Spy agency cracking down on ‘reckless’ boasts by people with top-secret clearance

Top-secret security-clearance holders will be banned from posting about their position on social media in a move to protect the country from the $12.5 billion a year threat of espionage.

ASIO director-general Mike Burgess said on Thursday that more than 35,000 Australians had exposed themselves by “recklessly” implying on professional networking sites they had access to sensitive information, with almost 2500 people declaring they had a security clearance.

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke has revealed ASIO will ban people with security clearances boasting about it.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke said on Friday that stricter conditions would be enforced to stamp out the practice after the government moved responsibility for the highest levels of clearance to ASIO from Burke’s department, which handles lower-level security passes.

“What ASIO is going to start doing with those top secret clearances is just make it a condition [to not post about it online],” he told ABC’s News Breakfast. “And if you start putting it up on social media, then what you put up on social media will no longer be true because you won’t hold the clearance any more. If you’re going to have a top-secret clearance, you need to show that you’re worthy of it.”

Burke said the government had given similar advice to security-clearance holders after the issue was first raised by Burgess in 2023, resulting in an 85 per cent reduction in the number of people boasting of security clearances online.

He said Australians needed to be aware that spies wanted to steal both commercial and government secrets.

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“It doesn’t all have to be defence and military. A lot of it could be commercial information,” he said. “It doesn’t mean you treat everybody with paranoia or anything like that, but you be discreet. And you work on the basis that if information’s confidential, it’s confidential for a reason.”

Burke said he understood the people’s desire to market themselves to potential employers, but declared that foreign spies should not be able to identify targets by simply Googling.

Burgess said in his speech on Thursday night that ASIO had disrupted 24 major espionage and foreign interference operations in the past three years – more than in the previous eight years combined.

He revealed that spies recently gained access to official Australian documents on free trade negotiations by recruiting someone with a security clearance, while others convinced a state bureaucrat to obtain the names and addresses of dissidents being targeted by a foreign regime.

With Matthew Knott.

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