7 ms·

Australian spy agency disrupts foreign election interference

59 points by tomohawk 5y ago

ErikVandeWater 5y ago
Please raise your hand if you trust the head of a spy agency to tell the truth.
- stubish 5y ago
  Look at what he said. ASIO has said almost nothing. Most of what is being reported at the moment is speculation and from anonymous sources. My reading of what ASIO actually said, this could just be a local businessman caught laundering political donations from a foreign government. Probably just business as usual except for the election cycle and recent tensions with Russia and China. In fact, one of the few things ASIO actually did say was this is nothing unusual and happening all the time.
- shermozle 5y ago
  Yeah this is really important. ASIO was politicised from its very beginning, spending enormous amounts of its history "investigating" the Labor Party, Australia's opposition party in the duopoly.
andrei_says_ 5y ago
> disrupted a foreign government's attempt to illegally bankroll the election of candidates who are politically sympathetic or vulnerable to inducements. I must say that my first thought when reading the title was that they disrupted the market of foreign election interference.
- iamthemonster 5y ago
  It's really only a matter of time before an app called Bribr "democratises lobbying" by allowing users to make microtransactions directly to their elected representatives for influence.
  - senectus1 5y ago
    and by default becomes the new form of Gov... power to the people!
  - csdvrx 5y ago
    And why not? Lobbying is legal if it follows the rules. If something similar could be made legal yet crowdsourced, I would see that as progress for democracy, a "lobbying as a service" open to all: if 50M people are ready to put $1 to lobby for something they care about, it's a shame we don't currently let them be properly heard.
    - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
      In this particular instance it's illegal.
    - andrei_says_ 5y ago
      almost like voting but with money… because voting with votes does not really lead to representation. Right?
      - csdvrx 5y ago
        > because voting with votes does not really lead to representation. Right? Indeed, it doesn't: this is because voting is susceptible to Sybil attacks, say by running ad campaigns that'll result in the less fortunate voters voting against their own interest after having been convinced to do so. This is also how a bunch of dictators get bootstrapped in democracies. The core problem with voting is that every vote carries the same weight: lobbying corrects for that, by letting group of people organize so that their voices may not be drowned out, which inverts the power relationship (ads to convince voters => group of voters organizing to make their voice heard)
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Policy Non-Fungible Tokens - politics in the blockchain.
Cadwhisker 5y ago
Better coverage here: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/chinese-spies-attempted-to-install-labor-candidates-in-federal-election-20220211-p59vmj.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/chinese-spies-attemp... "A Chinese spy ring attempted to bankroll NSW Labor candidates in the upcoming federal election in an attempt to get MPs elected to Australia’s Parliament. The plot was foiled by the nation’s counter-espionage agency ASIO, preventing the spies from installing sympathetic candidates into Labor’s preselection process." The opposition party are already spinning this to claim that the Labor party are friendly to China.
- IIAOPSW 5y ago
  This honestly makes me suspicious. Arm of government says opposition of current government is corrupted. How convenient. I don't know if ASIO is/isn't/could be weaponized as a political tool or if the sort of person that ends up there can/does use their position to push their personal politics. But it is plausible that it happens and by the nature of the organization such a hypothesis can't really be scrutinized.
  - hammock 5y ago
    >This honestly makes me suspicious. Arm of government says opposition of current government is corrupted. How convenient Didn't this happen during Obama's presidency, when Hillary and Trump were running?
    - wavefunction 5y ago
      No, I recall a bunch of suspicious meetings between Trump, his sons, his close confidants and known Russian intelligence assets (keep in mind that includes people like ambassadors) that they lied about having happened until we were presented with evidence that they did, at which point they tried to downplay them. That's my recollection at least.
    - IIAOPSW 5y ago
      Yes. And those accusations were true. And, quite possibly, these Australian accusations are also true. It may or may not be a convenient truth, or a truth withheld until a convenient time, or a similar truth about the other party might also be known to be true but not released. Or maybe Labour really is the more corrupt party and ASIO are earnestly working to protect Australian interests. All of these hypothesis are congruent with the evidence. There's a difference between being skeptical of politically convenient press releases versus being a contrarian that just assumes anything politically convenient must be a lie.
