An annual report by the heads of New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service has warned of “increasingly aggressive activity” in the country by people they believe are spies for foreign states, according to a report by The Guardian, which said unnamed states were making “enduring and persistent” efforts to collect information on the government by targeting people with access to sensitive information and interfering “in all spheres of the country’s public life.”
Analysts believed that New Zealand’s strategic importance in the Pacific, and growing awareness about the country’s politics, had angered authoritarian leaders such as China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, the report said, quoting a professor from the University of Otago who said: “Countries aggressively interfere in a liberal democracy because they’re extremely insecure, very fragile authoritarian regimes.”
Read the full report: The Guardian.
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