April 28, 2024
DANICA DE GIORGIO: Shadow Minister for Home Affairs and Cyber Security and Liberal Senator for Victoria, James Paterson joins us now. Thank you so much for joining us on the show this evening, Senator. Look, TikTok's Australian boss Brett Armstrong this week defended the platform. He did an interview with the Australian Financial Review and he pointed to TikTok's contribution to local businesses and jobs. But he specifically said, though, that there is no evidence of any concerns. What do you say to that?
JAMES PATERSON: It's great to be with you, Danica and James. Really good to be on your program tonight. Spoiler alert, that question that I asked them, they took on notice. They didn't answer. They never came back with how many times Australian user data was accessed in China. And that goes to the core of the national security challenges posed by an app, TikTok. It's the reason why, on the advice of our national security agencies, it's already been banned from every government employees phone. It cannot be downloaded a government employees phone. And that is because it is an espionage risk to those individual users. But that's not the only danger. The other danger is the danger of foreign interference that it poses, because its algorithm is non-transparent, and because every user's having their own unique experience. The Chinese government can direct TikTok to pump our society full of disinformation, full of propaganda that is sympathetic to the Chinese Communist Party's interests, and also to suppress content that's critical of the Chinese Communist Party. They've been exposed doing so multiple times in the past. So, Australia can't wait. We can't be left behind. We have to follow the United States and also legislate to try and make TikTok safer by divesting it from ByteDance and removing the Chinese Communist Party's control over the app.
JAMES MACPHERSON: Senator concerning as TikTok is. We learned today that a state sponsored hacking group called Vote Typhoon is targeting our critical infrastructure. I've read a little bit about this, and this to me seems like a much bigger issue than TikTok. Can you explain to viewers exactly what's happening and why this is a problem?
PATERSON: You're absolutely right, James. This is also a very, very serious issue. There is no innocent reason why a state backed hacking group would be targeting civilian infrastructure - things like the power network, water, gas and other utilities. There is no reason why they would need to be trying to establish a presence on those networks, except for one purpose, and that is sabotage, to be activated at a time of choosing of the government that sponsored it. Now Volt Typhoon is, we read in media reports, a Chinese government sponsored attacker. And they have been, again in those media reports, allegedly, seeking a presence on Australian networks, trying to penetrate those networks. It's previously been publicly assessed that they've been on US networks both in Guam and in the United States mainland. And this is very malicious behaviour. It's not the behaviour of a friend. It needs to be called out. And industry really needs to step up and root this stuff out of their systems, otherwise it will be used against us in a time of crisis, a strategic crisis, a security crisis, even an environmental crisis. These presences on our networks could be activated to shut down those networks and cause us to descend into chaos and disorder.
JAMES: So I've got to ask you this then. Why is that not considered an act of war? You've got a foreign nation hacking into our critical infrastructure in order to create a circumstance where they could close it down in a moment. How's that not an act of war?
PATERSON: That's an excellent question. And military strategists don't agree what crosses a threshold in the cyber realm from normal peacetime activities into war. But I think if you did cross the threshold into causing very serious physical, real world harm by shutting down a electricity network or a water network and all the spill-over effects that that would have, then we would have to regard that very seriously. And we should take already seriously the fact that there's unprecedented levels of espionage and state backed intellectual property theft being sponsored by the Chinese government, which has been publicly assessed by Mike Burgess, the Director-General of ASIO. That's bad enough already. I think we need to recognise this is not a normal diplomatic relationship. This is not something that friends do to each other. When it happens, we need to call it out and counteract it.
DANICA: Absolutely. This is not a normal relationship. We talk about the relationship apparently thawing. This is not normal. Now, Senator, you would have earlier seen, we played vision of children chanting Intifada and other anti-Israeli slogans at a so-called encampment of Palestine supporters at the University of Sydney. How do you feel about that vision?
PATERSON: Well thankfully, things on Australian university campuses are not quite as bad as they are on American university campuses. But if you wonder how it got so bad at American university campuses, look at what happened at Sydney University today where young children were indoctrinated in, frankly, my view, incredibly hateful slogans against Israel and the Jewish people. For what purpose is there to have five year olds chanting about intifada, which is a terrorist campaign, or from the river to the sea, which is to wipe out the modern state of Israel between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea? Although I suspect that the toddlers aren't quite up on their geography. And you ask them if it was the Red sea or the Mediterranean Sea, or the Euphrates River or the Jordan River, they wouldn't be able to tell you, but they are being told that you need to hate Israel, and by extension, many of them will feel that you need to hate the Jewish community. And that's very distressing. Let's remember that these are universities that have set up safe spaces that are protecting students from micro-aggressions, that think there's nothing more important than protecting people from being harmed by words, not just actions. And yet they tolerate this. They tolerate this on their campuses. Imagine if any other group in our society, any other minority group in our society, was targeted in the way the Jewish community is being targeted right now. Imagine if these were protests against the Asian Australian community. Imagine if they were protests against the LGBTI community. How long do you think a university would permit this kind of thing to happen, and how quickly do you think they would shut it down if it was a different group?
DANICA: Yeah, it's a nothing to see attitude unfortunately, when it comes to Jewish Australians, it's absolutely appalling.
JAMES: Senator James Paterson, thanks so much for your time. We really appreciate it.
ENDS
