Australian spy boss says 3 foreign governments plotted to harm people in Australia
Another government planned to harm or kill one or more people in Australia as part of a broader plot to eliminate critics around the world. Working with international security agencies, ASIO disrupted the operation at an early stage.
In both cases, the plotters were offshore and beyond the reach of Australian law.
Advertisement
Burgess didn't detail the third country's plot.
Collaboration between ASIO and the US
In a wide-ranging speech, Burgess revealed ASIO had alerted U.S. authorities to a 12-year-old boy plotting mass shootings in the United States.
ASIO online operators found a self-professed neo-Nazi on a popular social networking site. The boy talked about live streaming a school shooting and then moving on to a church, synagogue or mosque.
The Australian spy agency also discovered a cyber unit from an unnamed foreign government that targeted critical infrastructure networks in the U.S. The same unit routinely tried to explore and exploit Australia's networks, mapping systems to lay down malware or maintain access in the future.
'ASIO worked closely with our American counterpart to evict the hackers and shut down their global accesses, including nodes here in Australia,' Burgess said.
Spies target Australia's AUKUS partnership with the US and UK
Foreign spy agencies targeted Australia's AUKUS partnership with the U.S. and Britain that will deliver an Australian fleet of submarines powered by U.S. nuclear technology.
AUKUS is an acronym for Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In addition to the submarine deal, AUKUS Pillar II involves cooperation on a wider range of security technologies including artificial intelligence, electronic warfare and hypersonic systems.
Advertisement
'ASIO has identified foreign services seeking to target AUKUS to position themselves to collect on the capabilities, how Australia intends to use them, and to undermine the confidence of our allies,' Burgess said.
'AUKUS will remain a priority target for intelligence collection, including by countries we consider friendly,' he said, without naming those countries.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
10 minutes ago
- The Hill
Sen. Padilla on BLS chief firing: ‘I think an investigation is certainly in order'
Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said on Sunday he would support an investigation into President Trump's firing of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 'I think an investigation is certainly in order,' Padilla said in an interview on NBC News's 'Meet the Press.' Padilla noted he recently called for an investigation into potential violations of the Hatch Act related to the White House's involvement in the GOP redistricting effort. 'The example after example of Donald Trump weaponizing, no longer just the Department of Justice, but he's trying to weaponize the Bureau of Labor Statistics,' Padilla said. Trump on Friday directed his team to fire the BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer following a large jobs data revision that he blamed squarely on the appointee of former President Biden. The jobs report released Friday showed a significant downturn in May and June of this year, suggesting the U.S. added 258,000 fewer jobs over those months than had initially been reported. Trump said McEntarfer 'faked the Jobs Numbers' before the 2024 election in order to boost former Vice President Kamala Harris's White House bid, citing labor statistics revisions during the Biden administration that boosted job numbers ahead of the election. Padilla said Trump's decision to fire the commissioner reveals their anxiety about the economy. 'That tells you a lot about their insecurity about the economy and the state of Economic Affairs in America because everything that they're claiming to be true is not true,' he said. 'Prices are still going up. This is from a president who promised to bring prices down. And so the American people are feeling it. The impact of tariffs, $2,400 a year for working families across the country. That's the reality of tariffs.'
Boston Globe
10 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Trump's tariffs are making money. That may make them hard to quit.
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'The good news is that Tariffs are bringing Billions of Dollars into the USA!' Trump said on social media shortly after a weak jobs report showed signs of strain in the labor market. Advertisement Over time, analysts expect that the tariffs, if left in place, could be worth more than $2 trillion in additional revenue over the next decade. Economists overwhelmingly hope that doesn't happen and the United States abandons the new trade barriers. But some acknowledge that such a substantial stream of revenue could end up being hard to quit. Advertisement 'I think this is addictive,' said Joao Gomes, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. 'I think a source of revenue is very hard to turn away from when the debt and deficit are what they are.' The Port of Baltimore on June 30, 2025. ALYSSA SCHUKAR/NYT Trump has long fantasized about replacing taxes on income with tariffs. He often refers fondly to American fiscal policy in the late 19th century, when there was no income tax and the government relied on tariffs, citing that as a model for the future. And while income and payroll taxes remain by far the most important sources of government revenue, the combination of Trump's tariffs and the latest Republican tax cut does, on the margin, move the United States away from taxing earnings and toward taxing goods. Such a shift is expected to be regressive, meaning that rich Americans will fare better than poorer Americans under the change. That's because cutting taxes on income does, in general, provide the biggest benefit to richer Americans who earn the most income. The recent Republican cut to income taxes and the social safety net is perhaps the most regressive piece of major legislation in decades. Placing new taxes on imported products, however, is expected to raise the cost of everyday goods. Lower-income Americans spend more of their earnings on those more expensive goods, meaning the tariffs amount to a larger tax increase for them compared with richer Americans. Tariffs have begun to bleed into consumer prices, with many companies saying they will have to start raising prices as a result of added costs. And analysts expect the tariffs to weigh on the performance of the economy overall, which in turn could reduce the amount of traditional income tax revenue the government collects every year. Advertisement 'Is there a better way to raise that amount of revenue? The economic answer is: Yes, there is a better way, there are more efficient ways,' said Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Yale Budget Lab and a former Biden administration official. 'But it's really a political question.' Workers welded steel components together at a Thomas Built Buses plant in High Point, N.C., on July 21, 2025. TRAVIS DOVE/NYT Tedeschi said that future leaders in Washington, whether Republican or Democrat, may be hesitant to roll back the tariffs if that would mean a further addition to the federal debt load, which is already raising alarms on Wall Street. And replacing the tariff revenue with another type of tax increase would require Congress to act, while the tariffs would be a legacy decision made by a previous president. 'Congress may not be excited about taking such a politically risky vote when they didn't have to vote on tariffs in the first place,' Tedeschi said. Some in Washington are already starting to think about how they could spend the tariff revenue. Trump recently floated the possibility of sending Americans a cash rebate for the tariffs, and Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., recently introduced legislation to send $600 to many Americans. 'We have so much money coming in, we're thinking about a little rebate, but the big thing we want to do is pay down debt,' Trump said last month of the tariffs. Democrats, once they return to power, may face a similar temptation to use the tariff revenue to fund a new social program, especially if raising taxes in Congress proves as challenging as it has in the past. As it is, Democrats have been divided over tariffs. Maintaining the status quo may be an easier political option than changing trade policy. Advertisement 'That's a hefty chunk of change,' Tyson Brody, a Democratic strategist, said of the tariffs. 'The way that Democrats are starting to think about it is not that 'these will be impossible to withdraw.' It's: 'Oh, look, there's now going to be a large pot of money to use and reprogram.'' Of course, the tariffs could prove unpopular, and future elected officials may want to take steps that could lower consumer prices. At the same time, the amount of revenue the tariffs generate could decline over time if companies do, in fact, end up bringing back more of their operations to the United States, reducing the number of goods that face the import tax. 'This is clearly not an efficient way to gather revenue,' said Alex Jacquez, a former Biden official and the chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal group. 'And I don't think it would be a long-term progressive priority as a way to simply collect revenue.' This article originally appeared in
28 minutes ago
US labor activist intercepted by IDF during Gaza aid trip
American labor activist Chris Smalls was on an aid boat headed toward Gaza as part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition.
