I want to thank the Australian Information Industry Association for inviting me to speak today.
I acknowledge AFP Chief Information Officer and our Chief Technology Officer who are often at the forefront of finding solutions to the varied challenges our agency is facing.
Some of these challenges, plus the global events dominating our screens on loop, are leaving many communities and countries apprehensive.
But this month - even if it lasted for just a short period of time - we had an amazing, feel-good circuit breaker.
Tens of millions of people around the world watched with bated breath as the Artemis II crew launched and returned from the moon.
How ordinary citizens reacted to this triumph was instructive because it highlighted how curiosity and the power of adventure can unify generations, ethnicities and people from all walks of life.
NASA inspires because they connect their extraordinary mission with ordinary citizens by encouraging students, start-ups, businesses and others to find creative solutions to real space challenges.
This engagement is humble, astute and a model to admire and replicate.
Within the AFP, and at forums like these, I speak about values, trust, accountability and being principled.
But I also speak about the AFP needing to be bold, adventurous, taking good risks and identifying new public and private partnerships.
We must be better at connecting with the communities we serve, and with those who may have the solutions to some of our intractable policing challenges.
The AFP is a national security agency. We help protect Australia's sovereignty, our region and importantly, our future - our children.
To do this with fortitude and success, we must pull every lever.
It will require the AFP to ensure industry and the Australian public are connected, understand and feel inspired by our mission, which is defending and protecting Australia and Australia's future from domestic and global security threats.
Our mission is integral and far-reaching, and we know many in industry already want to be part of it because it is of consequence to every single person who lives in our country.
But that means the AFP will have to be more open to co-opting industry engagement. And that means, at times, the AFP may have to lay down the drawbridge and share some of our battleplans.
For the past few months, I have been expressing the need for continued service to country.
I am proud that generations continue to join the AFP, the Australian Defence Force and other national security and law enforcement agencies.
While I accept wearing a uniform is not for everyone, all citizens can play a role in contributing to Australia's national security and protecting our future.
This is why I am asking today, if you haven't thought of working for the AFP, could you be working with, the AFP? How could you contribute to our national endeavour to protect Australia's sovereignty, our region and our kids?
But first let me lower the bridge a little and tell you about the complicated and evolving threats we face as a country and as an agency.
The impact of overseas conflicts, terrorism in our own backyard, the pronounced fault lines in our communities and the exponential advances in technology are seeping through every stratum of Australian life.
Just like the many industries disrupted by the gig economy, so too has the criminal business model.
This disruption has created criminal amoebas that constantly change shape, split and merge with other criminal networks when it is in their interest.
Their adaption is not just because of tech.
However, tech has made it easier for the collision and collusion of two groups, which previously undertook very separate lines of criminality given their differing motivations.
Terrorists, state actors and state officials, often motivated by power or political destabilisation, are responsible for terrorism attacks, foreign interference, espionage or cyber warfare.
Organised criminals, who often align themselves with outlaw motorcycle gangs, traffickers of illicit commodities, money launderers and muscle for hire, are generally motivated by profit.
But increasingly, in Europe, and Five Eyes countries, including in Australia, persons of interest in organised crime matters are being linked to state actors or their proxies.
Law enforcement agencies around the world are uncovering examples where state actors have used traditional organised crime networks for grey zone offending.
In effect, state actors are increasingly capitalising on existing criminal underworld connections, especially with those who share ethnicity or ideology, to carry out offences such as foreign interference, sabotage or terrorism.
Crime ecosystems are also converging, with organised crime, cyber actors, terrorists and state actors sharing enablers, facilitators and supply chains.
These criminal convergences are in part the product of recent asymmetrical warfare, the growing costs of conflicts around the world, challenges to the rules-based order and the opportunism of offenders.
Our diabolical reality, particularly in Western countries, is that individual offenders or networks are now willing to carry out serious crimes for despots, dictators and disrupters.
And in our region, the strategic competition and challenges to the rules based-order has required the AFP to strengthen ties to our Pacific family, to help protect democracy and help train overseas police through the principle that the police are the community and the community are the police.
