Carmel Travers is a Sydney-based film-maker and journalist. Like many people, she keeps her personal and work records on several computers. But in September last year she received a visit from unnamed government officials who claimed they were acting in the interests of national security, and now two of her computers are in pieces.

CARMEL TRAVERS, FILM-MAKER ANS JOURNALIST: This is what was given back to me of my computers. My son actually wants to make it into a sculpture called ‘Freedom of Speech,’ which is not a bad idea.
This is the actual drive that was pounded by a crowbar. And...there's nothing comic about this. I mean, the intent of those officers was obviously to defend our national security, but, you know...talk about taking a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. You know, I just... It's amazing.

The government officials responsible claimed they were from the Attorney-General's Department, and spent a day trawling through her computers, looking for sensitive information. When they found any, they smashed the hard drives with a hammer to make sure it was really erased. They referred to the process as 'cleansing'.
This is what the Government officials claimed they were looking for. Carmel had been emailed a draft version of Andrew Wilkie's book 'Axis of Deceit', for research on a documentary. By the time her computers were cleansed, the book had already been on sale for several months, but the draft sent to Carmel contained a few pages that had been deleted from the published version.
Dateline has established that at least five other people received the offending draft. Each one also received a visit from the Government cleansing squad. Among them was LaTrobe University professor Robert Manne, who commissioned Wilkie's book.
Technicians spent four hours going through his office computer. Given how innocuous he believed the draft was, he was surprised at the Government's reaction.

PROFESSOR ROBERT MANNE, LA TROBE UNIVERSITY: If anything I was amused about the process. It felt to me a bit unlikely that a manuscript that appeared to be pretty innocuous, that there would be anything of interest to a security service or terrorist organisation, and even that they would have the capacity or knowledge to go into my hard drive to look for it.

What's particularly Orwellian about this story is that Australia's intelligence agencies have sweeping new powers that can prevent any reporting of incidents like these.
The new laws are designed specifically to target people who are not suspects but merely have information that might be of interest to national security. We and the people we've spoken to have had to take extensive legal advice before proceeding.
These new anti-terrorism laws hang like the sword of Damocles over anyone who becomes caught up in the world of national security. In this case, no warrants were issued under the ASIO act as everyone agreed to the cleansing. If they had resisted, they could have faced possibly five years in jail, and even talking about the fact that the cleansing had taken place would have been a crime. It raises the question of how many secret raids, destruction of research and even intimidation of witnesses may have have taken place.

CARMEL TRAVERS: Bear in mind that I was only one of many people whose computers were being cleansed and within the officers who came into my office, there was almost a boast. Because I apologised to them and I said, "Look, it's a bit cramped in here, I'm sorry you haven't got much room to work."
"Don't worry, we're used to this. We do this every day." And I said, "Oh, really? How often have you done it?" "Oh, 70, 72 or 73 times." It was almost a boast and it was not a rare event, and I found that alarming.

REPORTER: What I'm trying to find out is exactly how many computers were cleansed. We've heard sort of various figures being passed around...

Dateline asked the Attorney-General's Department about exactly how many computers had been cleansed and how the process worked, but they were unable to provide any information.
The sensitivity behind this story stems from the author, Andrew Wilkie. As a former senior analyst at the Office of National Assessments, he had already angered the Government by resigning over what he claimed was the distortion of intelligence prior to the invasion of Iraq. Wilkie's protest had gone as far as running as a candidate against the Prime Minister in his own seat of Bennelong in the Federal election.

ANDREW WILKIE, SENIOR ANALYST, OFFICE OF NATIONAL ASSESSMENTS: I think the Government's response to the book was in part another stage in what was a carefully planned, carefully executed campaign to discredit me and to shut me down.

According to Wilkie, the heavy-handed cleansing operation had nothing to do with national security. It was designed to intimidate anyone daring to challenge the Government over intelligence matters.

ANDREW WILKIE: I think a lot of it was just theatre meant to put pressure on people, almost to bully them. I think it was intended to send a very clear signal to the media, to the publishing industry, to me that they needed to be very, very careful about criticising the Government.
I think the Government's behaviour was intended very clearly to send a signal to my former colleagues that, you know, you don't cross them, you don't resign, you don't speak out.

Virtually everybody involved in the production of the book has signed an agreement with the Government that prevents them from talking about how it was censored. Dateline understands that breaking this agreement can result in a jail term, and that the Government initially tried to prevent anyone from even disclosing the fact that the book had been censored at all.

REPORTER: So they sought to initially prevent the fact that the book had been censored at all from being reported?

ANDREW WILKIE: I need to be careful here, because I have signed an agreement with the Commonwealth not to reveal the detail of negotiations. So all I will say is that the Government's initial position was unacceptable to me in that I was not prepared to sign anything that would have effectively kept secret the fact that they had censored a book critical of the Government.

