Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I will just put a general question to the Attorney-General, as this appears to be the appropriate time. There is a long piece on security issues called 'The whole haystack' by Mattathias Schwartz in the 26 January edition this year of The New Yorker. I know the Attorney-General has limited time to indulge in reading The New Yorker,but I will send it to him. He may find it of some interest. Essentially, the point made is that almost every major terrorist attack on Western soil in the past 15 years has been committed by people who are already known to law enforcement. A whole range of examples were given, such as that one of the gunmen in the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris had been sent to prison for recruiting jihadist fighters. He goes on and refers to the men who planned the Mumbai attacks in 2008, saying they were under electronic surveillance by the United States, the United Kingdom and India.

The point made is that, in each of these cases, the authorities were not wanting for data. What they failed to do was appreciate the significance of the data they already had. I appreciate what the Attorney-General said in his summing up speech about what he considers to be the breadth of this legislation. My question to the Attorney-General is: with this ability to access metadata, will there be a different approach to assessing that information to avoid the mistakes of intelligence agencies referred to overseas, where they failed to appreciate the significance of that data? General Keith Alexander, the former head of the National Security Agency, has called all this digital information 'the whole haystack'. How do we find the needles when the haystack seems to be so much bigger? I hope he understands the spirit in which I ask this question. It is not being provocative. How do we ensure that intelligence agencies are not swamped with so much information that they do not make a good analysis as to where the threats are?