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IN CONFIDENCE-TO BE SHARED WITH AUS/CAN/UK/US ONLY

Declassified for release - December 2017

Purpose
1.

This note provides you (The Hon Chris Finlayson) with a briefing to assist in your preparations to

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lead discussion on the 'Intelligence Narrative' over dinner on 5 February 2015, as part of the Five
Country Ministerial (National Security) Meeting.

2.

Ac
t

The intelligence narrative

For New Zealand, the need for a compelling intelligence narrative first arose out of the Dotcom

io
n

incident in the second half of 2012, when GCSB disclosed that work it had done to help Police
execute a search warrant against Kim Dotcam in January 2012 had, on the face of it, been

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unlawful. The case is still before the Courts, but what is relevant to the Five Country Ministerial

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conversation is the resulting political furore. It was made worse in New Zealand by the fact that
GCSB reported directly to the Prime Minister, and so the resulting debate was very quickly

In

3.

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politicised.

For New Zealand as well as other partners, the subsequent media leaks episode continued and

What we learned from both the Dotcom episode and the subsequent media leaks process was

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4.

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al

widened the debate, and gave it a global dimension. That context is familiar to everyone.

a)

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important:-

th
e

the intelligence community needs to be able to explain what it does, why and subject to
what oversight compellingly and continually, in what for many of us has been a very

nd
er

contested area of debate;

that means that we need to see the communications effort as a core function for each of

b)

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our intelligence and security agencies, and New Zealand would argue that the

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s

ed

communications teams across the Five Eyes need to work together, s6(a)

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c)

The internet is global, and we have

certainly learned that media stories go around the world very quickly;
the debate has of course widened to include the dimension of privacy and security. which
is as much about the rise of big data in a commercial sense as it is about anything any
government does. Public opinion tends to be led to believe that governments are more
pervasive, and pernicious in their ability and desire to track citizens, while corporate
operators (often with much bigger resources and very much less oversight) tend to be
under-estimated;

 d)


Dedassi?ed for Its-lease December2017

the result has been the emergence of a visible rift in some countries between what
governments are saying and what technology companies are saying, and calls

(particularly from the UK) for steps to be taken to make technology companies more

cooperative. In New Zealand this has been re?ected in recent legislation which gives the

New Zealand Government the power to deem overseas application service providers to

be covered by lawful intercept requirements.