Innercode 5y ago
Well they have certainly tried before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Dastyari#Chinese_influence_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Dastyari#Chinese_influence...
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis#Alleged_CIA_involvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...
- _kbh_ 5y ago
  The most recent and audacious version of this is Gladys Liu. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Liu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Liu https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/gladys-liu-s-beijing-confession-deepens-dispute-over-loyalty-20190911-p52qec.html https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/gladys-liu-s-beijing... I’m sure the former member of a Chinese propaganda group is not upto anything suspect.
candeira 5y ago
I wish I could go into the site and edit the headline to read "Australian spy agency disrupts foreign interference into election" to prevent ambiguity and reduce backtracking by readers.
stanislavb 5y ago
Now imagine how many similar cases there are around the world that haven't been "discovered" officially. Both China and Russia are using similar tactics. I guess, at the time being, China is the more dangerous one as CCP is much richer than poor war-focussed Russia.
- threeseed 5y ago
  I wouldn't even just look at elections or government interference. Universities in particular are rife with Chinese influence not just as the administrative level but amongst the students. I personally know of Hong Kong students who have been threatened by CCP operatives in Australia for being involved in protests.
- MonkeyClub 5y ago
  > Both China and Russia are using similar tactics. Are you perhaps forgetting another major player?
AussieWog93 5y ago
More interesting than the story itself is the fact that a Japanese publication is writing about it...
- rmbyrro 5y ago
  Japan is certainly not comfortable about a particular [very close] neighbor of theirs.
basicplus2 5y ago
Now they just need to stop big business interfering with proper democratic elections
brenainn 5y ago
Interesting that there's another version of the story where "intelligence sources" say the culprit is Russia. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-10/russian-agent-suspect-foreign-interference-australian-election/100819910 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-10/russian-agent-suspect...
- mrjangles 5y ago
  Just in case anyone was in doubt of how despicably dishonest this particular source is, you should definitely go ahead and read this. Edit: wow, and at the end they even try to imply that anti-vaxers are involved with the Russians (with carefully chosen weasel words of course).
- stubish 5y ago
  ABC are now confirming China: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-11/china-accused-attempt-bankroll-labor-candidates-federal-election/100822512 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-11/china-accused-attempt...
Gustomaximus 5y ago
They also have put significant investment into media, especially towards controlling anything Chinese language. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/beijing-controls-chinese-language-media-agencies-in-australia-says-intel-agency-20201202-p56k10.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/beijing-controls-chi... And universities are targeted for both students and lecturers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-57647418 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-57647418 Personally I feel this behaviour is counter productive to Chinese interests long term as in an open society these actions become public. For any good it does, it will also generate mistrust, ill feeling and potentially by extreme groups as leverage for fear/hate.
gumby 5y ago
As an Australian living in California I’m surprised we don’t see more such issues in California elections. There is out-of-state but still US money in referendum questions but that seems to be it, despite the fact that California’s economy is a lot larger than Australia’s. Australia is of strategic value to China, as it spent the last 20 years as a Chinese mining province, so I can understand their wanting to meddle in Aussie elections (if these allegations are true). But why not California?
- reducesuffering 5y ago
  We do have these issues in CA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Swalwell#Contact_with_Chinese_spy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Swalwell#Contact_with_Chi...
  - gumby 5y ago
    Thanks.
windex 5y ago
China has insatiable hunger for land in asia, fish in all the seas, and Australia. Any idea why? It's not like they use all of it. At some point most nations would deem it not worth the trouble to constantly be doing this bickering with all of their neighbours, I dont see that with China. One might say that they have only perfected the US system, but China does it a whole other tone-deaf way.
foxes 5y ago
This news report just looks like slinging dirt at Labour. The details seem very vague. Really this seems like some sort of scare piece. The true enemy to the Australian people is the Liberal party itself. If you are Australian vote them out.

