And that's it for the census inquiry. What did we learn?
- all parties are very sorry for what happened on August 9 but insist someone else is to blame;
- IBM has blamed a subcontractor for a geoblock failure which is generally seen as the heart of the matter;
- IBM is also in talks with the federal government about paying for some of the cost of the debacle;
- the Australian Bureau of Statistics has promised to be more rigorous come the next census but has put the blame on IBM;
- the Prime Minister's cyber security tsar says IBM failed to deliver on its contractual obligations but that the ABS should have done more to check IBM's systems; and
- the former head of the ABS says the whole thing was embarrassing, especially the public information campaign.
Good times.
Thanks to Andrew Meares for his photographs and to you for reading and commenting.
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Until we next meet, go well.
Was it a bit like being attacked with a water pistol not a real weapon, Senator Xenophon wants to know.
It was an attack with a real weapon, Mr MacGibbon replies, but only a small one.
Senator Xenophon returns to his theme of the contract between IBM and the ABS.
"In strict terms of service delivery the contract was not delivered upon but the ABS could have done more to ensure it was," Mr MacGibbon says.
Mr MacGibbon says the only thing that could have made the night of August 9 worse was putting the census website back up and it crashing again.
"There was, quite rightly, extreme caution around making sure that when the site went back up it was robust enough to withstand anything the internet could throw at it."
"There was a degree of vendor lock in," Mr MacGibbon says of the faith the ABS placed in IBM.
"They were seen as the natural choice."
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Mr MacGibbon says the ABS should have checked more thoroughly what safe guards were in place against the kind of events that did take place.
"You don't conduct one for non nefarious purposes," Mr MacGibbon says, even though the style of the attack was not designed to extract information.
Mr MacGibbon submitted his review of the attack to the Prime Minister's Office on October 14.
Mr MacGibbon says "the final straw that broken the camel's back" was that the events of August 9 were "interpreted as an actual hack as opposed to an attack".
The geoblocking was not the best means to propel the attack, he says.
That concludes the evidence of the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Next up it is Alastair MacGibbon, the PM's special adviser on cyber security.
10,531 people have refused to do the census, the ABS says.
It is up to the Director of Public Prosecutions to decide whether or not to follow up.
In the past, the ABS's Chris Libreri says, no one has been prosecuted.
"There was certainly a DDoS attack or a DDoS event," Dr Kalisch says when asked if he should not have used the phrase "malicious attack" in an interview early on the morning of August 10.
"It was certainly a malicious event....It wasn't a benign attack."
He then adds the word malicious is not one he normally uses.
It was about 10.30pm that it became clear that the site would not be back up that night.
Mr McCormack was told after the site was taken down, as was Treasury Secretary John Fraser.
"This is something the ABS has responsibility for and takes control of," Mr Kalisch says.
"This is not a ministerial responsibility."
Mr Kalisch cannot remember exactly how many phone calls he had with Small Business Minister Michael McCormack but "there were a number".
It would be fair to describe the census as a "high risk project" because it is a complicated process, deputy statistician Trevor Sutton says.
Back to topSenator Nick Xenophon suggests the process by which the ABS tendered for the census project was inappropriate.
"We believe our approach was consistent with the policy," Mr Kalisch says.
An open tender would have been considered had IBM not been able to satisfy the ABS that it could deliver.
"It is a little bit irrelevant about what IBM believes to have happened," Mr Kalisch says when asked if the ABS's account of census night tallies with that of IBM.
The ABS sees Alastair MacGibbon, the Prime Minister's special adviser on cyber security, as "the source of truth".
In layman's terms: "You can function on one kidney but you don't really want to."
(That's an actual quote.)
"There was a sense that the router had failed," Mr Kalisch says.
Senator Jane Hume wonders if he was concerned that there not a back up router.
The bureau was "aware of the design" of the system which was in place but "we were more surprised when the router failed there was not a clear explanation for what the failure was".
The bureau first met with the minister newly in charge of the census, Michael McCormack, two weeks before census night.
What did you talk about, Labor senator Chris Ketter asks.
"It was really just about the nature of the census process," Mr Kalisch says.
At this point the public information campaign had not begun so people were unaware of the different nature of the census.
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