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Burgess says while money is lost, tens of billions' has been saved foiling foreign spies

Burgess said Asio was publicising the dollar value on the cost of espionage activities against Australia to help raise awareness about safety and security. He told RN Breakfast:

Whilst ($)12.5 is an imposing figure, actually, tens of billions of dollars have been saved. Saved by the good work that's already being done. We're just saying we need to do a little bit better because $12.5bn is still too high.

It is not naive, it's recklessly inviting the intelligence, the intention of a foreign intelligence service. It's OK to put what you're doing on your CV if you're applying for a job, you've got a right to do that. When you advertise it on a professional networking site or your social media profile, that's just unwise and you are becoming a target.

The problem with espionage, it's highly secretive and hard to see or hard to measure, but actually engaging the Institute of Criminology in an attempt to cost it, to make the cost tangible, will help businesses and individuals understand this is a real threat. And more importantly, we spent some time saying what good security looks like and how they can help catch spies and stop this.

... All nations spy, including Australia, so we can't forget that. So all governments look for covert or sensitive insights that are not publicly available. So all nations do it, and genuinely you would be surprised by who's doing it.