Equally, one of the most serious issues that has my focus is the threat facing our youth. They are being radicalised, sexually extorted and in some cases, targeted by sadistic online networks motivated by notoriety and violence that is CT adjacent, which describes crimes that don't reach the threshold of terrorism but are coming close.
The blurred boundary of the virtual and real worlds that our children are growing up in will continue to challenge parents, schools and law enforcement agencies.
The AFP has a very wide complex and complicated remit. We investigate online child exploitation, Commonwealth fraud, the trafficking of illicit commodities, forced marriage, cyber crime, terrorism, espionage and foreign interference.
Our role also includes protecting high office holders, Federal Parliamentarians, designated airports and key defence sites; and right now we are building a new Command to protect the planned arrival of AUKUS submarines.
Just about every crime we investigate or disrupt is tech enabled, which means our technology, capability and partnerships must be among our greatest tools.
Modern policing more than ever requires a strong knowledge base of bits and bytes.
It is also important to acknowledge that it is becoming harder to determine who owns or possesses data relevant to serious crimes - think about the digital connectivity in homes, vehicles, public places, smart cities and banking.
While the impact of crime is visual and felt in our street and our suburbs, the evidence can be stored anywhere in the world in multiple servers or data centres.
Given criminals spread their data all over the world, it requires an increase to our sovereign capabilities.
To give an analogy, without sovereign capability, we are renting a room from a landlord.
Ultimately, we need to own the house and have the keys to decide who can enter, when they can enter and what they will be allowed to do when they are there.
Another challenge is our data growth. It is like a tsunami driven by forces beneath the surface, such as AI generating data at scale.
Here is an example of that data tsunami.
An online tool has reported there are 4 billion snaps shared on Snapchat and almost 350 billion emails and 25 billion text messages sent every day.
Even if a very small number of these communications related to illegal activity, you can understand the obvious challenges law enforcement agencies face.
Every day, our investigators must manage the deluge of data received and then reduce it to something manageable.
Even a simple task like reviewing CCTV footage from a hotel or commercial premises is extremely challenging.
Think about a simple scenario of a hotel that has a dozen cameras recording public places like a foyer, lifts, corridors and a gym.
The task of reviewing just one month of footage to identify the comings and goings of suspects and their associates is immense.
If there are 12 cameras recording 24 hours a day, that equates to 288 hours of video every day.
Thirty days is the equivalent of 8,640 hours. Even with four police officers reviewing this footage at double speed, for eight hours a day, five days a week, it would take six months to review.
While the use of AI can assist in this process, AI is not readily accepted by our courts, which means an AFP member may still need to testify to the contents of those 8,640 hours of video footage.
When I became Commissioner in October last year, I announced five new priorities.
They are:
- Defending Australia's domestic security and our region;
- Supercharging global operations;
- Protecting vulnerable communities;
- Future proofing our workforce; and
- Investing in science and technology-led capability.
When I refer to investing in technology, I think about where our investment will help the most as we protect Australia and our region.
And because the AFP is a global policing organisation, it is crucial that our investigations can operate across borders, jurisdictions and digital platforms.
That is why as Commissioner, I am focussed on ensuring that our technical capability enables global policing cooperation, operational effectiveness and trust between nations.
Furthermore, to keep Australians safe, we must become a data enabled powerhouse and treat data as an asset as we navigate challenging national security threats.
Collecting data is not an end in itself because our members still need to analyse it, identify patterns, detect anomalies and translate information into actionable intelligence.
As we navigate AI challenges and the great opportunities, it is important I acknowledge that some in the community have questions about how it is being deployed by law enforcement agencies.
Our position is clear. AI will support policing, but it will not replace human judgement, accountability or consent.
Under my Commissionership, we will address AI ethics and public trust through the following four approaches:
- Human-Led: AI will not make decisions that affect people's rights or freedoms. It will help our members manage scale, complexity and risk, but accountability will always be the responsibility of a human decision maker and with the organisation itself.
