The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) was established in 1949 amidst Cold War fears of spies and secrets (Horner, 2014). In the decades that followed, ASIO compiled many thousands of dossiers on people and organisations who might pose a threat to the nation -- these included communists, writers, academics, scientists, unionists, and Indigenous rights activists. One historian has estimated that hundreds of thousands of files were created (McKnight, 2014).
Under the Australian Archives Act, the public has a right to access government records more than twenty years old. This is subject to exemptions on grounds such as national security and privacy. Exemptions are assessed and applied as part of a process known as 'access examination' (National Archives of Australia, 2016).
Unlike other government agencies, ASIO does not have to disclose information about its records. You can, however, ask whether they hold a file on a particular person or topic. If such a file exists, it is funnelled through the access examination process and some or all of it may be withheld from the public.
In late 2015 I harvested details of all publicly available ASIO files from RecordSearch, the online database of the National Archives of Australia (ASIO-Files, 2015). At that point, 11,899 files had been through the access examination process -- 2% (264) were completely closed, 82% (9716) were open with exemption.
This paper will report on a series of experiments that explore the entanglements of access and surveillance by analysing metadata and digitised content harvested from ASIO files in the National Archives of Australia. It examines access not as a state of being, but as a process shaped by legislation, bureaucratic practice, and technology. It seeks to understand the nature of 'openness' by examining what is closed, what is censored, and what is missing.
There are a growing number of cases around the world where records of state surveillance are reclaimed by communities as a source of documentary heritage (Ketelaar, 2002). Before ASIO, systems of surveillance were established in Australia to support racial exclusion under the White Australia Policy, as well the control of 'aliens' during wartime. Records generated by such systems now provide a rich source of information for academic researchers such as Kate Bagnall (2015) exploring the boundaries of race and gender, as well as many family historians. Indeed, a series of books, documentaries and exhibitions based on ASIO surveillance files have also appeared in recent years.
But while the content of such records fosters research into the lives of individuals, what can their context tell us about the bureaucratic processes that created and control them? Government archives are not just collections of documents, they are repositories of state power. Technologies of recordkeeping and identification were crucial to the development of surveillance. Can we turn the records on themselves to better understand the systems that generated them -- the systems that continue to define the nature and limits of 'access'.
Micki Kaufman's Quantifying Kissinger project (2015) explores how computational techniques can be used to analyse a large collection of formerly classified documents relating to US foreign policy. The classification status of the documents as 'Secret' or 'Top Secret' is used as a facet in visualising topics over time.
The History Lab at Columbia University has assembled a huge database of declassified government documents. Many of these include redactions -- sections of text blacked out for security reasons. By identifying redactions, and comparing redacted and non-redacted copies of the same documents, the History Lab is revealing new patterns in state censorship (History Lab).
Both these projects use restrictions on access -- classification status and redaction -- as reference points that can be mapped against other historical changes across collections of official records. I've taken a similar approach, analysing the artefacts of access examination to build a picture of what we are not allowed to see.
On 1 January 2016 I harvested metadata from the National Archives' database, RecordSearch, describing all 14,370 records that were 'closed' to public access. Although these records cannot be viewed by the public, RecordSearch provides information on the reasons why they were closed, and the dates on which access decisions were made. This metadata can now be searched, analysed, and visualised using a public site I developed called Closed Access (2016).
Closed Access reveals access examination as a process, rather than a set of rules. For example, many of the 'reasons' cited for closing the files are not defined under the Archives Act, but relate to other aspects of the examination practice. Trends in access examination outcomes can be explored by date and provenance to provide a rough measure of the conservatism of individual access decisions. Access examination itself has a history.
As noted, the majority of ASIO files in the National Archives are 'Open With Exception' -- the public can view them, but they may have pages removed, or redactions applied. Around 30% of these files have been digitised. This means we can move beyond the analysis of metadata, to extract and examine features from the content of the files themselves.
As a first stage, I created a computer vision script to identify and extract redactions from ASIO surveillance files. The script examined 228,000 page images harvested from Series A6119, extracting details of 239,571 individual redactions (Redactions, 2016). Initial results indicate that the scale of redaction is much greater than previously estimated, however, I'm continuing to refine the redaction identification process.
I've also used the redactions to provide a new point of access. On the Open With Exception site (2016), visitors can browse the full set of redactions, following links to explore the documents and files from which they were derived.
This paper will report on continuing work to explore the context of redactions by analysing other attributes of the files including age, subject, and the date of the access decision. I've also attempted to map the positions of redactions to visualise the most heavily censored areas. In the future I hope to extend this analysis to document patterns of communication and recordkeeping within the ASIO files -- to see surveillance in action.
Throughout these projects I've tried to reflect on how my own work changes the nature of access to the records. None of this data was available in machine-readable form, so I've developed and shared tools for screen-scraping from RecordSearch. The data I've harvested is now freely available on Figshare, including the extracted redactions. The public websites, Closed Access and Open With Exception, provide opportunities for anyone to explore and visualise the data. I've also deliberately blurred the line between interface, art, and intervention, using the visual character of the redactions to encourage a sense of subversion and play (redacted, 2016).
Access is not just what we see, it's what we do.
ASIO-Files. (2015). [online] Available at: https://github.com/wragge/asio-files
Bagnall, Kate. (2015). Anglo-Chinese and the politics of overseas travel from New South Wales, 1898 to 1925. In: Sophie Couchman and Kate Bagnall, eds, Chinese Australians: Politics, Engagement and Resistance. Leiden: Brill.
Closed Access (2016). [online] Available at: http://closedaccess.herokuapp.com/.
History Lab. Tools for analysing official secrecy. [online] Available at: http://www.history-lab.org/research/declass.
Horner, David. (2014). The Spy Catchers: The Official History of ASIO. Sydney: Allen & Unwin.
Kaufman, Micki. (2015). "Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me:" Quantifying Kissinger. [online] Available at: http://blog.quantifyingkissinger.com/.
Ketelaar, Eric. (2002). Archival temples, archival prisons: Modes of power and protection. Archival Science, 2, pp. 221–238. doi:10.1007/BF02435623.
McKnight, David. (2014). How to read your ASIO file. In: Meredith Burgmann, ed., Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files. Sydney: NewSouth, p. 38.
National Archives of Australia. (2016). Access Examination. [online] Available at: http://www.naa.gov.au/collection/search/access-examination-project.aspx.
Open With Exception. (2016). [online] Available at: http://owebrowse.herokuapp.com/.
redacted. (2016). [online] Available at: http://owebrowse.herokuapp.com/redactions/.
Redactions extracted from ASIO surveillance records in National Archives of Australia Series A6119. (2016). [online] Available at: https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4101765.v1.