Roundup: Aussie public broadcaster acquires classified gov't documents from second-hand filing cabinet

CANBERRA, Feb. 1 (Xinhua) -- The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) has entered the offices of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) after the public broadcaster acquired confidential government documents.

Officers entered the ABC's offices in Canberra and Brisbane in the early hours of Thursday morning to deliver safes to house the documents just hours after the leak was revealed.

The ABC still has access to the highly-classified documents, which came into journalists' possession when a locked filing cabinet was bought from a second-hand shop in Canberra, while the organisation's lawyers negotiate with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C).

Under Australian law, classified documents from Cabinet, the inner-sanctum of the government, remain classified for 20 years.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet launched an urgent investigation into the breach within an hour of the ABC publishing some of the content online on Wednesday evening.

In a statement, ABC News director Gaven Morris said that the ASIO action was "not a raid" and that the broadcaster was working with ASIO to secure the documents since they were identified.

"The ABC is working in cooperation with the federal government and relevant authorities to ensure the Cabinet files are secure," Morris said in a statement on Thursday.

"ASIO officers delivered safes to ABC offices in Canberra and Brisbane overnight. This was not a raid."

"We want to ensure that the government is perfectly satisfied that there is no threat of them getting into the wrong hands or anything else, but equally we want to ensure that the editorial principles of the ABC are maintained as well and we'll continue to work with the government on what next to do."

Barnaby Joyce, Australia's Deputy Prime Minister (PM), said the person responsible for losing the documents would be identified and questioned.

"Obviously someone's had a shocker and the investigation will find out exactly how this happened," he told ABC radio on Thursday.

"In the process of running a country, there are things which go awry. This is one of them."

Stories published by the ABC from the documents included the revelation that the Australian Federal Police (AFP) had lost nearly 400 national security files between 2008 and 2013.

Morris defended the decision to publish the documents, saying they were clearly in the national interest and that the ABC has been "as careful as we could possibly be."

"We haven't gone anywhere near stories or issues that may have a national security implication," he said.

Former PM Kevin Rudd has threatened to sue the ABC over one of the published documents which claimed he was warned of "critical risks" in the home insulation scheme his government introduced in 2009.

Four insulation installers died during the program's rollout.

Rudd said on Monday that any claim he ignored safety was a lie and that he told the ABC that before they chose to publish the files.

Bill Shorten, Rudd's successor as leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP), described the incident as "absurd."

"I can't believe it happened, I mean all these spies who are meant to be spying on us they should just be going shopping in second hand furniture stores in Canberra," he said.

"You shouldn't be able to find information out because someone didn't check a set of filing cabinets, then they sold it at a second hand government furniture sale." Enditem