"Anything about China in ASIO." That topic turned up in WeChat messages to a Sydney marketing consultant from two suspected Chinese spies he knew only as Ken and Evelyn, next to "China spy" and strategy, targets, tactics, methods and technology. ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, is the agency that hunts foreign spies. Ken and Evelyn wanted a paid consultant reporting on it. Alexander Csergo got three and a half years from a Sydney court on Thursday for reckless foreign interference. He's the first person sentenced for that offence since Australia's 2018 laws created it. It began with a LinkedIn approach from someone seeking part-time consultancy. He met the pair in empty Shanghai cafés he suspected had been cleared for the meetings, and prosecutors said he believed both worked for China's Ministry of State Security (MSS). The paid topics ran from lithium mining and Germany's change of government to the Quad and the Australia-UK-US (AUKUS) submarine pact. The judge placed the turn around May 2022, when Csergo was asked for a defence report "materially different" from his earlier work. His own messages show he saw the risk. He told Ken they had to be "careful" because "we don't want to find ourselves being questioned by any governments." He also tried to reach former prime minister Kevin Rudd through an online contact form, though he never interviewed him. His lawyers argued the reports were worthless open-source material plus fictitious interviews, with no evidence he revealed any national security secret. The jury convicted anyway. I think that's the part people will misread. A thin report costs an intelligence service almost nothing, and what the cash bought here was an Australian who accepted a defence tasking and stayed in contact with Ken after he moved back to Sydney. ASIO chief Mike Burgess said the spies wanted him to target people in Australia's intelligence community, the Prime Minister's Office, the defence sector, the judiciary and think tanks. ACI — Aric Chen | Insights