Speech to the New Zealand Institute of Intelligence Professionals

Speech to the New Zealand Institute of Intelligence Professionals at Grand Hall, Parliament

Andrew Hampton, Director-General of Security

21 November 2024

Thank you for the introduction. It is a real privilege to speak at an event that celebrates excellence in intelligence. In my job, I get to read rich, powerful and impactful intelligence every single day and I can confirm that there is real excellence being produced. So can I start by thanking you for the work that you do. National security decision making is impossible to do well without the insights we receive through sound intelligence.

In my introduction just now I used the whakataukī ‘Ehara taku toa i te toataki tahi Ēngari he toa taki tini’ I come not with my own strengths but bring with me the gifts, talents and strengths of my whānau, tribe and ancestors.

It’s a proverb I use often as I find it provides useful context for how we should be thinking and talking about national security. It’s the idea that we all have something valuable to contribute and that we are stronger and more impactful by working together. Providing clear and actionable intelligence requires a team effort that draws upon the full diversity of our individual and collective strengths. 

I like to think we understand pretty clearly the value proposition that we offer as intelligence professionals but for too long we have had a fairly narrow conception of who can benefit from the value we provide. We have tended to think, particularly in the classified environments that I have been involved with, that the decision maker with the right security clearances is our main customer and that’s it.

For many of you that key decision maker is your main customer and we should never lose sight of that, but where we could be missing a beat is by not thinking about where else a version of these insights could also be valuable if shared more widely. How do we think about ways to make a broader impact?

This evening I would like to talk about the work we’re doing at the NZSIS to make our intelligence insights and advice more accessible to a broader audience in a way that does not compromise the important secrecy we maintain over our sources, methods and capabilities. 

It is my belief that being more open to sharing intelligence with broader audiences, including with community groups and businesses contributes to social resilience. It is that resilience which should be recognised as one of our most fundamental national security assets. 

Sharing more about the threats we face and engaging meaningfully with the public has also become vital to building social licence around the work we as intelligence professionals do and the new kinds of work we want to be able to do in the future.

Partnering with and for others

We at the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service - Te Pā Whakamarumaru, are in the business of keeping New Zealand and New Zealanders safe and secure. We protect Aotearoa New Zealand as a free and open democratic country for future generations to enjoy and carry out our mission by aiming to stay ahead of the threats we face as a country. 

At the peak of our organisational strategy is our strong intention to deliver impact with and for others.

No matter how good our people are at doing their jobs or the technical capabilities we can deploy, in the field of intelligence and security we cannot even come close to achieving our missions through working alone. Partnering with others is key, especially partnering with communities, and with the private sector. 

Once made aware of what to look out for, communities and businesses will likely see threats emerging before we do. With access to the right advice and guidance, they will be able to take steps to make themselves harder targets and to mitigate threats before they can cause great harm.

Resilient communities will be best placed to protect themselves from future threats and better able to respond to them when they occur. This applies whether we are talking about violent extremism and terrorism, or foreign interference and espionage, or indeed cyber attacks.

Any way we as intelligence professionals can contribute through our collective work to the development of strong, supportive and inclusive communities is probably the ultimate impact we can all make on the safety and security of New Zealand and New Zealanders.

Strength in community

The community I grew up in is in rural Mid Canterbury. Do we have any mid-Cantabrians here this evening? We tend to pop up in the most unusual of places.

Whenever, I’m home it’s a bit of a running joke that I’m the spy boss. I was down at the A&P Show a few years back and visited the promotional tent for my old school Ashburton College. When they realised I was an old boy they asked what I did up in Wellington. I happily talked about my work as an intelligence professional and even agreed to do a follow-up interview with the local paper about careers in national security. I left the tent feeling like I made a real impact and proudly went back and bragged to my family. Unbeknownst to me, my big brother, the farmer returned to the Ashburton College tent and said, “sorry to bother you but has my brother been here? He looks a bit like me, taller with glasses?” They said, “yes of course, Andrew with that important job in Wellington?” “Oh no,” said my brother. “He didn’t say he was the spy boss did he? I’m so sorry, we have had him out on day release for the A&P Show and we’ve lost him. If you see him again, please send him back to the car park by the sheep pens.” And with that, the impact was gone.

I was last back in Mid Canterbury a couple of weeks ago as a keynote speaker at the Advance Ashburton Community Foundation’s annual awards celebrations. As its name suggests, this is a community funded trust that allocates hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to individuals, groups and initiatives to strengthen the local community.  It was a fantastic event to be a part of, and a chance for me to reflect on how important community resilience has been to me personally but also how it contributes to our national security. 

