Australia just sold its state secrets to a secondhand shop

A trove of classified Australian government documents were handed to the media after being mistakenly sold in locked filing cabinets in a secondhand shop, the country’s public broadcaster reported Tuesday.

In an extraordinary breach of national security, the cabinets were offloaded cheaply because nobody had the keys. When the buyer drilled the locks, they found papers documenting Cabinet discussions across five governments, spanning more than a decade.

The documents were passed to the ABC, which has published some, withholding others for national security reasons. The broadcaster reported the papers were nearly all classified, with some marked “top secret” or designated for Australian eyes only – but could have easily fallen into foreign hands if purchased by a different buyer.

The Australian government has launched an urgent investigation, the BBC reported.

The documents have themselves brought to light a number significant security breaches previously unknown to the public, including the loss by the Australian Federal Police of 400 secret files from the National Security Committee, in charge of security, intelligence, and defence issues, between 2008 and 2013.

The committee is responsible for deploying Australia's military and approving kill, capture, or destroy missions.

They also reveal that nearly 200 top-secret, codeword-protected documents were left in a former senator’s office after she was voted out in 2013. The papers contained highly sensitive security intelligence, including updates on progress in the war in Afghanistan, details of counterterror operations, and profiles of terror suspects.

With the broadcaster posting many of the documents online for the public to explore, the fallout from the leak looks set to continue for some time.

Terry Moran, secretary for the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet during some of the period in question, told ABC that whoever was responsible for disposing of the cabinets “must be found and sacked.”

Cover image: A view of some of the shelves where hundreds of files line the archives of the former East German secret police, known as the Stasi on September 17, 2014 in Berlin. (Carsten Koall/Getty Images)