- AI Principles: We govern AI deliberately and proportionately, in accordance with the Australia New Zealand Policing Advisory Agency AI Principles, which have been agreed to by all Australian and New Zealand Police Commissioners. Our AI use will and should be subject to legal, ethical, privacy and operational scrutiny.
- The AI Transparency Statement, which the AFP published last year, sets out how we use AI, the principles we apply, the safeguards in place, and the AI capabilities we can responsibly disclose. It also explains why some operational detail cannot be disclosed, to protect sensitive methodologies that give the AFP that competitive advantage in terms of defending and protecting Australia.
- The fourth is Community Trust: Our 2025-26 Community Confidence Survey now includes specific questions on trust in the AFP's use of AI. The results show a majority of Australians express confidence that we will use AI responsibly. We are also investing in AI literacy across the workforce so our members can challenge outputs, escalate concerns and apply professional discretion. We also continue to engage with oversight bodies, academia, industry and the community.
It is important I have this conversation with you today because I want to explain our challenges and limitations.
When industry engages with law enforcement early, we are better placed to identify unintended risks, emerging misuse and opportunities for harm prevention before exploitation becomes widespread.
We have a proud history of collaborating with the tech sector, but we always do better when we co design with key industry partners and academia.
Some examples of this collaboration include the Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation and the Joint Policing Cybercrime Coordination Centre, where industry and law enforcement work side by side to prevent harm, disrupt offending and protect victims. This is where we are co-creating to bring edge technology to our frontline capabilities.
So what is the AFP's ask of the industry? We are asking for partnerships that recognises risks, responsibilities and shared outcomes.
Our technical specialists within the AFP are not working at the edge of a product.
They are working at the edge of national security and community safety.
I need your help to address our data volume, our vast fragmented data to reduce complexity for my members and deliver actionable insights.
We are deliberate about building our internal capability, but equally recognise that industry partners bring valuable expertise, scale and innovation.
We rely on trusted partners to augment our skills, fill gaps, uplift and accelerate our capabilities to meet operational needs.
We need to detect earlier, understand faster and act decisively - without compromising safety, legality or public trust.
We need industry to partner with us to solve real and growing operational problems, not with isolated technologies but with integrated capability that works in environments we operate in, within the laws we uphold.
We are looking for genuine partnerships; we want to move away from a tactical supplier model to a strategic capability partnership model.
The intent is a collaborative model, working side by side where we combine AFP expertise with industry expertise to deliver outcomes faster while growing our own capability.
It would be remiss of me today not to share some of intractable problems we believe industry, academia and others could help us with.
I have a laser-like focus on protecting our future, our children and our next generation.
That includes protecting them from harms such as sextortion and online child exploitation.
A locked front door to a home, does not keep our youth safe from the predators who can bypass physical security and reach our kids online.
Distance is no barrier to online offending.
We need to identify and disrupt online offenders who hide in the digital shadows while grooming or soliciting sexual content from children. We also want to protect our members from exposure to this content.
So, imagine if we had a team of bots that detected, reported or even shut down offenders who target our kids? My hope is that we can find a way.
Another growing challenge are autonomous drones, which give criminals low-cost access to capabilities like surveillance, delivery and coordinated operations with speed precision and anonymity.
We need to detect, attribute and lawfully disrupt these drones in real time - within complex urban environments, legal constraints and without compromising public safety or trust
As the AFP navigates the tech challenges in front of us, it is important to note that co-designed programs or ideas means we can usually share these with other global law enforcement agencies, such as Five Eyes law enforcement agencies.
That means your ideas or products may not just have an Australian application but a global one.
I now want to take you back to where I started.
Under my Commissionership, the AFP will be bold, ambitious and encourage the community to understand, connect to and by inspired by our mission.
Where we can, we will partner with industry - and I suspect we will need to do that more often.
We are facing unchartered territory as we navigate complex and complicated crime challenges.
While some of these challenges are confronting, I have no doubt that proud and innovative Australians, who value the way we live and understand what is at stake, will embrace our mission, be curious with us and contribute to service to country.
I am sure this is just the start of our conversation together.
I want to thank you for hearing me out today and I hope you will continue to help the AFP deliver its critical mission.