As a kid, I took for granted a range of privileges and opportunities which I now appreciate are not afforded to all children growing-up in this country. At the same time, like most teenagers, there were some things that I found a bit challenging, and these challenges have also shaped who I am today.

I was prone to episodes of anxiety, but I only discovered it was this when I was much older. Fortunately, I’ve got some mental health tools that are now so embedded in how I cope with stresses and pressures they are just a natural part of how I operate. I only wish I knew how and where to get this type of help when I was in my teens.

While I have always wanted to learn, I also struggled with reading and spelling throughout primary school and ended up being held back a year.

My Mum would spend hours reading to me and helping me with my homework. Often, she would be doing my homework! It’s no surprise that she went on to become an educator for people with specific learning disabilities. The importance of family support continues right to this day. I simply would not have been able to have the career I have had without the emotional and practical support of my wife and children.

Growing up I was also blessed with teachers who made sure I got the learning support I needed, nurtured the potential they saw in me and inspired me to broaden my learning horizons. The same was true of the lecturers I had when I went on to study history and politics Christchurch at Canterbury University.

These multiple layers of support are important. It is something each of us can benefit from and where we can make our own contribution.

Changing face of communities

While communities can, and should be, huge sources of strength, support and pride for their members, they also evolve over time as the world around them changes. What bound us together in the past might not always be the same in today’s environment.

When I was growing-up too many kids died in car accidents or through suicide, and mental health was something that just wasn’t talked about. In the 1980s the unique place of Māori as Aotearoa’s first peoples was only just beginning to be recognised. Broader ethnic and religious diversity, to the extent it existed in places like Ashburton, was largely kept hidden from the mainstream.

Fortunately, many of these aspects of our community have changed for the better since I was growing up. We now talk much more openly about mental health and there are now a greater range of services available for young people. Still though, our country’s youth suicide rate is one of the highest in the OECD. Bullying and social dislocation remain prevalent, now exacerbated by social media. It’s the same challenge but just happens differently these days.

The place of Māori as tangata whenua is now recognised in our institutions and across society. Similarly, the many people who have come from all across the globe to make New Zealand their home and contribute to our economy and our cultural life is now considered something to be celebrated.

The Christchurch terrorist did not see a diverse and inclusive community as a source of pride and strength - he felt threatened by it and wanted to destroy it. The outpouring of grief and community support that followed the horrific attacks showed that his distorted and hateful views were rejected by the vast bulk of New Zealanders.

I want to acknowledge those of you here who responded on that terrible day and were involved in the subsequent investigations and inquiries. It’s a day I know you, as well as the people at the NZSIS, will never forget.

Nature of the threat

So, coming from a supportive and inclusive community is something that is very important to me, and has helped shape who I am. Supportive and inclusive communities are also vital to our national security.

National security is not something that can just be left to the NZSIS or any of the other agencies represented here tonight. It requires an all-of-society effort where each of us can play a role. Unfortunately, there are a range of international factors and societal trends that pose national security threats to New Zealand. Resilient communities will be our best defence.

Violent extremism

We at the NZSIS assess that another terrorist attack in New Zealand remains a realistic possibility. The most likely perpetrator of such an attack is someone who is acting alone, has been self-‑radicalised online and acts with little or no intelligence forewarning.

The person could be motivated, as the Christchurch terrorist was, by a distorted view of the superiority of their own identity and could denigrate others based on their religion, their ethnicity, their gender or their sexual orientation. We are also concerned about individuals who are motivated to undertake a violent act by a distorted view of their faith. We see global terrorist networks, particularly ISIS and Al-Qaeda seeking to use the crisis in Gaza to radicalise and recruit others. There are also individuals, often driven by online conspiracy theories, who see violence as the answer to achieve some type of radical political outcome.

A growing concern for us, however, are individuals who have what we describe as having “mixed, unclear or unstable” motivations to undertake an act of violent extremism. They tend to have very personalised grievances and “shop around” online between different ideological motivations. These individuals are increasingly young people and have a fixation with violence, sometimes compounded by mental health challenges.

Fortunately, at this time, there are only a small number of violent extremist individuals who are being investigated by us and the Police. But that’s just who we know about. Our agencies are not all-seeing and all-knowing, and nor should we be in a democracy like ours. There are likely to be individuals who we don’t know about but who could radicalise to violence very quickly and cause great harm. The organisations and communities we engage with around the country are therefore just as likely as we are to see concerning behaviours and activities. 

Foreign interference and espionage

As you know, we are also concerned about the corrosive effect of foreign interference on our democratic institutions, our economic prosperity and our diverse communities. We are coming up with ways to have that conversation too in a way that alerts people to the threat but doesn’t alarm. 

