled in yet another diplomatic spat, this time over Snowden's revelations that Canberra's spy agencies tapped the phones of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife and members of his inner circle.

Like any journalist, I am a fervent believer in freedom of information. But I also believe governments should have secrets - and also secretive methods of finding out what is going on over the horizon. That's what intelligence is for: to protect citizens against unpleasant surprises.

Every country, friend and foe, does it, though those with superior satellite and digital technology obviously have the edge over less developed nations, some of them too preoccupied with their own problems to worry about what goes on next door.

It must be assumed Dr Yudhoyono uses an encrypted phone for official business, so the questionable value of eavesdropping on the personal 3G cellphones of national leaders these days should now be balanced by the very real possibility that it will not stay covert for long.

Once this particular dirty little secret was out in the open, it was clear the Indonesian government had to vent its outrage. It suspended cooperation on the hot asylum-seeker issue and cancelled a joint air exercise over the Northern Territory. There may be more.

Dr Yudhoyono was well justified in calling Canberra's snooping an unfriendly act. He conveyed his feelings on Twitter, suggesting he sees this as an opportunity to regain some lost political ground domestically after a torrid year in which his majority Democrat Party has been shredded by corruption allegations.

If that is the case, then it could be some time before relations return to an even keel. Notoriously thin-skinned at best, Dr Yudhoyono took over the rhetorical charge from Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa the moment the scandal affected him personally.

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has so far refused to apologise or to offer reassurances that his spies will in future shy away from keeping electronic tabs on the Indonesian leadership - something that may have been more systematic than has been revealed so far.

"There must be some sort of recognition from the Australian side it was inappropriate," says Mr Wiryono, a respected career diplomat who served as ambassador to Canberra between 1996 and 2000.

"Spying on a president you call a best friend doesn't make sense."

Snowden, Assange and Manning are more information anarchists than whistle-blowers, the products of the Internet generation, which shares the naive conviction that citizens should know everything their governments do.

It does not seem to matter to them that too much public knowledge of official secrets puts their governments at a disadvantage to states such as China and Russia, where free flow of information is not encouraged and can often lead to draconian espionage charges.

More importantly, leakages put diplomats on the back foot, exposing sensitive sources of information in the countries where they operate or their government's position on foreign policy issues under negotiation.

Talking in the open with everyone's cards on the table does not leave much room for compromise.

If bugging the leadership is over the top, the Indonesians should have been fully aware of the scope of Australian eavesdropping capabilities at the time of the 1999 East Timor crisis and during the hunt for the 2002 Bali bombers.

Newspapers published transcripts of incriminating field radio conversations between Indonesian officers in East Timor, and it was clear the Australian Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) was intercepting communications between Jakarta and Dili.

In their 2000 book Deliverance, journalists Don Greenlees and Robert Garran said DSD and the Australian Secret Intelligence Service produced an "extraordinary volume of essentially real-time information" on developments there.

Australia was not alone.

Former Indonesian intelligence guru Abdullah Mahmud Hendropriyono acknowledged in a 2004 interview he was doing the same thing, spying on the Australian embassy in Jakarta and monitoring the phones of Australian politicians.

There was a lengthy period when Indonesia's electronic eavesdroppers regularly sent a wink-and-a-nod Christmas card to the Australian embassy in Jakarta - perhaps a little hint that intercepting communications was not always a one-way street.

The only other time Jakarta has recalled its ambassador was when ship-borne Papuan asylum-seekers were allowed to resettle in Australia in early 2006. The Indonesians angrily labelled it a propaganda stunt - and they were probably right.

Three years after East Timor, the ability of the Australian technicians to track mobile phones enabled investigators to round up the perpetrators of the Bali bombing within six weeks of the initial break in the case.

Since then, Institute of Policy Analysis for Conflict director Sidney Jones says, phone taps have been responsible for up to 80 per cent of the arrests carried out by Indonesia's Densus 88 counter-terrorist unit, using some but perhaps not all of that equipment themselves.

thane.cawdor@gmail.com

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