This speech by ASD boss Rachel Nobel starts in 15 minutes via the Sheep Tunnel. If anything interesting happens I’ll tweet it. https://twitter.com/stilgherrian/status/1300562130823819264

The stream is up. Hold music plays.

Overly-long introductions by ANU people are in progress.

Rachel Nobel up. She starts by repeating the standard description of what ASD does. She also says we’ll see some photos that we haven’t seen before. She repeats her three key takeaways as per the news stories this morning. https://twitter.com/stilgherrian/status/1300562130823819264

The dangers of the new internet age are being hinted at.

Enigma! Drink!

Obviously “siphon” should be “cipher” but I can’t edit the transcript while t’s been transcribed. Bloody AI.

“We are both the poacher and gamekeeper. Both sides of our brain work together to protect ourselves from people like us. We do signals and cyber security, and we’ve been at it for 73 years.”

All this continues to be straightforward stuff.

Further tweets will only appear if Ms Noble says something that’s actually new or particularly significant to note.

Noble has just delivered her line about ASD’s powers shouldn’t surprise us because they’re all there in legislation. I think she makes a mistake in thinking that actual people get their knowledge of how The Government works by reading legislation. I may have more to say later.

“As the internet and all the goodness that is brought to our lives became more pervasive, so too came the realisation that it had provided a new and terrible vector through which malicious actors and criminals could seek to harm Australians.”

Like so many others, Noble pronounces “adversary” as /æd'vərsəri/ not /ˈædvəsri/ and it disturbs me.

Nobel finishes her speech, She said exactly nothing new. From my admittedly jaded viewpoint, that was wasted time. But there’s a Q&A now so let’s see what happens.

Nobel thinks ASD is already being transparent because the last director-general Mike Burgess mentioned an example a year ago in his speech at the Lowy Institute. Lol.

(My report on that speech is at https://www.zdnet.com/article/australian-cyber-spooks-hacked-islamic-state-comms-before-major-battle/.)

Could ASD take a more active role in speaking about Australia’s policies in cyberspace? My brief paraphrase is that Home Affairs does policy and that a lot of this is in the Cyber Security Strategy.

Big question here on how she sees ASD collaboration with industry and the public given the agency’s broader brief. She says ASD and industry are cross-placing staff. Also the website is more accessible to people now. But...

The main question was how she sees the ASD’s advisory role will change with new technologies like AI and such. She’s saying the fundamental issues of understanding what data you have, where it’s going, who has access etc won’t change.

How will ASD maintain its edge in the face of these emerging technologies? The edge is finding the right people. Continue to value diversity, etc.

Nobel says having the highest level of clearance is no longer necessary for all ASD jobs. Industry outreach etc is often only aat PROTECTED level. (This mixed-clearance environment must be interesting to manage.)

How important is ASD in the Five Eyes? “A lot of people don’t know this but but the idea of the Five Eyes alliance was actually born of the SIGINT relationship and so it’s now something that people sort of expressed in many different forms including economic cooperation.”