Peter A Clarke

A change of Federal government gives rise to a new opposition and some new shadows.  Senator James Paterson has been made Shadow Minister for Cyber Security. 

As part of that responsibility the good Senator in Cyber security needs ‘like-minded’ nations: Paterson has been reported as calling for more collaboration to combat transnational cyber security threats.  The report provides:

Opposition Cyber Security spokesperson James Paterson says the government needs to collaborate with more “like-minded” countries to combat transnational threats posing a risk to Australia’s cyber security.

Senator Paterson told Sky News this afternoon that serious organised crime is becoming a major security threat due to foreign facilitators getting involved.

“Serious organised crime is operating on a multinational basis in a way that corporations do and some hostile foreign states are actively facilitating or at least harbouring and tolerating that … We need to think about the way in which we respond when that happens,” Senator Paterson said.

“We need to work more collectively in the future because we are dealing with these transnational threats … they are moving money and illegal products like drugs all around the world and we could not possibly meet that challenge on our own, we have to meet (those challenges) together with like-minded countries.”

Senator Paterson then reflected on the success of Operation Ironside, stating that it was assistance from international partners that contributed to the taskforce’s positive result.

“Operation Ironside was an incredibly creative and innovative strategy to bust open criminal networks when they’re using peer-to-peer messaging services that are both anonymous and encrypted and often created on devices that are only used for that communication,” Senator Paterson said.

“We couldn’t do that without our partners like the FBI, who we worked incredibly closely with for Operation Ironside, and the way in which we share those tech innovations and legislative tools … is an incredibly important part of our success.”

There is nothing much new in any of the Senator’s commentary and laudatory.  However transnational threats have been a problem for a decade.  There has been co operation on a range of levels for that long.  The dull and monotonous task of improving cyber security practices in Australia is at least as important as getting nations to co operate.  It is poor cyber security in the home market that makes overseas hackers so attractive to Australia.  Unfortunately the previous Government placed too little emphasis on improving privacy protections.