59 points by tomohawk 5y ago

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

Please raise your hand if you trust the head of a spy agency to tell the truth.

stubish 5y ago
Look at what he said. ASIO has said almost nothing. Most of what is being reported at the moment is speculation and from anonymous sources. My reading of what ASIO actually said, this could just be a local businessman caught laundering political donations from a foreign government. Probably just business as usual except for the election cycle and recent tensions with Russia and China. In fact, one of the few things ASIO actually did say was this is nothing unusual and happening all the time.
shermozle 5y ago
Yeah this is really important. ASIO was politicised from its very beginning, spending enormous amounts of its history "investigating" the Labor Party, Australia's opposition party in the duopoly.

andrei_says_ 5y ago

> disrupted a foreign government's attempt to illegally bankroll the election of candidates who are politically sympathetic or vulnerable to inducements. I must say that my first thought when reading the title was that they disrupted the market of foreign election interference.

iamthemonster 5y ago
It's really only a matter of time before an app called Bribr "democratises lobbying" by allowing users to make microtransactions directly to their elected representatives for influence.
- senectus1 5y ago
  and by default becomes the new form of Gov... power to the people!
- csdvrx 5y ago
  And why not? Lobbying is legal if it follows the rules. If something similar could be made legal yet crowdsourced, I would see that as progress for democracy, a "lobbying as a service" open to all: if 50M people are ready to put $1 to lobby for something they care about, it's a shame we don't currently let them be properly heard.
  - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    In this particular instance it's illegal.
  - andrei_says_ 5y ago
    almost like voting but with money… because voting with votes does not really lead to representation. Right?
    - csdvrx 5y ago
      > because voting with votes does not really lead to representation. Right? Indeed, it doesn't: this is because voting is susceptible to Sybil attacks, say by running ad campaigns that'll result in the less fortunate voters voting against their own interest after having been convinced to do so. This is also how a bunch of dictators get bootstrapped in democracies. The core problem with voting is that every vote carries the same weight: lobbying corrects for that, by letting group of people organize so that their voices may not be drowned out, which inverts the power relationship (ads to convince voters => group of voters organizing to make their voice heard)
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Policy Non-Fungible Tokens - politics in the blockchain.

Cadwhisker 5y ago

Better coverage here: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/chinese-spies-attempted-to-install-labor-candidates-in-federal-election-20220211-p59vmj.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/chinese-spies-attemp... "A Chinese spy ring attempted to bankroll NSW Labor candidates in the upcoming federal election in an attempt to get MPs elected to Australia’s Parliament. The plot was foiled by the nation’s counter-espionage agency ASIO, preventing the spies from installing sympathetic candidates into Labor’s preselection process." The opposition party are already spinning this to claim that the Labor party are friendly to China.

IIAOPSW 5y ago
This honestly makes me suspicious. Arm of government says opposition of current government is corrupted. How convenient. I don't know if ASIO is/isn't/could be weaponized as a political tool or if the sort of person that ends up there can/does use their position to push their personal politics. But it is plausible that it happens and by the nature of the organization such a hypothesis can't really be scrutinized.
- hammock 5y ago
  >This honestly makes me suspicious. Arm of government says opposition of current government is corrupted. How convenient Didn't this happen during Obama's presidency, when Hillary and Trump were running?
  - wavefunction 5y ago
    No, I recall a bunch of suspicious meetings between Trump, his sons, his close confidants and known Russian intelligence assets (keep in mind that includes people like ambassadors) that they lied about having happened until we were presented with evidence that they did, at which point they tried to downplay them. That's my recollection at least.
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
    Yes. And those accusations were true. And, quite possibly, these Australian accusations are also true. It may or may not be a convenient truth, or a truth withheld until a convenient time, or a similar truth about the other party might also be known to be true but not released. Or maybe Labour really is the more corrupt party and ASIO are earnestly working to protect Australian interests. All of these hypothesis are congruent with the evidence. There's a difference between being skeptical of politically convenient press releases versus being a contrarian that just assumes anything politically convenient must be a lie.

