The top-secret leak that led to a spying scandal, infuriating Indonesia – and Tony Abbott

Lenore Taylor at home in Sydney. ‘Within a week of looking at it, we had published it,’ she says of the Snowden leak revealing a spying scandal that outraged Indonesia. Photograph: Jessica Hromas/The Guardian

Lenore Taylor remembers the pressure she felt carrying a USB stick from Sydney to Canberra with the contents of a top-secret leak implicating the Australian government in a spying scandal that reached the then president of Indonesia’s personal mobile phone.

It was 2013 – the same year that David Miranda, the late partner of former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, was detained in Heathrow airport for nine hours after a series of stories revealed mass surveillance programs by the US National Security Agency.