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America's intelligence agency, the National Security
Agency (NSA), has refused to comment on the latest leak of top secret
documents which appear to implicate Australian spies.
The Australian Signals Directorate reportedly told the US it was monitoring communications between Indonesian officials and the US law firm and offered to share the information.
The NSA has refused to comment on the revelations.
But in a broad statement, the NSA said any allegation that the agency relied on foreign partners to circumvent US law is absolutely false.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott yesterday said he never comments on operational intelligence matters, but he did say that anything gathered is not used to the detriment of other countries.
"We use it for the benefit of our friends," he said.
"We use it to uphold our values. We use it to protect our citizens and the citizens of other countries and we certainly don't use it for commercial purposes."
Meanwhile, the Indonesian president's adviser had reportedly urged the US and Australia to clean up the mess and salvage relations with Indonesia, according to The Guardian newspaper.
Relations between Australia and Indonesia plunged to their lowest ebb in years in November after reports that Australia tried to tap the phones of president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife and several top officials in 2009.
US secretary of State John Kerry is expected to be questioned on the matter at a press conference in Jakarta later today.
More transparency needed, expert says
A researcher with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, James Lewis, says Australia would have been conducting routine surveillance."Indonesia has a phone network and an internet network that all its communications are on... and Australia was monitoring those networks," Mr Lewis said.
"They were monitoring them mainly to prevent terrorism and when you do that, of course, all sorts of stuff comes up.
"Then the question is, what do I do with this other stuff?
"Do I throw it away, do I listen to it, do I put it in a special box?
"In this case, they thought trade talks, sent it to NSA and said are you interested?"
Mr Lewis said he is confident the Australian agency would have been told to minimise any information it passed on about Americans.
He said there needs to be more transparency about surveillance and information distribution.
"These intelligence agencies, if you ask them what they were doing, they say we can't comment, or we don't know, or everything is lawful," he said.
"They need to be more transparent.
"They need to be say, here's what we learnt, here's what we did and here's why we stopped."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-17/nsa-refuses-to-comment-on-australian-spy-reports/5263398
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