Introduction

In the month before David Irvine stepped down as the director of the domestic intelligence agency, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), he claimed in an interview that, based on recent opinion polls, ASIO and other security organisations enjoyed continued and strong support from the public. On the surface, he appeared to be right. But there are a number of issues that need to be considered when assessing this claim. This chapter will describe public perceptions of security agency performance and powers, and perceptions of how governments in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom have struck the balance between protecting national security and preserving civil liberties, especially those of free speech, free media and privacy. The principal method employed for this chapter is a longitudinal meta- analysis of opinion polls in Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom regarding the trust in security agencies and the level of accountability and oversight.

Background

For much of the post– World War II period, from 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the Australian security services were deeply preoccupied with Cold War counter- espionage. The main agency responsible for this work was the domestic intelligence agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). As its official history shows, its successes were few and its failures many. The official historians do not attempt to varnish this record. They report that throughout the post- war period, ASIO had one notable counter- espionage success: the defection of a Soviet spy, Vladimir Petrov, in 1954, and a lesser one, the expulsion of another Soviet spy, Ivan Skripov, in 1963 (Blaxland and Crawley 2016).

Among the notable and highly publicised failures were the wrongful conviction of six Croatian men over an alleged terrorist plot in Sydney, the failure to prevent the assassination of a Turkish diplomat in Sydney in 1980 and the failure to prevent the Hilton Hotel bombing in Sydney in February 1978. The hotel was the venue for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM), and among the heads of government attending was the Indian prime minister, Moraji Desai. A bomb was planted in a rubbish bin outside the hotel, and when the bin was emptied at 1.40 in the morning, it went off, killing two garbage collectors and a policeman standing nearby, and injuring 11 other people.