 Ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honour to be speaking at a conference today. Though as a journalist I've got to admit to feeling a little bit intimidated speaking to a group of academics. Usually it's the other way around. I'm the one that's sitting in the audience interrogating and listening to you guys, the academics. And so it does feel a little bit weird to have the tables turned. But in this case, I guess, on a conference on information warfare in the 21st century, I do feel as though I've got a little bit of experience. And I suppose it isn't odd that you should have, as your opening speaker, someone who's been convicted of terrorism offences. And as most of you know, my most relevant experience comes from being on the wrong side of a prison in Egypt. Accused, ironically in fact I think, of doing precisely the kinds of things that we're talking about trying to put an end to. So in that respect at least it feels as though I might have a bit of a relevant experience to talk to you about today. Remember that we're all accused of being members of a terrorist organisation in Egypt. Of being, of advising a terrorist organisation. Of financing a terrorist organisation and of broadcasting false news to undermine national security. In short, we're accused of being terrorist propagandists. And again, as I said, I'm sure that's something that I know a lot of you have actively been working to try and counter. Now sadly, for this conference we were doing none of that sort of stuff. But the story of how we came to be there in that situation does, I think, offer some insights into both the problems we're facing as well as the risks of adopting solutions that have more to do with dodgy intuition or jerking knees than any more considered responses. Now at the time I was in Egypt, I was covering the unfolding political crisis between the interim government that was set up after the military coup that toppled the Muslim Brotherhood and that had been, and the Muslim Brotherhood supporters. Remember that at the time the Brotherhood had been asked from power after they'd been elected as the first democratically elected government that Egypt had ever had. I was in the country then as a reporter that was filling in over the Christmas New Year period. I was only there for a few weeks, my home base was down in Nairobi and so I didn't really know the environment in Egypt particularly well. Of course as a reporter, one of the things that I do and I guess as academics you'll have the same sort of experience where in your field of expertise the more you work the more you get a feel for the boundaries of the topic that you're working on and you start to understand just how far you can go before you upset certain people in your field in our case the authorities. I've done that before and I've gotten in trouble before. I'm personally on grata and Ethiopia as it happens. But Egypt wasn't one of those environments because I didn't know it. I wasn't particularly pushing the boundaries. What we would do was speak to, or the government would make a statement changes to the constitution for example. I'd pick up the phone and call the opposition, do our duty as journalists to try and produce reports that were balanced and relatively fair and neutral. And then we'd speak to an analyst to make sense of it all. It was vanilla journalism. It just so happens though that the opposition at the time was of course the party that was last in power, that's the classic model of democracy and guess what, that was the Muslim Brotherhood. Now at the time the Brotherhood hadn't been banned. It had been accused by the government of being involved in acts of terrorism but it hadn't officially been banned. And so we were doing as I said our duty as journalists. Remember the Brotherhood was still even at that point the largest and most organized political force in the country and we had a responsibility to speak to them. But on the night of December 28th of 2013 I was getting ready to go out for dinner with a friend of mine in Cairo and there was a knock on the door. I remember getting a little bit, getting dressed quickly doing up my shirt, putting on a jacket and there was a rather more urgent knock on the door. I opened up the door, the door flung open as if there was a spring behind it and the room was filled with about 8 or 10 guys. Now I knew that they didn't tell me who they were, they were in plain clothes but it seemed pretty clear that they were security agents and I knew almost immediately that this was quite serious that it wasn't just a bunch of thugs that were trying to roll us especially when I opened up the safe and pulled up $9,000 and they just sniffed at it. It was only really once I was being interrogated though that I really came to understand the charges against us and as I mentioned earlier, we were effectively being accused of being terrorist propagandists. The trouble for me was trying to reconcile the gap between what we were accused of doing and what we actually did between the terrorism charges we were facing and the illiterate journalism that we were producing. I struggled for a long time trying to work out what had gone wrong. I thought initially that perhaps that even misread the name, the hotel room on the arrest warrant. I thought that perhaps someone had misinterpreted something we'd said but as we were trying to come to terms with it, ironically I remember being, I was in a prison that was in fact the same prison, in fact I understand the same cell block that Side Kutub, the intellectual founder of modern militant Islam, was being held. There was a mango tree over the top of our cell that I was told Kutub himself had