Posted
Photo:
ASIO officers deliver a safe to the ABC's Parliament House Bureau in the early hours of the morning. (ABC News: Dan Conifer)
ASIO officers have moved to secure the thousands of
top secret and classified Cabinet files obtained by the ABC, in early
morning operations in Canberra and Brisbane.
Officers delivered
safes to the public broadcaster's Parliament House Bureau and South Bank
studios around 1am, just hours after the massive national security
breach was revealed.The ABC still has access to the documents, now kept in the safes, and negotiations are still underway between lawyers for the ABC and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C).
The department launched an urgent investigation on Wednesday, after it was revealed the trove of documents had been discovered in two locked filing cabinets offloaded to a second-hand furniture depot in Canberra.
The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C) launched an urgent investigation into how the massive breach occurred, within an hour of the ABC revealing the trove of documents.
But the ABC understands the Australian Federal Police (AFP) are yet to join the inquiry.
Photo:
ASIO officers leave the Parliamentary Press Gallery in the early hours of Thursday morning. (ABC News Dan Conifer)
Terry Moran was the secretary of PM&C from 2008 to 2011, and argued the fallout from the incident which has made global headlines should be simple.
"Whoever was responsible for the selling a couple of the filing cabinets, which I think were locked, which must have been heavy with all the papers in them, without checking what was in the filing cabinets, apart from anything else they ought to be found and sacked," Mr Moran told the ABC's 7:30 program.
He suggested the departmental investigation may not go far enough.
"I would probably bring the AFP in to do a major investigation," Mr Moran said.
The former senior public servant claimed the breach could be seen as another reason to switch to a paperless system for ministerial documents.
Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has described the incident as "absurd".
"I can't believe it happened, I mean all these spies who are meant to be spying on us — they should just be going shopping in second hand furniture stores in Canberra," Mr Shorten told ABC Comedy's Tonightly program.
"You shouldn't be able to find information out because someone didn't check a set of filing cabinets, then they sold it at a second hand government furniture sale."Then apparently these filing cabinets were sitting in the shop for some months, and someone decided to get the drill out to break into this one.
"But at least we're on top of it — the government's on top of national security."
Senior public servants, both past and present, have expressed surprise about the almost comical situation of locked, full filing cabinets being allowed into the public domain.
The breach has further highlighted concerns about the scope of new espionage laws being considered by Federal Parliament.
Media organisations argued the new legislation would make publishing and reporting on such documents illegal.
"From what I've seen the documents in those filing cabinets were classified, secret classified documents," Paul Murphy, from the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance told the ABC's 7:30 program.
"Therefore under this bill they are defined as inherently harmful information.
"So the communicating of them, any of those documents that were labelled top secret, would come under an aggravated offence with a maximum penalty of 20 years for the journalist and potentially other people in the media organisation for communicating those documents."
The legislation is currently being considered by parliament's intelligence and security committee.
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