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This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and republished with permission.
International priorities dictated a huge vacuum in the gathering of far-right intelligence reports, according to the leading communications spy agency.
The Royal Commission of Inquiry heard that the Government Security Communications Office received 7,526 intelligence reports on terrorism and violent fanaticism in a three-month period at the end of 2018-19.
But not a single one was about right-wing extremism.
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This “was not the result of the GCSB’s own intelligence-gathering setup,” the office’s managing director, Andrew Hampton, told RNZ in a statement.
“The intelligence reports that the GCSB receives from its international Signals intelligence partners is what those agencies collect based on their own priorities.”
These partners had their own legal mandates, which could also influence the intelligence they collected, Hampton said.
It did not respond to RNZ’s question as to whether the gap in far-right reporting from abroad continues. He replied that the intelligence reports were “highly classified and we cannot provide further details on this.”
However, he added: “GCSB shares our intelligence and security priorities with its partners and, since the attacks on March 15, 2019, has emphasized to them the importance for New Zealand of countering white identity extremism.”
The information gap existed despite the fact that far-right terror attacks in the West between partner countries increased roughly three times in five years by some counts, and although one partner is the US, where the threat from the White supremacists increased since 2017. Car attack in Charlottesville.
However, the United States has had many of its own problems with a lack of focus on domestic terrorism and led the world in its obsession with Islamic terrorism.
“While international partners do not direct or dictate that New Zealand bodies pursue particular clues or ideologies, partner reports and clues provided by partners necessarily informed the development of New Zealand’s threat assessments and affected the allocation. of resources, certainly from counter-terrorism agencies, “said the commission’s 800-page report.
The Royal Commission is also revealing other weaknesses in the GCSB.
It had only a handful of staff dedicated to fighting terrorism in the four years prior to the attacks – just two, up to seven, of the nearly 500 employees.
Last year, the Treasury rated its “mission-critical” Internet operations as five years behind Five Eyes’ partners, according to the investigation.
The office gave the Royal Commission the message that it thought other agencies handled counterterrorism better.
However, the commission gave the GCSB a great free pass.
“It engages in national counter-terrorism activities only when commissioned by another agency.”
He concluded that the office was under the direction of the police or the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) and they were not giving much.
This was partly because those two agencies were not well informed about the unique information gathering powers of the GCSB.
The SIS “possibly correctly, does not consider it appropriate or necessary for its personnel to have a full understanding” of the GCSB’s capabilities.
But without that understanding, the “ability of the SIS to maximize the contributions of signals intelligence to the counterterrorism effort is limited,” he said.
He added that the GCSB’s relationship with the police “is not particularly close.”
This “customer-driven” model and its shortcomings had not been discussed.
“Their clients did not always have sufficient knowledge of signal intelligence capabilities to know how their contributions could be maximized.”
The government has focused on the commission’s finding that no public agency failed to meet the standards required in counter-terrorism efforts prior to the attacks.
However, this is preceded by another finding: a “systemic failure of the counterterrorism effort” in six areas, notably the police, SIS, and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), which was intended to provide oversight but to often not.
One of the six flaws was “the reality that the system did not compel or at least encourage public sector agencies to discuss their individual strategies and any residual risks they may have and thus identify gaps in the system.”
The horizon scan at the DPMC was inadequate and did not adequately consider the radicalizing role of the Internet.
The GCSB had five years to improve its Internet operations in 2019, but was struggling, despite the fact that “capability was critical to the mission of the entire New Zealand intelligence community.”
The office, he said, should be more collaborative, as it “has the potential to make a key contribution to the counter-terrorism effort because it can collect information that no other public sector agency can collect.”
This story was originally published on RNZ.co.nz and republished with permission.
