Why Scott Morrison is right on encryption but wrong on Muslims

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Opinion

Why Scott Morrison is right on encryption but wrong on Muslims

On the one hand, the federal government is getting pretty excited over its new counter-
terrorism bill, demanding Parliament pass it this week. On the other, the scale and number of terrorist attacks in Australia is small and the problem seems in check. Is this just a piece of political theatre by a government desperate to show how tough it is and how feeble the Labor Party is? Or is there serious need?

I'd like to call an independent expert witness.

Illustration: Dionne Gain

Illustration: Dionne Gain

Nick Rasmussen is an American with impeccable credentials. He's a career diplomat with nearly two decades as a senior counterterrorism official. For the last three years he led the overall US effort as head of the National Counterterrorism Centre. He was director of the agency under both Barack Obama and Donald Trump, a reliable clue that he's a respected professional, not a political hack.

"It's hard to argue that the threat is receding," Rasmussen tells me. A Washington think tank, the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, reports that the number of violent jihadis in the world has quadrupled since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.

It estimates their total population at 200,000 to 250,000. "That's the gross number of people engaged in the project of being terrorists," says Rasmussen. "So whatever success we've had in reducing attacks on the scale of 9/11 or 7/7 [in London] there are more bad guys in more places that aim to do us harm. It requires not just vigilance but more work."

Why have the world's security agencies and governments failed to curb the number of terrorists? "I think I can pinpoint one reason," says Rasmussen, now at the McCain Institute for International Leadership and also a professor at Arizona State University. "Their ability to use social media and modern communications technology to spread their message.

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

"There was a time when we were struggling to keep up with Inspire magazine," an online instructional handbook for trainee terrorists. "That seems quaint now. Modern communication tools have been a powerful accelerant to the problem of jihad."

Terrorists worldwide have turned to encrypted messaging services, ones that are readily available to anyone with a mobile phone, to plan and coordinate. They don't need to take elaborate precautions to avoid detection. They just download WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. Or Telegram, owned by a private London firm, and they have reliable encrypted messages. The terrorists have "gone dark", in the jargon of the times, their communications invisible to the security agencies. Or, as Rasmussen says: "The good old days when we could listen to their calls and read their mail, those days are long gone."

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The point of the Australian government's new bill is to address this problem. The heads of Australia's intelligence agencies have argued publicly that they need to be able to decrypt these communications to prevent attacks.

The corporate owners of the services aren't cooperating. On the contrary, they've united to form a lobby specifically to block the Australian initiative. The proposed law would allow the authorities to require communications firms to decrypt suspect messages, subject to a warrant. Rasmussen's view: "Letting things lie as they are is not acceptable."

"I'm intrigued by anything that brings us closer to solving the technology problem," he tells me during a visit to Sydney as a visiting fellow at ANU's National Security College. "I'm willing to try to experiment and find ways of getting communications providers to be more responsive to our requests for assistance. I commend the Australian government for taking this initiative."

He doubts that the US could follow this example – the big American digital communications firms have their peak power in the US and the US Supreme Court lately has shown a fundamentalist interpretation of the constitutionally designated freedoms. But, says Rasmussen, "I hope that it works and that'd be no bad thing from my perspective."

Labor accuses the Morrison government of looking for a political fight rather than a
counterterrorism solution. Whatever it may say, it's simply untenable for Labor to go to an
election in defiance of the unanimous advice of all Australia's police and security agencies.
And it's untenable for the government to refuse to negotiate.

A compromise, negotiated in good faith between the two main parties, is the only outcome that serves the national interest. In recent years such negotiations, conducted in the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, largely have been successful in minimising the politics and maximising public safety. Which is why almost nobody outside Canberra has ever heard of the committee.

So on the first matter, our expert witness finds that there is indeed a pressing need for the
government's bill. But on another key aspect of counterterrorism, however, Rasmussen's message will fall less easily on the prime ministerial ear.

"He was a terrorist": Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the recent attacker on Bourke Street, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali.

"He was a terrorist": Prime Minister Scott Morrison on the recent attacker on Bourke Street, Hassan Khalif Shire Ali.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

After the knife-wielding terrorist in Melbourne murdered Sisto Malaspina last month, Scott Morrison made some angry and divisive remarks about the Muslim community of Melbourne. Bad idea, according to Rasmussen: "If the Australian government is not speaking to its citizens in Melbourne to enlist help to keep the community safe, creating a narrative with these communities so they are looking at the government as a partner and not as a threat, then it will be difficult to achieve success.

"And I know that countering violent extremism efforts in Australia are in fact aimed at
making the community a partner in the counterterror effort." (Well, yes, but not in this
instance of prime ministerial intervention. Some Muslim leaders boycotted a meeting with
Morrison as a result.) "One of the things we know stands a better chance of working in the US if you are going to talk to a community about radicals you have to do it in a way that doesn't focus
excessively on them as a problem. If you go into a Muslim community and the only
examples you give are IS, you are not likely to win their support.

"If you have a conversation about domestic terrorism and bring to the table concerns about the full spectrum of extremist violence – white supremacists, even environmental terrorists – they are more likely to help.

"It makes sense to bring the full spectrum of terrorism problems to the table or the community tunes out - 'you are here to persuade me to rat on my kids'. Why would they do that?"

The Morrison government's decryption bill wins the endorsement of the expert witness; the prime ministerial rhetoric does not.

Peter Hartcher is the Herald's international editor.

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