On the fifth floor of this building in central Melbourne are the offices of Black Inc, Andrew Wilkie's publishers. The Government cleansing squad spent a week here, going through every computer the draft manuscript had been stored on. After taking legal advice, no-one from the company was prepared to appear on camera.
Just how the Government knew about the contents of Wilkie's book before it was published adds yet another Orwellian twist to this tale.
Dr David Wright-Neville is a former colleague of Andrew Wilkie's from the Office of National Assessments, and is now an academic at Monash University. He was asked by the publishers to check there were no inadvertent breaches of national security in the draft.

DR DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE, MONASH UNIVERSITY: I remember thinking that the book, I thought, was fairly tame, in terms of the sorts of material that Andrew addressed. And I think my recommendations were there weren't many deletions that were absolutely necessary and even those were very minor queries. I really had no major concerns about anything that was in the initial draft of the book.

Being extremely cautious, the publishers then sought a second opinion from a lawyer in Canberra.

PROFESSOR ROBERT MANNE: The normal thing in publishing is that you fear that you might have defamed s meone, at least that's been my experience. And there are many extremely skilled lawyers and law firms dealing with defamation. But this was really peculiar in that we just didn't know who would have the expertise, the national security expertise and the legal expertise, to be able to tell us where the manuscript might have been getting close to the bone in regard to national security and law connected to national security. So we searched around and eventually a name emerged.

REPORTER: And who was that person?

PROFESSOR ROBERT MANNE: It was Martin Toohey.

Martin Toohey was the lawyer the Government asked to report on allegations of intelligence failures in East Timor. When he received the manuscript, Toohey himself sought legal advice. He then took the extraordinary step of sending Wilkie's entire draft manuscript to the Attorney-General's Department, without consulting either the author or publisher. Within hours, it was circulating amongst the various intelligence agencies.

PROFESSOR ROBERT MANNE: I was absolutely gobsmacked. I would have thought that a solicitor passing a manuscript given by a client to the Attorney-General's Department without any authorisation from the client would have been an extraordinarily obvious breach of the duties owed by that solicitor to that client.

But that's not what the ACT Law Society ruled. After the publishers complained about Toohey's behaviour to the Society, it stated that Toohey was "justified in law" in handing the manuscript over to the Government. It stated that when national security could be involved, a "public welfare" exception exists that allows solicitors to breach their obligation to keep their clients' information secret. Martin Toohey had "apparently acted in good faith", said the Society.

REPORTER: What sort of position do you think this sort of precedent puts a publisher in, who's trying to seek in good faith legal advice on a matter like this?

PROFESSOR ROBERT MANNE: That's a very good question, and I myself think that lawyers should be asked that question.

DR DAVID NEAL, VICTORIAN BAR SOCIETY: The great difficulty is that if lawyers breach that confidence, that if lawyers, either individually or as a group, show that they can't be trusted to retain confidential information, then people who are wanting to find out whether they can lawfully do something, might be inhibited from doing that and they might just simply take their chances.

A number of people involved in this whole episode have also been extremely concerned about being caught up in Australia's new anti-terrorism laws.

DENNIS RICHARDSON, HEAD OF ASIO: I consider that this committee plays a very important role.

Some of the strongest measures have a sunset clause, and are due to expire next year. But Dennis Richardson, the head of ASIO, argued in Parliament last month that they should become permanent.

DENNIS RICHARDSON: We propose that the questioning and detention powers become a permanent part of the suite of counter-terrorism laws enacted by the Parliament over the past three years or so.

But virtually every legal body in Australia has argued against the need for these extraordinary powers to be made permanent.

DR DAVID NEAL: The idea that these powers can be exercised in secret, without safeguards, and without the normal protections citizens generally have is something that is very worrying, and it becomes more and more worrying in the aftermath of things like September 11, because then almost anything starts to be seen as a security issue, anything which would justify the exercise of powers that at the time they were given were only supposed to be used in very, very extraordinary circumstances.

Former intelligence analysts like David Wright-Neville believe that the ASIO laws have more to do with Government control of information rather than fighting terrorism.

DR DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: I think it was an overreaction, and I suspect that it's not so much fuelled by ASIO themselves but perhaps fuelled by a government that is determined to present itself as being tough on a threat that in many respects remains imaginary.

He believes that as these powers expand, he and his colleagues are finding themselves working in a climate of fear and intimidation.

DR DAVID WRIGHT NEVILLE: The sort of environment that many critics of this government now work under, many of us do feel that we are constantly surveilled, we do feel that we are constantly being harassed in some ways. One only needs to write an opinion piece for the newspaper and one can get a phone call from someone in the Government asking for clarification or pointing out things, and that never used to happen in the past.

REPORTER: Does that happen to you now?

DR DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: It has happened to me.

REPORTER: What sort of form do those calls take? What happens?

DR DAVID WRIGHT-NEVILLE: I'm not prepared to go there.

GEORGE NEGUS: Thom Cookes tells us that when the Canberra "cleansing squad" had finished its work, thrashing those computer hard drives, it presented the bemused staff at Black Inc Publishers with a customer satisfaction questionnaire. Carmel Travers' documentary, referred to in Thom's report, screens here on SBS, by the way, tomorrow night at 8:30.