planted many years ago. It was there that I met a guy called Allah Abdul Fattah who was an extraordinary character. He was one of the most intelligent, most astute observers of politics of human nature that I've ever come across. Those of you who follow Egyptian politics will recognise that he is a famous blogger and political activist, a pro-democracy campaigner who has the rather dubious distinction of being locked up by every single government that Egypt has had since the fall of Hosni Mubarak. By Mubarak, by the Skaf government, by the Muslim Brotherhood, by the interim government and guess what, even now, by Abdul Fattah al-Sisi. And he said to me, listen, you've got to understand this, you have to separate this out, you've got to stop trying to take it personally and think about the politics of this. And that's when I realised that we were in prison not because of anything we had done but because of what we had come to represent. What the government wanted to do was send a very clear and unequivocal message, not just to ourselves but to all journalists that you will not speak to the Muslim Brotherhood. They came after us, not because of anything we had done but because of what we had come to represent. The fact that we worked for Al Jazeera was, I think, politically convenient, but it wasn't the reason we were arrested in the first place. The Egyptians really wanted to make a point about Qatari interference in Egypt, as some people have assumed, and it made no sense to come after an Australian into Egyptians. They wanted to make a point about Al Jazeera's cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood. Again, there was no point arresting an Australian journalist who'd only been in country for two weeks. So I wouldn't be standing here, of course, if that was all there was to this story. It would have been just an isolated case of a bunch of journalists who were being locked up, but prison gives you a bit of time to think and the more I thought about it, the more I realised that what had happened to us in Egypt wasn't an isolated example. It was an extension of a trend that I've been seeing throughout much of my career. Now, let me give you a few figures at this point, because I know you, being academics, love numbers. And so I've taken a look at some numbers from the Freedom House, an organisation called Freedom House, which released the results of its annual survey of press freedom around the world. And its stark conclusion is that it's the worst state that it's been in 13 years. Now, what does that mean in practical terms? Well, last year 79 journalists were killed on the job for doing the work, for the work that they were producing. That isn't a record high. That was back in 2007 when 120 died. It is broadly in line, though, with recent trends when about 100 have been murdered each year since the early 2000s. In the 1990s, it was around half that. This year, of course, we are on course for a surprisingly low number, though. It does seem to be a statistical outlier. Although I think my colleagues and friends in Somalia have, I think, a fairly reasonable explanation for that when they said in a report last year that the numbers of journalists in Somalia have declined, the numbers of murders rather have declined, not because the killers have recognised the error of their ways, but because journalists have taken the message and either dropped out altogether or stopped doing the reporting, censored themselves from doing the kinds of reporting that would put them in harm's way. And when you think about that as a consequence, then you start to understand the impact that this has, on journalism, but on our own understanding of the world around us. So what about those under arrest? Well, last year was a record. The Committee to Protect Journalists countered 259 in prison as of December the 31st. Of course, wars have always been dangerous places for journalists, but that usually comes from being in a place where bits of metal are flying around at supersonic speeds. We journalists weren't specifically targeted because of who we were or what we were reporting on, although, of course, if you happen to stumble across a warlord who wanted to keep something hidden, that inevitably would have its risks. But my point is that wars in the past, particularly of pre-911, were generally over tangible things, and this is really important. The wars have been over tangible stuff, whether it's land or ethnicity or water, things that you could put your finger on, but the conflicts journalists have been witnesses to rather than participants in the struggle. But what 9-11 did was turned the war, turned the conflict from physical things into a war over ideas. And the space where those ideas are transmitted becomes, by definition, a part of the conflict, a part of the battlefield, and that is, of course, the media. And so journalists almost inevitably become targets in this conflict. The Committee to Protect Journalists started tracking the numbers of those under arrest in 1991. We saw a particularly bloody period through the... a difficult period through the 1990s when a lot of local journalists were killed, and then they tailed off a little bit, until 9-11. One of the things, one of the features of 9-11 is the way that George W. Bush made it a binary choice, made this conflict a binary one. You might recall that he stood up before a joint session of Congress shortly after 9-11, and he said, in this war, you're either with us or you're with the terrorists. Now, the problem in that statement is for journalists, it effectively sucked out the middle ground. It made it a black-or-white conflict. And so if journalists did... performed