Innercode 5y ago

Well they have certainly tried before: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Dastyari#Chinese_influence_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Dastyari#Chinese_influence...

bigbillheck 5y ago
Indeed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional_crisis#Alleged_CIA_involvement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Australian_constitutional...
_kbh_ 5y ago
The most recent and audacious version of this is Gladys Liu. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Liu https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gladys_Liu https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/gladys-liu-s-beijing-confession-deepens-dispute-over-loyalty-20190911-p52qec.html https://amp.smh.com.au/politics/federal/gladys-liu-s-beijing... I’m sure the former member of a Chinese propaganda group is not upto anything suspect.

candeira 5y ago

I wish I could go into the site and edit the headline to read "Australian spy agency disrupts foreign interference into election" to prevent ambiguity and reduce backtracking by readers.

stanislavb 5y ago

Now imagine how many similar cases there are around the world that haven't been "discovered" officially. Both China and Russia are using similar tactics. I guess, at the time being, China is the more dangerous one as CCP is much richer than poor war-focussed Russia.

threeseed 5y ago
I wouldn't even just look at elections or government interference. Universities in particular are rife with Chinese influence not just as the administrative level but amongst the students. I personally know of Hong Kong students who have been threatened by CCP operatives in Australia for being involved in protests.
MonkeyClub 5y ago
> Both China and Russia are using similar tactics. Are you perhaps forgetting another major player?

AussieWog93 5y ago

More interesting than the story itself is the fact that a Japanese publication is writing about it...

rmbyrro 5y ago
Japan is certainly not comfortable about a particular [very close] neighbor of theirs.

basicplus2 5y ago

Now they just need to stop big business interfering with proper democratic elections

brenainn 5y ago

Interesting that there's another version of the story where "intelligence sources" say the culprit is Russia. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-10/russian-agent-suspect-foreign-interference-australian-election/100819910 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-10/russian-agent-suspect...

mrjangles 5y ago
Just in case anyone was in doubt of how despicably dishonest this particular source is, you should definitely go ahead and read this. Edit: wow, and at the end they even try to imply that anti-vaxers are involved with the Russians (with carefully chosen weasel words of course).
stubish 5y ago
ABC are now confirming China: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-11/china-accused-attempt-bankroll-labor-candidates-federal-election/100822512 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-11/china-accused-attempt...

Gustomaximus 5y ago

They also have put significant investment into media, especially towards controlling anything Chinese language. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/beijing-controls-chinese-language-media-agencies-in-australia-says-intel-agency-20201202-p56k10.html https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/beijing-controls-chi... And universities are targeted for both students and lecturers. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-57647418 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-57647418 Personally I feel this behaviour is counter productive to Chinese interests long term as in an open society these actions become public. For any good it does, it will also generate mistrust, ill feeling and potentially by extreme groups as leverage for fear/hate.

gumby 5y ago

As an Australian living in California I’m surprised we don’t see more such issues in California elections. There is out-of-state but still US money in referendum questions but that seems to be it, despite the fact that California’s economy is a lot larger than Australia’s. Australia is of strategic value to China, as it spent the last 20 years as a Chinese mining province, so I can understand their wanting to meddle in Aussie elections (if these allegations are true). But why not California?

reducesuffering 5y ago
We do have these issues in CA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Swalwell#Contact_with_Chinese_spy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Swalwell#Contact_with_Chi...
- gumby 5y ago
  Thanks.

windex 5y ago

China has insatiable hunger for land in asia, fish in all the seas, and Australia. Any idea why? It's not like they use all of it. At some point most nations would deem it not worth the trouble to constantly be doing this bickering with all of their neighbours, I dont see that with China. One might say that they have only perfected the US system, but China does it a whole other tone-deaf way.

foxes 5y ago

This news report just looks like slinging dirt at Labour. The details seem very vague. Really this seems like some sort of scare piece. The true enemy to the Australian people is the Liberal party itself. If you are Australian vote them out.