Counter-Terorism white paper

[Worrals in the wilds]

Not strictly aviation related, but the federal government's Counter-Terrorism White Paper is now available at the link below.
Given the number of aviation security (and lack thereof) threads recently, some of you may be interested in reading the report behind the hype.

Counter-Terrorism White Paper: Securing Australia – Protecting our Community (http://www.dpmc.gov.au/publications/counter_terrorism/index.cfm)

[Erin Brockovich]

Had a quick read through – and all I can say is that I am disappointed.
I can’t be effed citing examples for now, but if that is the best we can come up with? :ugh:

[Minimbah]

Worrals. Like most documents regarding this subject that are available to the public it is pretty much full of motherhood statements like this one "The scale of threat cannot be estimated with certainty beyond the next few years" which states the bleeding obvious about the future. I have trouble believing the first part of the sentence which implies that "they" can be certain of "scale of the threat" in the short term.

Terrorism is like drug smuggling. You only know what you see. You have "known unknowns" such as "someone is planning a terror op somewhere" or "we've intercepted x kg of drugs, but, no, we don't know how much has got past us".

Of course, the problem for us looking in (to the intelligence community) from outside is that we don't know what they know. We have to assume the know what they are doing and are making the correct guesses. One can only hope that they are better at it now than when the "WMD intelligence" started the war in Iraq!
Minimbah

[Worrals in the wilds]

Absolutely Minimbah, agree 100 percent.
I only posted the link because I was moderately interested in reading the document and thought other people might be too, and it was mentioned in the media with respect to the body scanners. I also thought the summary section outlining the role of each department was useful, and was interested to read in The Australian (can't remember where it was in the report) that ASIO may be taking on some criminal investigative powers.

At the end of the day the squirrels probably don't tell their own Minister what they're up to, so a public document is always going to be a bit short of actual information :}:suspect:. The lucky buggers get much less media scrutiny than various other departments we could mention, which hopefully means they're left to get on with their work rather than getting diverted by their Minister's latest Fabulous Idea for hitting page 1 (There's been another scandal! March out the cute sniffer puppies!!) :ugh:.