The Inspector General of Intelligence Services in New Zealand, Brendan Horsley, dropped an alarming surprise recently, indicating that there has been secret activity on New Zealand soil that even the government was not aware of: a clandestine operation by a foreign intelligence agency. This operation has been running covertly inside the Government Communications and Security Bureau (GCSB), a testament to both the foreign agency’s audacity and the GCSB’s failure in oversight. This revelation comes from a report shared just last Thursday
The secret operation dates back to 2013, where the foreign agency has been capitalizing on the GCSB’s technology to host signals meant to “support action against military targets”, as detailed by the report. With the government taken by surprise, this backs the report’s suggestion that New Zealand’s security decisions could have been compromised over these years. Which foreign agency is at play here, however, remains undisclosed in the report.
Further criticism rains down on GCSB’s leadership team during the period when these covert activities took place. While the current leaders claim they were blindsided, there is a possibility that their predecessors might have been syndicates of the foreign operation. Horsley denounced GCSB for their failure in securing ministerial approval of the program, an action he found to be ‘improper’. The scope of the operation allegedly even slipped beyond the standard intelligence sharing that GCSB is normally allowed to deal with. Find out more about the standard cooperations GCSB is allowed to engage in here
In the aftermath of the revelations, the report laid out five principal recommendations for GCSB’s future conduct. The agency has accepted these recommendations that range from increasing direct oversight of the Inspector General to implementing a national audit system. The aim is to prevent such setup from occurring again without the requisite permissions. GCSB’s Director, Andrew Clark, accepted the agency’s failure and made an assurance of improved process handling in the future. Read Clark’s acknowledgement. Interestingly, no staff members who were aware of the operation remain in the agency, and the organization has seen significant overhauls since the unveiling of the clandestine operations.