their own job, the job that we were supposed to be doing, if we held to our professional ethics of balance, of accuracy, of fairness, and we crossed the line to speak to all parties in the conflict, to speak to the other side, we ended up inevitably becoming regarded as the enemy by the American government and by those governments and organisations who sympathised with the US, who sided with the US. The war on terror has been with us for so long, it's been so pervasive, that it can at times feel as though we've been locked in some kind of existential struggle with Islamic extremism since time immemorial. It's almost as if it's a natural given. When the Canberra Times published an interview that I gave over the weekend, there was a minor avalanche of Twitter trolls who took great glee in reminding me of how many people Islamists have killed, of how much of a threat they posed to Australia and the West more broadly. That interview, of course, I suggested that one of the things, one of the great dangers in this conflict is our response to the conflict in undermining our own civil liberties. But the thing that those trolls suggested was that there is something fundamentally hostile to us within Islam itself, that we've always been locked in some kind of existential struggle, but it hasn't always been this way. For me, Afghanistan was a really important baseline. It kind of illustrates how things have changed. In one of my first assignments, I was based in Kabul for the BBC, Androiders as their Afghanistan correspondent, and that was back in 1995. Now back then, the country was being torn apart by rival militias that were fighting for control of the country in the wake of the departure of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the communist government there. In 1995, though, a new force emerged from the South. It swept up and took over half of the country and started to threaten Kabul. They stopped at just short of Kabul. The front line stopped short of a place called Maidan Shah, and I decided that I really had to cross the front lines and speak to that new group. Now I made the decision for two reasons, partly out of a solid commitment to journalistic integrity to speak to all the parties in the conflict, regardless of who they were and what their aspirations were, and partly out of a sense of my own safety and security, because I felt at the time that, inevitably, a white guy working around the front lines of Afghanistan, where I spent half of my life there, and I was inevitably going to find myself in the sights of somebody else's rifle. And what I didn't want to do was to be seen by either side as partial to the conflict, as taking a particular side and therefore being seen by one side or the other as the enemy. So although it was risky to cross the front lines, I felt I simply had no choice, if I wanted to stay safe, to take that risk. I felt it was the lesser risk. And so I remember sitting at the other side of the front lines one day after a fairly quiet period, outside Maidan Shah, talking to my translator and my driver and saying, OK, let's go and do this. And we squeezed up butt cheeks together and got in the vehicle and headed across the front lines towards the bunkers at the other end and saw these turbans poking above. And finally we had a big BBC flag and Falsi on the back of the vehicle, and we finally arrived. And all of a sudden these guys poked their heads up and said, BBC? BBC? Oh, welcome! It was the Taliban. Now, of course, that kind of adventure today would be thought of as suicidal. It would be madness. It would be seen as throwing myself into the lion's den, asking to be kidnapped or killed. The Taliban, of course, at the time, saw us as legitimate players on the battlefield, though. They recognised that we had a place. Our role there was as legitimate as human rights workers as the Red Cross or MSF. We were observers, not participants, to the conflict. And so even though the Taliban didn't necessarily like us, they didn't necessarily understand our theology, they recognised that we had a legitimate role there and they were happy to talk to us. Now, I started to realise things had changed when I went back to Afghanistan after 9-11 and a few things took place that really made us understand that this was a very different world that we'd entered. You might recall there was the American bombing campaign that was supporting the Northern Alliance. And one of those bombs on Kabul landed squarely on the Al Jazeera Bureau. At the time, Al Jazeera hadn't been broadcasting in English. It had only been operating in Arabic, but it had thrown a tremendous amount of criticism from the United States government and its allies because they had the temerity to speak, first of all, to the one person that I wager every person, every journalist in the world wanted to speak to and that was Osama bin Laden. They also had been reporting on the consequences of US bombing on the population behind the lines, behind the Taliban lines. Now, whatever you think of the rights or wrongs of the American campaign, as a journalist, it's impossible to deny that Al Jazeera had a responsibility to use all of its contacts to keep us, the public, fully aware of what was taking place behind the lines and of what those extremists were thinking. It's part of our jobs to keep the public informed. Now, of course, the US government insisted initially that it was a mistake and then they said that actually they had targeted what they described as a known al-Qaeda facility. But for those journalists like myself that were operating in the country at the time, there was one very clear and unequivocal message. You will not speak as a