The most insidious foreign interference is that which targets our diverse ethnic communities. We see a small number of authoritarian governments or proxies acting on their behalf that monitor, and in some cases, harass groups or individuals in New Zealand who they perceive as dissidents. We also see one foreign government in particular using deceptive front organisations to try to control the community narrative and suppress views they perceive as critical. 

There are also a small number of foreign states that conduct espionage against New Zealand and New Zealanders, sometimes involving foreign intelligence officers operating under the guise of legitimate activity.​

Targets include government departments, commercial entities and research institutions.

We at the NZSIS engage with organisations around the country so they are alert to foreign interference and espionage and know how to raise concerns with us when they see or experience it. And those governments that undertake such activity need to know we are on to them.

This type of activity is not acceptable in a democracy like ours and it is damaging to our communities, businesses and institutions. That’s why it needs to be called out.

Leveraging insights for good

An important way we can contribute to building community resilience from a security and intelligence perspective is therefore by sharing insights that inform the public’s understanding of the threats and allows them to make better decisions about their own safety and security.

In September, we published New Zealand’s Security Threat Environment for the second time. This annual document has become a game changer in the way it helps us describe the nature of violent extremism, foreign interference and espionage threats and demonstrate that they do indeed happen here.

We are learning all the time how to have these conversations with the public. For us it’s about making sure we have plenty of case studies up our sleeves. Our latest report has 14 case studies – all stemming from actual leads or investigations from the past 12-18 months.

Language is important too. We try to focus attention on certain behaviours and activities associated with the threats we describe rather than on any particular groups or individuals.

National security conversations of course shouldn’t stigmatise anyone but there are more practical reasons too – if people are led to believe the threat emanates from a particular group, individual or country then we could be blinding them to the possibility a threat could come from someplace else.

Another aspect of the national security discussion that’s hugely important is that we can’t credibly talk about threats if we don’t also front up with actionable protective security advice to help individuals and organisations to manage risk. At the end of each section of our threat environment report we provide advice on how to manage risk associated with particular threats along with links to other helpful information.

A couple of years ago, we published Know the Signs: a guide for identifying signs of violent extremism. The idea was to help communities identify the kind of behaviours and activities we find concerning. This document outlines for the public the indicators of someone who may be on a pathway to radicalisation and how to report any concerns.

We have been delighted with the response. We have seen organisations use it as part of health and safety training; organisations have adapted it so it speaks better to their particular community stakeholders; and we saw Microsoft link to it has part of its parental guidance for the X-Box in Australia and New Zealand.

Given that each indicator came from different NZSIS CT investigations, it’s a tangible example of intelligence being declassified and shared to make a broader impact.

Our recent guidance for the tech sector on how they can secure their innovation is another example of sharing intelligence-based insights and advice in order to have a wider impact. The threat of espionage to this sector is real and it’s one that we and our Five Eyes partners are keen to amplify and work alongside industry to respond to. We challenged ourselves to produce relevant unclassified case studies to make the threat real and to demonstrate that security measures can be both cost effective and impactful. 

The advice had its genesis at a summit in San Francisco last year, which I attended alongside other Five Eyes heads of agency and Condoleezza Rice at Stanford University. This was the first time the heads of agency had stood together on a public stage to talk about a shared threat. Normally, our meetings are highly secret so this was an unusual experience for all of us.

The next day things got even more unusual when we turned up at a community gymnasium, which had been transformed into a US 60 Minutes studio, with blacked out windows, spotlights and too many cameras to count.

We were told Oprah’s make up team had a day off so were tasked with turning mutton into lamb for five ageing spies.

I think I got about 15 seconds of air time in the final 60 Minutes piece for more than two hours filming but reaching an audience of that size with this message was too good an opportunity to pass up. Since then, we have been pleased with the pick-up of the Secure Innovation advice by the New Zealand media and within our own tech sector.

Importance of community engagement

While we at the NZSIS have done a lot of work to provide accessible and relevant unclassified intelligence products and protective security advice, we can’t just turn-up and say, “Hi, we’re from the government and we are here to help”. 

If we want communities and businesses to take seriously what we have to share, we need to earn their trust, and to do this we need to build our own cultural capabilities and customer focus; really invest in relationships; listen; and demonstrate we have something of value to offer. 

For the NZSIS, we have the added challenge of being relatively new to the game of being “out there.” Most people would not have had anything to do with my agency and there are a whole load of different perceptions about the work we do that are either based on the movies or people’s different views of state power. Sometimes new migrants are wary of us due to the unconscionable activities of the intelligence agencies in the countries where they or their forebears came from.  

