The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet said the department boss initiated an urgent investigation into the disposal of the filing cabinets. The papers left in the office — but not included with the sold filing cabinets — included Middle East defence plans, national security briefs, Afghan war updates, intelligence on Australia’s neighbours and details of counterterrorism operations. Australian Cabinet documents are usually kept secret for 20 years, before they are made public in a heavily redacted form. Rory Medcalf, head of the Australian National University’s National Security College, described the discarded documents as “very weird and embarrassing” from a national security and political perspective. “This is not catastrophically damaging for national security in the sense that that something like the Snowden revelations must have been,” he added, referring to the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden disclosing a cache of classified material in 2013.

Source: National Post January 31, 2018 05:07 UTC