journalist. You will not speak to the other side. Of course, it's not just the American government that was responsible for attacking journalists. Later in November, the Taliban intercepted a convoy that included four journalists that was travelling from Jalalabad up to Kabul. They stopped them in a place called Surobi. They took the four journalists out. They let everyone else in the convoy go and they dragged those journalists, including a very good friend of mine, Maria Grazi Cattouli, a wonderful Italian journalist who I came to know very well during 1995. They dragged those journalists out in 1995. They dragged them off into the hills outside Surobi and they entered the magazines of their Kalashnikovs into them. And then, of course, we had Daniel Pearl's execution. He was kidnapped and beheading by al-Qaeda. These guys, these journalists were not killed because they happened to be reporting anything that was likely to upset or expose the Islamists. They were murdered simply because they were journalists. There was a trial that convicted the Taliban that were responsible for those murders. They acknowledged them, but they said that they were simply following orders from their superiors to go after journalists. Now, as Freedom House's survey of the journalists killed, these are not isolated examples. They were simply some of the earliest shots. One of the problems with the war on terror is its indefinability. Everyone in this room has grappled with it one time or another. Governments have massaged and extended and twisted the definition of terrorism to mean pretty much whatever they wanted to mean. Let's go back to those Freedom House numbers for those journalists under arrest. Of the 259 that are in prison because of their work, a handful have been locked up for what we might consider to be journalistic misdemeanors that hardly justify imprisonment like defamation or slander. But the vast bulk of them, about two-thirds, are fancy anti-state charges like sedition and treason. And guess what? That is exactly what we were facing when we were locked up in Egypt. Now, the Egyptian authorities invoked the T-word, terrorism, to justify what in my mind amounted to an assault on a fundamental democratic right, the right to news and information. Since then, the government has passed a raft of new laws in Egypt that define terrorism as anything, as innocuous, as disrupting public transport or a civil servant from during his duties. In other words, anything that amounts to a protest. The world's largest jailer at the moment is, of course, Turkey. The crackdown began after last year's attempted coup, and since then the government has charged thousands of academics, lawyers and journalists of being supporters of the coup and therefore part of a terrorist organization. Over 100 journalists are now behind bars, and more than 100 news organizations have been shut down. In Burma, the government has used terrorism laws to prosecute five people for publishing a calendar that described the Rohingya community, which happens to be Muslim, as an ethnic minority. So what about the world's greatest bastion of free speech, the United States, where the First Amendment guarantees that the government can never pass any law restricting freedom of the press? Well, it turns out that they don't need to pass laws restricting freedom of the press. The US has the Espionage Act that was passed in 1918 to deal with spies, to deal with anybody, with foreign agents coming in to try and destabilize and undermine the country. Since from 1918 up until 2008 it was used just a total of five times to protect national security. And then came Barack Obama. As much as I love the guy, as much as I'm impressed by him, as much as I think he was a very strong, very useful, very powerful president, he, depending on how you count, he used the Espionage Act almost twice as often as all of his predecessors combined, and in almost every case he used it to go after journalists or their sources. Now that would be understandable if those journalists or their sources were exposing perhaps CIA tactics that would undermine their fight against Islamic State or perhaps revealing military tactics to the Russians. But that didn't happen. In almost every case it was because those journalists were revealing politically embarrassing information. Now I'm not trying to suggest that the U.S. is about to become Egypt anytime soon. But the war on terror has given licence to governments to use national security as an excuse to chip away at some of the most fundamental elements of our democracy. And we in Australia, I think, are headed down a similar path. We've seen several tranches of legislation pass with bipartisan support. There's section 35P of the ASIO Act that makes it illegal for a journalist to over-investigate what is called a special intelligence operation in SIO. But guess what? Even that designation itself is secret. So a journalist simply picking up the telephone and asking questions about the kind of things that ASIO or the security agencies have been up to runs the risk of winding up in prison for up to for five years or up to ten years for what's described as aggravated disclosure. Now in my mind, to my mind, one of the most important roles of a journalist is to interrogate the work of the security services. The kind of things that they do on behalf of us, the voters, to keep us safe. I'm not suggesting that we have a responsibility to expose genuine national secrets. But the problem with an SIO designation is that it lasts in perpetuity. So anything that the security agencies may have done long in the past is off limits for us as journalists which means that it is impossible for