A top national security agency has suffered a massive blow-out in breaches of its own security, exposing secret operations to outsiders in a trail of embarrassing Get Smart-style bungles.
Are Australian Crime Commission agents taking notes from Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway’s characters in Get Smart?
Australian Crime Commission staff are increasingly compromising or risking investigations as classified intelligence documents are lost, sensitive equipment is misplaced or stolen, and buildings left exposed in often comical circumstances.
Breaches have risen six-fold over the past five years and include a stressed investigator with a full bladder hearing his car being broken into while urinating on a beach.
Secure cabinets have been left open, a package was sent to the wrong address and a sensitive video conference accidentally beamed into the wrong room.
In a “major security breach” in Melbourne last October, security minutes indicate the ACC was forced to suppress a person’s information from the public, change their phone and re-register a vehicle after an investigator left intelligence papers on a car roof.
Left it on the bus
“I left carpark, inadvertently leaving the vehicle log book/folder on the roof tucked under the roof rack of the vehicle,” the official explained. “An ‘ACC HIGHLY PROTECTED’ document has been placed within the vehicle log book/folder (instead of a secure briefcase).”
An investigation by The Daily Telegraph has learned the ACC has recorded at least 48 internal security breaches over the past two years after only 24 cases in the previous three.
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