New Zealand’s spy agency says it is increasingly coming across espionage activity in the Pacific – and has identified individuals connected to an unnamed foreign intelligence service.<\/p>\n
The NZSIS reports that individually, Pacific states remain vulnerable to attempts at subversion, both in politically, and in the community.<\/p>\n
Security expert Al Gillespie told RNZ’s Midday Report that China has been singled out as a regional threat like never before.<\/p>\n
“In previous reports you’ve seen it also making that point about Russia, or about Iran. But they’re not mentioned this time. But China is,” he said<\/p>\n
“And it’s mentioned not just with regards to domestic interference but also with influence in the pacific. And so they;’re trying to shine a light on what may be going on.”<\/p>\n
The NZSIS said that regionalism and consensus were the best safeguards, which is why foreign actors seek to sow division.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, the SIS also said diaspora community groups in New Zealand were being unfairly targeted by foreign states and their proxies seeking to limit their democratic rights and freedoms.<\/p>\n
Gillespie said China was unfortunately not the only country that undertakes this activity.<\/p>\n
He said SIS staff spent a lot of time talking to different communities about how the agency functioned and how it would handle threats so people could feel confident about coming to them with their concerns.<\/p>\n
RNZ has reached out to the Chinese Embassy for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New Zealand’s spy agency says it is increasingly coming across espionage activity in the Pacific – and has…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":568324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-568323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=568323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/568323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/568324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=568323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=568323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=568323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}