us or anybody else in the public to know about those operations. Then there's the metadata legislation. Past and early 1995, remember, that gives a host of government agencies not just the police or the security services the right to look at anyone's data without a warrant. The only exception is journalists. There were special secret courts set up after howls of protest from the media that required the security agencies to get a warrant to investigate journalist metadata. But we already know that the federal police have accidentally examined journalist data without a warrant. But here's the bigger problem. There is no protection for journalist sources. Anyone who gives information to a journalist is at risk. That upends one of the most deeply held principles of media freedom, our responsibility to protect the identity of our sources. And that undermines our ability to perform our most crucial role in a democracy, to act as a public watchdog, to keep those in power, to keep the bastards honest, to hold those people to account. Metadata we know has already been used to investigate the sources of leaks about the conditions of the detention centres on Manes and Nauru and to prosecute the source of a leak about security failures at Sydney Airport. Now, whatever you think of the detention centre policy, it's hard to justify using metadata, a piece of national security legislation to investigate the source of really what was a political embarrassment. Journalists talking to people trying to explain why some young Muslims might want to go and fight for Islamic State can be prosecuted for promoting extremist ideology under the foreign fighters legislation. Law professor George Williams, who some of you may well know from the University of New South Wales, has been looking at national security legislation. And before 9-11, he found just one piece of legislation related to terrorism that had an impact on freedom of speech. Post 9-11, he found up to date, from between 9-11 and to date, he's found 66 pieces of legislation that all in some way chip away at what I would consider to be one of the most fundamental principles of our democracy. Now, this is important, not just because of what it means for us journalists, it's important because of the impact that it's having on our democracy, on our capacity to have nuanced, complex political debates. It's chipping away at what one organisation has described as the grey zone. Now, by that, they mean the space that is essential for a pluralist society to work. They mean the region of tolerance that makes it possible for different ethnicities, religions, cultures and political beliefs to coexist and thrive together. It's the space that has made Australia one of the most stable, peaceable and prosperous places on the planet. In short, it is essential for the way we exist. The grey zone is the space where we tolerate difference, we have arguments without getting into violent fights. It is the region journalists work in to publish different views, to question and challenge one another. Democracy simply couldn't work without it. And guess what organisation uses the term the grey zone? It's not Amnesty International. I can see a few new Englands. Those guys know what it is. It's not some human rights group it is Islamic State. They use that title in a cover story for their magazine, their online magazine, The Big, called The Extinction of the Grey Zone. The story was about how one of their main strategies was to destroy that democratic space by making it impossible for Muslims and other cultures to live side by side. They want to create intolerance. And the magazine, in that article, they quoted one person quite favourably as supporting their campaign, supporting their mission to extinguish the grey zone. And the person they quoted in that article was George W. Bush. And the line they cited, in this war you are either with us or you are with the terrorists. Now, in my work in regimes of all stripes I've noticed that there seems to be a sliding scale between absolute freedoms from speech at one end and a police state, an authoritarian state at the other. In the current environment it is all too easy to tempting for governments to use the war on terror as a convenient excuse to drag the slider to the right to claim more power in the interests of national security, trading off the media's oversight role in the process and the public's right to speak out and to be a part of that democratic process, to be a part of the grey zone. Even if we wanted to live in a police state, history suggests that can never really deal with terrorism. Just ask the British about how that worked for them in Northern Ireland. And perversely, the best way to deal with terrorism, to deal with extremism of any sort, not to terrorism, let me rephrase that, the best way to deal with extremism of any sort is to keep an open, accountable society with the media free to do its job, interrogating not just governments but those whose opinions tend to drift off into the political extremes. Islamic State understands that, which is why they want to end that. It was the French philosopher Albert Camus who said that a free press can of course be both a good thing and a bad thing, but a press that is not free can never be anything but bad. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a tremendous honour to be speaking here today in front of such an incredible audience of academics and thinkers who have been working on this stuff far longer than I have and far more deeply than I have. I can't claim to be an expert, much less have any answers, but I hope that my experience might help keep the conversation going. Thank you very much.