Published daily by the Lowy Institute. While nuclear-powered submarines steal much of the media limelight, the AUKUS security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States is about much more than the submersible warships.
And it is headed for a critical phase. The partnership will include additional cooperation in defence-related science and technology, industrial production and supply chains, and cyber and AI capability. This will involve significant contributions from the private sector of each partner economy and require ongoing intellectual property IP transfers between partners. Such transfers and storage of highly sensitive data will require information security and network resilience.
In the contemporary era of strategic competition between economically interdependent nations, IP theft poses unique challenges that AUKUS partners must overcome. Even the lower end of this estimate is vast.
While there seems to be no comparable official estimate for Australia, there are high-profile examples of IP theft here , here and here , as well as Australia serving as legal jurisdiction for the adjudication of an IP theft case involving Motorola and Chinese firm Hytera.
Yet it may surprise some that another significant contributing factor to Chinese economic espionage is the unwillingness of victimised private businesses to take legal action against Chinese firms or the state. For example, in , when Google revealed a major China hack , 33 other American businesses that were also hacked refused to make public statements.
