UNCLASSIFIED

Dear Mr Palmer

Freedom of Information Request no. 15/81

I refer to your request for access to documents under the Freedom of
Information Act 1982. I have taken your request to be for:

Copies of all corporate documents (including briefings, communications,
forms, reports or notes) mentioning WikiLeaks or its Australian staff,
including but not limited to Julian Assange.

We received your request on Sunday 11 January 2015 and the 30 day
statutory period for processing your request commenced from the day after
that date. You should therefore expect a decision from us by Tuesday 10
February 2015. The period of 30 days may be extended if we need to consult
third parties, impose a charge or for other reasons. We will advise you if
this happens.

You will be notified of any charges in relation to your request as soon as
possible, before we process any requested documents or impose a final
charge. I note your request that any charges be waived on public interest
grounds and undertake to consult with you prior to any decision by the
agency to impose a charge.

Please note that information released under the FOI Act may later be
published online on our [1]FOI Disclosure Log, subject to certain
exceptions. (For example, personal information will not be published where
this would be unreasonable.)

We will contact you using the email address you provided. Please advise if
you would prefer us to use an alternative means of contact.

Yours sincerely

FOI Coordinator

Legal and Commercial Directorate

CrimTrac Agency | Australian Government

e: [2][CrimTrac request email]

IMPORTANT: This email and any attachments remain the property of the
CrimTrac Agency and may contain confidential and or privileged
information. It is authorised for use by the intended recipient for the
purpose stated in the email and CrimTrac will not be held responsible for
any loss or action taken in reliance upon it. If you are not the intended
recipient, please delete this email and notify the sender immediately and
do not disseminate, distribute, copy or use its contents.

This email has been scanned for known computer viruses however the
CrimTrac Agency will not be held responsible for any damage which may
arise from opening the email or its attachments.

P Please consider the environment before printing this email. 

The CrimTrac Agency, GPO Box 1573 CANBERRA CITY ACT 2601

References

Visible links
1. http://www.crimtrac.gov.au/privacy/FOIDi...
2. mailto:[CrimTrac request email]

UNCLASSIFIED

Dear Mr Palmer

Freedom of information request no. 15/81

I refer to your request for access to documents relating to WikiLeaks
under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act).

Please note that CrimTrac’s primary role is to facilitate, manage and
administer information sharing solutions to support police and law
enforcement agencies work in domestic crime prevention, detection and
reduction. CrimTrac is not directly involved in operational police work. 
While CrimTrac holds information collected by operational police, CrimTrac
staff do not collect information relating to crime, criminal activity, or
persons of interest. It is also important to note that CrimTrac has no
policy remit; it is a line agency committed to delivering services to
local and federal police agencies.

With that in mind, I am writing to advise you that we have searched all
network drives, correspondence registers and documents in our Secretariat
and Communications areas, as well as the corporate email systems of Senior
Executives and Executive Level Directors.

Based on our searches to date, CrimTrac is currently inclined to refuse
your request on the basis that a practical refusal reason exists, namely,
that the work in processing your request (as currently worded) would
substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the agency from its
other operations. However, before formally initiating a request
consultation process under [1]section 24AB of the FOI Act, I would like to
consult informally with you and invite you to narrow the scope of your
request.

By way of explanation, our search to date has yielded documents that are
already publicly accessible or known. For example:

·         If WikiLeaks is mentioned in a news article, the news article or
a link to a news website might be included in a daily summary of ‘news of
interest’ to staff, and distributed to all staff (CrimTrac employs over
200 staff). The ‘author’ of the document is a journalist, and the document
itself is available on the internet.

·         Some staff have set up their own ‘news alerts’ and/or have
subscriptions to online news websites that send similar daily summaries of
relevant news articles. Again, the CrimTrac employee is not the author.

·         Other documents (none of which are authored or generated by
CrimTrac) identify the word ‘WikiLeaks’ or ‘Assange’ as a newsworthy
‘topic of the day’; however, these documents contain no additional
commentary, elaboration or explanation – they are simply these keywords.
These documents are similar to the publicly available news summaries noted
above.

·         Given the size of our workforce, many documents are duplicates –
the same document is distributed to multiple mailboxes.

These documents fall within the scope of your request as well as the
definition of ‘document’ in the FOI Act, and number in the hundreds.
Therefore, to assess these documents would take significant resources and
likely yield results that are of little value (publicly accessible
information, or simply the keywords – once ‘irrelevant matter’ is
deleted).

Can I therefore invite you to reconsider the scope of your request by
focusing it on documents authored by CrimTrac officials, and excluding
duplicates of documents?

Could you please let me know by reply email if you wish to reframe your
FOI request by midday next Tuesday 27 January 2015? If we do not receive a
response from you, we will issue a notice under section 24AB(2) to
commence the 14 day request consultation process with you, extending our
deadline for your request to 24 February 2015.

Best wishes,

FOI Coordinator

Legal and Commercial Directorate

CrimTrac Agency | Australian Government

e: [2][CrimTrac request email]

IMPORTANT: This email and any attachments remain the property of the
CrimTrac Agency and may contain confidential and or privileged
information. It is authorised for use by the intended recipient for the
purpose stated in the email and CrimTrac will not be held responsible for
any loss or action taken in reliance upon it. If you are not the intended
recipient, please delete this email and notify the sender immediately and
do not disseminate, distribute, copy or use its contents.

This email has been scanned for known computer viruses however the
CrimTrac Agency will not be held responsible for any damage which may
arise from opening the email or its attachments.

P Please consider the environment before printing this email. 

The CrimTrac Agency, GPO Box 1573 CANBERRA CITY ACT 2601

References

Visible links
1. http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/...
2. mailto:[CrimTrac request email]

UNCLASSIFIED

Dear Mr Palmer

Please refer to the attached documents.

Yours sincerely,

FOI Coordinator

Legal and Commercial Directorate

CrimTrac Agency | Australian Government

e: [1][CrimTrac request email]

IMPORTANT: This email and any attachments remain the property of the
CrimTrac Agency and may contain confidential and or privileged
information. It is authorised for use by the intended recipient for the
purpose stated in the email and CrimTrac will not be held responsible for
any loss or action taken in reliance upon it. If you are not the intended
recipient, please delete this email and notify the sender immediately and
do not disseminate, distribute, copy or use its contents.

This email has been scanned for known computer viruses however the
CrimTrac Agency will not be held responsible for any damage which may
arise from opening the email or its attachments.

P Please consider the environment before printing this email. 

The CrimTrac Agency, GPO Box 1573 CANBERRA CITY ACT 2601

References

Visible links
1. mailto:[CrimTrac request email]