Inside an AFP leak probe: Bolt, Wilkie and 'previous experience'

A damaging leak emerges on proposed changes to immigration policy, broadcast around the nation. Ministers say they never saw the document. Bureaucrats at the Department of Immigration and Border Protection join the suspects list. Australian Federal Police, almost certainly, begin sifting through personal communications metadata for clues.

You’d think the technology would make the task easier; based on the difficulty of tracing leaks in the past, police need all the help they get. Even when physical copies of classified documents distributed to various agencies have gone missing, lax and inconsistent attitudes to information handling protocols make it difficult to find where the leak came from.

A report released last week under freedom of information provides an interesting look inside a leak investigation which petered out with insufficient evidence in 2005, when digital tools at the AFP’s disposal were less advanced. They had to try — the inquiry was “deemed essential with high impact” — but weren’t surprised to come up empty-handed.

The leak investigation “reinforced previous experience” about looking into unauthorised disclosures in the Commonwealth, according to the post-operational assessment, which summarises “lessons learnt” from the case:

“Consistent with other unauthorised disclosure investigations the prospect of obtaining direct evidence of the physical transfer of the material was low. When there is extensive distribution, both in numbers and within the receiving agencies this decreases the likelihood of an outcome from the investigation.”

The matter at hand was a 2002 article by one-eyed columnist Andrew Bolt that attacked Tasmanian senator Andrew Wilkie using quotes from a report Wilkie prepared when he worked at the Office of National Assessments, called Humanitarian Dimensions. Like so many leaks, this one was clearly politically motivated, and unlikely to be the result of a public servants’ personal moral crisis.

It appeared to be aimed at discrediting Wilkie’s anti-war stance and undermining his critique of the Howard government’s decision to join the fight against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Distribution was extensive: 66 copies were forwarded beyond the ONA and its overseas posts, including 28 to other agencies. The leak was politically motivated, but the investigation also found handling procedures were not followed correctly:

“In this instance there was widespread non-compliance with the ONA handling guidelines by recipients. The ONA only began to enforce their procedures in response to this unauthorised disclosure.”

Receipting guidelines were followed but “retention and disposal was often a matter of local expediency with resulting anomolies”. At least 27 were destroyed and probably more but the AFP could not be sure:

“The already identified disparity in recording, distribution, return or destruction processes for the documents within receiving agencies creates the likelihood this figure could be higher.”

The assessment finds the police investigation was limited by the length of time between the original distribution of the document and it being passed on illegally, ending up with Bolt. This was compounded by “disparities in the levels of professionalism in the handling process within the receiving agencies” and the anonymous nature of the leaked report.

Assisted by the ONA and Defence Security Branch, the police used “forensic document examination” and “telecommunications product analysis” but still couldn’t finger the culprit.

The assessment suggests the investigation would not have proceeded at all, if a copy of the same report quoted by Bolt was not subsequently used in a parliamentary committee a few months later by then Coalition senator Sandy Macdonald:

“No criminal offences were disclosed in the actions of the Senator or the Ministerial staffers who assisted him in framing questions for the Joint Parliamentary Committee.”

Wilkie was unsuccessful in agitating for the AFP to re-open the case — which is widely believed to have been a political attack on the former ONA official who quit the agency and turned whistleblower over his opposition to Australia’s military deployment in Iraq.