Parliament's intelligence and security committee again interrogated officials over twin raids on the ABC and the home of NewsCorp journalist Annika Smethurst in Canberra on Friday.

Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo doubled down on his department's refusal to provide details about the prevalence of journalist information warrants to the committee.

Mr Pezzullo said it would take months to collect the data from state and territory police forces, which he'd deemed an unreasonable diversion of resources.

"So you've spent three weeks preparing an answer to the committee's request, which amounts to saying we don't know? And we don't care to find out?" Labor's attorney-general spokesman Mark Dreyfus asked.

"We should have just [said] it on day one and been done with it," Mr Pezzullo said.

But he also rued the deteriorating relationships between media outlets and government agencies.

Mr Pezzullo said there were "two dozen" journalists he could think of who had the "judgment, the depth, the scale of knowledge ... wit and the sensibility" to reach out to the department if they suspected they were about to publish material that could cause substantial public harm.

Mr Pezzullo suggested reviving a parliamentary committee from the early 1980s where "trusted conversations" between defence officials and members of the media would occur.

He noted it was a "different time" with fewer media outlets and fewer deadlines.

It was not "foolproof" either, Mr Pezzullo said, referring to "dramatic disclosures" made by veteran intelligence report Brian Toohey (he also noted Toohey's recent memoir was "well worth reading", although he did not agree with much he said).

But there could be value in having some sort of contemporary equivalent where officials could provide perspective to journalists, Mr Pezzullo said.

"it just seems to me to have those relationships in place before the crisis, before there's an incident is always better than trying to establish those relationships in the heat of an incident," Mr Pezzullo said.

But Mr Pezzullo reprised his comments that public servants who leaked classified documents should go to jail.

He delivered a line-by-line admonition of Smethurst's story, which he called "dead wrong".

He said the premise of the story was flawed, and even someone with "the most basic, rudimentary, I won't even say undergraduate" of information architecture, network engineering and cyber operations would have understood that the proposal alluded to in the documents would not have given the Australian Signals Directorate access to Australians' personal data and communications.

"You can't blow a whistle on a falsehood," Mr Pezzullo said.

But Defence officials were vague about the actual harm to national security the story caused.

Defence Secretary Greg Moriarty said he believed it had damaged Australia's national security, as it contained details about the Australian Signals Directorate network exploitation and offensive cyber capabilities.

But Mr Dreyfus said Smethurst appeared to have drawn those paragraphs from the agency's own mission statements.

"How is there anything in this story that goes beyond what's available on the ASD website?" Mr Dreyfus asked.

Mr Moriarty said the document had such a sensitive security classification he would have been "derelict in my duty" if he had not referred it to police.

"If there had been a two-line tweet, I would have referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police," Mr Moriarty said.

The Australian Federal Police also revealed it treats public service leaks as corruption until proved otherwise.

"In our view if we have a public official who is illegally providing information to a third party outside their duties, it's corruption," Deputy Commissioner Neil Gaughan told the inquiry.

Police also said they had developed new procedures for alerting the minister's office to politically sensitive raids, after receiving a rinsing through a privileges committee last year.

Acting Commissioner Karl Kent also took issue with the description of the operations as raids.

"The AFP does not raid homes, it executes search warrants in accordance with the law," Acting Commissioner Kent said.

But News Corp Australia's Campbell Reid said: "if it looks like a raid and feels like a raid it's probably a raid".