Date Time Untested espionage laws blast chill winds through news publishing Journalists must be protected from prosecution in a much-needed overhaul of Australia’s Espionage Act 2018, according to a group of academics pushing for reform. The University of Queensland’s Dr Rebecca Ananian-Welsh said the Act’s harsh penalties – including jail terms of life imprisonment – were having a “chilling” effect on public interest journalism. “While no journalist has been prosecuted in the past three years, the threat of imprisonment for a national security offence looms, and is a huge concern for news companies, journalists, and their sources,” she said. “The laws criminalise a very wide range of conduct which involves ‘dealing’ with information for the purpose of communicating it to a ‘foreign principal’.