The uncomfortable truth: It's not how little ASIO did. It's how much we want them to know |
In the aftermath of the Bondi Archer Park massacre, a familiar post-tragedy ritual is under way. Politicians, commentators and sections of the public are looking for someone to blame, and inevitably the spotlight has turned on to ASIO.
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A recurring question is whether Director-General Mike Burgess and his organisation could - or should - have done more to identify the attackers before the violence occurred.
The uncomfortable but necessary truth is that there are limits on what ASIO can realistically do. Australia's intelligence and security agencies operate under strict legal constraints when monitoring Australians. Surveillance powers are tied to legislated thresholds relating to politically or ideologically motivated violence, foreign interference, espionage and terrorism.
These constraints reflect a liberal democratic system that prioritises civil liberties and due process. Any proposal to meaningfully expand ASIO's remit into broader domestic or international monitoring would raise serious legal, ethical and political concerns - and would likely be rejected by the public once those implications were understood.
A particular challenge is the lone actor with no organisational ties, no explicit ideological signalling, and no behaviour that crosses legal thresholds. Such individuals can effectively be invisible to security intelligence agencies.
A related issue, often neglected in public debate, is that not all mass-casualty attackers are ideologically driven.
Mass-casualty violence may also be initiated by individuals who are profoundly socially dislocated, psychologically damaged, or chronically unwell. These are not terrorists in the conventional sense, but sociologically motivated individuals acting out of grievance, alienation, paranoia or emotional collapse, rather than political or religious ideology.
Historically, many such individuals would have been institutionalised or closely supervised. Decades of de-institutionalisation - while well-intentioned - have placed........