Use pay phone to contact Australian Secret Intelligence Service recruitment

Candidates must be able to withstand the smell of urine for a number of minutes...

Pay phones are still semi-common in Australia - at least in Western Australia - there's usually one within a few blocks of anywhere in Perth and most other cities.

There is a payphone within view of my job and until a year or two ago there were one close to my apartment. They are rare, but not as rare as you might think.

That was my understanding, they know it is possible for a foreign government to tap the phone lines and they don't want a foreign government being able to target candidates for hire.

> they want to filter out people who don't take OpSec rules seriously

I personally think it's a little bit this.

I know someone who applied to be an intelligence analyst agent in the UK. First stage was a multiple choice exam in a London hotel, where they had to turn up and say they were there for "KRNP Recruiting" or something. Now the hotel staff must have known something was going on, and it wouldn't be to hard to find this out ... but I reckon it filtered out both ppl who didn't take it seriously and also people who enjoyed that kind of subterfuge a little to much :-)

(honestly can't remember exact letters now)

I hope most people are shrewd enough to keep uncommon login details, or this could be used to delete a lot of accounts.

It would be quite simple for a foreign govt to order their local teclo to hand over a list of all phone numbers that have called the secret agent recruitment hotline

HN just provided a bunch of noise to cloud those page views. It's not much, but it's something.

What if there's some weird loophole among the Five Eyes participants that ignores payphones in favor of other landlines and cells?

So if you get recruited, their surveillance partners like the five eyes don't know you are a spy. They are obviously sharing your call history with everyone, including people they might want to spy on some day.

It might just be to create a sense of allure. Taken from the movies. Like you are a spy now, dog.

It might be to keep other people around you from accidentally finding out you are a spy.

The benefit is they immediately hang up, then call you back on your mobile. The first interview question is "how did we do that?"

Data retention and XKeyScores. Anyone with access can then see who works or wants to work for ASIS. Data retenton laws and information sharing can cut both ways.

I'm guessing because they want the identities of their recruits to be secret, or at least difficult for other intelligence agencies to determine. Calling from a cell phone makes a very clear link to a specific person, while a pay phone would require other methods of intelligence gathering to unmask the identities of potential new spies. It is probably easy for a nation state level adversary to hack, or otherwise obtain phone records (especially if the call is somehow routed through the US).

They don't want other countries' spy agencies to know who they're recruiting.

There's even odds it's a response to the Gemalto hack; all three major AUS MNOs use Gemalto SIM cards, and at the time only NSA and GCHQ were specifically called out as being involved, not ASD. Canberra might be feeling a bit left out there. Alternatively, they might be afraid that PLA's Third Department have also compromised Gemalto or other upstream hardware providers, since Australia and China are in each other's region of interest.

Using a personal phone to contact the security services provides a direct link between that person and the security services to anyone who can access phone records. Using a payphone (probably) at the very least increasing the cost of establishing such a link (to identify the individual, you need listen to the call, which is more work and may be obscured by any OPSEC requirements that can be established over the phone, or have access to some other records [phone location records if the person is carrying a mobile phone at the same time, or CCTV footage from the area]).

Also, a new phone with sim card is only about $30 in a petrol station. You would be better off going to a random petrol station, buying a new phone/sim, and disposing of it after the call. Preferably by removing the battery, then taking it to some other remote place and destroying it, then take it home and dump it in your neighbours trash. Depends how paranoid you are, but if you're becoming a spy...

Actually that's pretty benign. Locked bags over here are widely used by businesses and Government departments.

There's like one per suburb/town in Australia. In rural areas, often there's just a payphone in the middle of nowhere. The only artificial light in miles.