‘Hoovering up’: How Australian spies operate

Every fortnight, Sam Roggeveen and Hugh White discuss major developments in international affairs affecting Australia and the region, from an Australian perspective.

“All of those styles of intelligence except the last one —HUMINT— is, of course, undergoing fantastically rapid change in the last few decades and that doesn't look like ending. I mean, SIGINT, when I first got into the business SIGINT was still largely a matter of, well, intercepting high frequency transmissions — if you go back to the sort of World War One, World War Two era. And, you know, then getting into satellites and so on.”

“But these days, intercepting other people's or intruding into other people's computer systems has become a vast part of the process. And so, the whole shape of what we used to call SIGINIT hardly seems an adequate word anymore”

“Signals is a very World War two word.”

“You know, it used to be the case that when you're trying to intercept other people's signals, you either had to get alongside a cable like the British splicing into the transatlantic cable at the beginning of World War One, sp they could they could intercept what the what the Germans were doing, or listening to high frequency radio, which is a very geographically based business where you could set up your antenna to listen became really critical.

“These days, that being what it is, the geography has almost become irrelevant.”