The Age said our spies knew too little. Now it says they know too much 2002 - An Age article damns our intelligence agencies for not knowing more: Australian intelligence received no advance warning of the Bali bombings, an inquiry exonerating the spy agencies has found... Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd said the inquiry had only examined the narrow question of specific intelligence, not the broader questions about the government's assessments and warnings of the emerging al Qaeda terrorist threat. 2003 - An Age article damns our intelligence agencies for not knowing more: Militant Islam was there in Indonesia for all to see long before the Bali bombing. How could Australian security analysts miss it? 2004 - An Age article damns our intelligence agencies for not knowing more: Report finds intelligence failure on Iraq... Australia relied on thin and ambiguous intelligence information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (WMD), a wide-ranging inquiry into the intelligence community has found. 2004 - An Age article damns our intellegence agencies for not knowing more: The report, by former intelligence chief Philip Flood, also says agencies failed to properly target Jemaah Islamiah's terrorist activities in Asia, contributing to a lack of warning about the Bali bombings. 2004 - An Age editorial damns our intelligence agencies for not knowing more: Australian intelligence agencies also underestimated the threat of radical Islamic groups in our region such as Jemaah Islamiah... The problem facing intelligence agencies has two parts. The first is that the terrorist threat requires them to imagine scenarios that were unprecedented before September 11. Their failure then was one of imagination. But now The Age criticises our intelligence agencies for trying to find out too much, and demands Tony Abbott guarantee they will never do so again: On learning that the United States had covertly monitored calls on her mobile phone, Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel last month phoned President Barack Obama and demanded a personal explanation. She did so because the friendship between their countries, cultivated over decades, is sufficiently robust to endure such ructions. Indeed, it must endure despite them. In confronting Mr Obama, Dr Merkel armed herself. While she may not have got an apology per se, she elicited a response that effectively confirmed the surveillance and embarrassed the US. Mr Obama told Dr Merkel that the US ""is not and will not in the future"" monitor her phone. Those words set a benchmark. If it emerges in the future that the US has again monitored a German leader's personal communications, the trust between the allies - for now repaired - will have been breached. And it will be a grave rupture. Australia is at the same point with Indonesia. It has not always been an easy relationship, but the two nations have enjoyed a closer and warmer friendship in the past decade than at any time previously, one that overcame even Indonesia's bold admission in 2004 that it had spied on Australia. Revelations that Australian intelligence units monitored the phone contacts of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, his wife, and his closest advisers, strikes at the heart of the friendship.