To work authentically with communities, we need to try to understand their perspectives. For example, the NZSIS has a Muslim Advisory Group that advises us on how best to engage with Aotearoa’s diverse Muslim communities. Over recent years, we have also worked to understand security concepts from a te ao Māori perspective in order to improve national security outcomes for Iwi Māori. We have also invested in building relationships with our Pacific partners in order to share more intelligence and protective security advice with them in a relatable way.

We have long had a community engagement function that meets with individuals and groups around the country in an open and upfront way. The team listens to community concerns and informs them of our national security function.

This team has done more than any other in my organisation to demystify the world of intelligence and security in communities around the motu. As a result, we have received on average 20 percent of our leads from members of the public in recent years.

I think there has been a perception in the national security sector in the past that these kinds of conversations are too difficult to have or they shouldn’t be something we “put on” communities. I have heard officials talk about national security being the sole responsibility of the state.

If that was ever the case, we certainly cannot afford to think that way any longer – particularly with the complex and fast evolving threat environment that we currently face.

Social licence

Engagement is therefore one of the avenues through which we seek to build the social licence we need to be a credible voice about national security threats. Social licence is also vital for us to be seen as a legitimate organisation that can responsibly use the extraordinary powers we have at our disposal, once properly authorised, to detect, deter and disrupt these threats.

Independent and robust oversight is key to us maintaining our social licence. We welcome the role of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, even when the findings are unfavourable or seem to us unfair. He provides scrutiny of our activities on behalf of the public which by necessity they do not usually get to see for themselves.

Sometimes I hear media reports about activity some of your agencies undertake, which while legal, is not subject to the same level of independent oversight as the intelligence agencies. I’m not saying you necessarily need the same level of oversight as my agency, but there is probably more work to be done to bring the public along with what you are trying to achieve. If we don’t get this right, the permission space could shrink for all of us.

As the NZSIS seeks to build trust and confidence, it is also important that we own our organisation’s history, including past mistakes or activities that now look very different with the passage of time and changing social and political context.

We recently published more than 100 declassified files relating to work our predecessor agency did to try to track down Nazi sympathisers in New Zealand in the 1930s and NZSIS records relating to a Soviet era spy operating in New Zealand in the 1960s. Prior to this, we have also released files related to key moments in New Zealand history such as 1951 Waterfront Dispute, the Springbok tour and the Rainbow Warrior sinking.

Social licence for future threats

Building and maintaining social licence is also necessary if we are to develop and deploy new capabilities. I have spoken a lot tonight on ways we are trying to build social licence by making our intelligence more accessible, but we also need to be thinking about social licence as we adapt to an evolving threat environment. This is a thought I’m keen to leave with you tonight.

Without a doubt, the threat environment we currently face is more complicated and concerning than it has probably ever been during my nine years in security intelligence. As the environment evolves, so too should the tools we need to carry out our important work.

We are going to increasingly need to access and extract insights from big data sets. We are going to need to act quickly to properly join the AI revolution and harness the best parts of the technology as a force for good. And we are getting to the point of needing new capabilities and authorities so we can effectively disrupt certain threat actors.

For the NZSIS, like for some of your agencies, we are increasingly accessing, layering and analysing publicly available data sets to discover potential threats that we otherwise would not see. 

We are exploring the use of AI to help us analyse data quickly and at scale, while ensuring that we comply with our legal compliance requirements and that we always have a human in the loop. 

And following the most recent review of the Intelligence and Security Act, we are contributing to policy work on what an effects mandate would mean for the NZSIS so that we don’t just identify threats but can take additional steps to disrupt them in particular circumstances and with the appropriate authorities in place.

This is the kind of work we need to be doing, often in concert with our international partners, if we are to stay relevant and effective. Much of this work will of course need to be conducted in secret. However, we also need to challenge ourselves to find ways to give the public some insight into why it is necessary that we have these capabilities, how we will be held democratically accountable when using them, and how external oversight will ensure we are being lawful, responsible and proportionate. 

Ongoing public engagement will be vital to build both the permission space and a general understanding. 

Concluding remarks

Having a mature and informed discussion about national security can be tricky work. I think we as an agency are getting better but we are far from normalising these important conversations.

What I think we have proven though is that there is a burgeoning demand for clear and actionable intelligence and advice and that people are up for the discussion.

The benefits for our national security are at least threefold: we enlist the help of more people to support our efforts; we contribute to resilient communities and resilient organisations; and we build and maintain the social licence we need to do our jobs.

That means demand for rich, powerful and impactful intelligence produced by highly trained professionals is not going away any time soon.

What might change is the range of people who get the privilege of reading your excellent work

Ngā mihi nui. Thank you.