Documents obtained under FOI tell the story. Apparently it all began with an article in Crikey on 29 June 2006 based on a email from the Australian Ambassador to East Timor to all Embassy staff.
Within hours of publication, DFAT had activated the ‘conduct and ethics’ machinery - via the urgent attention of people right at the top of the department - to try to track down how this personal but unclassified email ended up in quasi-hostile hands. Covert investigation of all email traffic from the Embassy found seven staff (including me) who’d forwarded it from work to non-Crikey friends, but there was no way of identifying any links in the chain beyond that. At one point, an investigator also commented that the original email might have been forwarded via a webmail service that couldn’t be tracked. It is by no means clear exactly what offence was alleged to have been committed by forwarding a personal email anyway. In late August 2006 the investigation was closed.
In the meantime, hoping to find a smoking gun - checking for any visits to the Crikey site - DFAT had examined in more detail the internet usage of the seven who’d forwarded the email. In my email traffic, DFAT identified what they regarded as some (unrelated) suspect messages - none of which constituted an offence (they were work related and mainly to my boss in Canberra), but apparently enough to raise suspicions. My visits to various websites (not Crikey) were also recorded and use of a private webmail service highlighted.
Having marked me as suspect, DFAT then obtained all of my email records for the month before the email reported in the Crikey article (and, later, also for the month after the article appeared), in what can only be categorised as a fishing expedition unrelated to the original investigation. The reasons for expanding the inquiry are undocumented and the only explanation DFAT has given me for examining this broad period is inadequate - “because this time period covers the dates of the sending by HOM Dili of an email with photos and the publication by Crikey of a story which was the subject of the original investigation”. Sure, it covers those dates, but a lot more besides - and the investigators had already seen all the emails that could have been relevant to the Crikey article. Anyway, it was in this process that they came across my unrelated earlier email to my partner that sparked (many months later) the unsuccessful allegations of my breach of the Code of Conduct.
The lessons from the story? People do actually read Crikey. Government agencies take reputation control very seriously. Your employer means it in that screen when you log on, threatening to examine your emails. And if, investigating one thing, they decide (for whatever reason, and I concede sometimes there could be valid ones) to pick on one person and widen the investigation a bit to find another issue they can use against them, they will certainly do it.
For the record, all this happened months after (and hence did not affect) the decision in early 2006 to not extend my posting which has been the subject of a recent media story.
Peter Ellis, May 2007