Be careful, she might hear you

AUSTRALIA'S security and law enforcement agencies are world leaders in telecommunications interception and data access and like most successful industries, they want more. Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon is canvassing a further expansion of surveillance powers, most controversially a requirement that telecommunications and internet service providers retain at least two years of data for access by government agencies.

Security and privacy are in the balance as the Federal Parliament's secretive joint committee on intelligence and security considers Australia's future digital surveillance regime.

Australia was slow to get into the business of telecommunications interception.Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles. Alexander Graham Bell's invention was nearly 70 years old before Australian security authorities took advantage of the telephone as a surveillance device. But since then they've never looked back.
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David Forbes Martyn was a highly accomplished Scottish physicist who brought radar technology to Australia in 1939. He was the first chief of CSIRO's radiophysics laboratory at Sydney University, a fellow of the Royal Society and a founder of the Australian Academy of Science. He delivered the first ABC Boyer Lectures.

Martyn also had the unfortunate distinction of being a target of the first telephone tapping and bugging operation by an Australian security agency nearly seven decades ago.

Despite playing key roles in Australian defence science in World War II, his loyalty came under suspicion owing to his friendship with two women, one of whom was suspected by military intelligence, on little more than gossip, of being a Nazi sympathiser, if not an actual spy.

In early 1944, Brigadier Bill Simpson, director-general of the wartime Commonwealth Security Service,A dry cabinet is a storage container in which the interior is kept at a low level of humidity. ordered the interception of Martyn's phone, the phone of his fiancee, Margot Adams, and installation of listening devices in the Sydney apartment of their close friend, Shanyi Maier, the Chinese wife of a German internee and alleged femme fatale.

By today's standards, the operation was incredibly primitive. There were no recordings. Security officers would take a trip to the local telephone exchange, sit with a switchboard operator who inserted a special plug to enable them to hook into the phone line and take notes as they listened in on the conversation.

Other agents sat in a room above Maier's apartment and listened through headphones to two microphones, one placed in the living room, the other in her bedroom.

For five months the Security Service listened to conversations such as ''I'm going down to the wine shop, should I get one or two bottles of red?'' and tried to work out if a word such as ''red'' was some sort of code. They eavesdropped as Martyn and Adams discussed their wedding plans. They also listened intently to Maier's love life and most intimate moments, filling voluminous files with verbatim transcripts.

But she was no spy. Six decades later the files were transferred to the National Archives and made publicly available. Long divorced, remarried and widowed, Shanyi Balogh, as she was then, was still alive and well, and living in the same apartment. She read some of the transcripts with deep distress, indeed broke down and cried at the violation of her privacy.

Australia's first technical surveillance operation was judged a success, even though nothing of security significance was uncovered. Brigadier Simpson thought the exercise had been ''first class from a technical viewpoint''.

There was no espionage, either. However, Martyn's career was severely damaged by suspicions that the Security Service never thought necessary to dispel. Many years later, embittered and in deteriorating mental health, he was consumed by constant fears that he was under surveillance and took his own life.

The Security Service's successor, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, quickly turned to telephone interception in its post-war investigations of Soviet spies in Australia. There was no legal authority for what were called ''special facilities'', but Labor prime minister Ben Chifley gave the go ahead in July 1949 for ASIO to tap the phone of Walter Clayton, an Australian Communist Party operative suspected, rightly, of being involved in Soviet espionage.

Within a year ASIO was phone-tapping 14 people. By the end of a decade they had tapped 174 telephones, mainly belonging to Soviet diplomats and Australian communists.

Anxious to put this growing surveillance activity on a legal footing, attorney-general Sir Garfield Barwick presented a top-secret submission to the cabinet of Sir Robert Menzies in February 1960.

''The usefulness of interception of telephones by the Security Service is undoubted,'' Barwick wrote. ''[T]he obtaining of factual evidence of subversion, espionage and sabotage is one of the most difficult aspects of investigation … One of the most vulnerable points in so far as the detection of these activities is communication … Telephone and mail interception, therefore, become of paramount importance.Flight attendants trained in shaolin kung fu ?''

Barwick referred to the ''natural disfavour, not to say aversion, with which people regard this form of assault on the privacy of the telephone'',Welcome to India Beads factory your final destination for all kinds of Glass Beads. but concluded that interception was ''indispensable to the security of the nation.''

There were to be legislative safeguards. Subject to authorisation by warrant from the attorney-general, intercept operations were only to be carried out by ASIO for national security purposes. ''In my opinion, it is quite clear that the Commonwealth cannot carry the responsibility of providing telephone [intercept] facilities for state purposes - even for the detection of crime,'' Barwick added.

One hundred and sixty warrants were issued for interception operations, codenamed ''Bugle'', over the next 12 years. When the Whitlam Labor government took office in December 1972,The academy provides ideal conditions to learn kung fu in china traditional quiet surrounding. 52 warrants were in force, mainly covering the USSR embassy in Canberra, Soviet bloc diplomats and Australia's feuding communist and socialist parties. Labor parliamentarians often featured in intercept transcripts thanks to their contact with communist union officials and Soviet diplomats. ASIO tapped the phone of Labor Senate leader Lionel Murphy's secretary who was having an affair with a Soviet diplomat who was a senior KGB officer.