New Zealander of the Year: Spy chief brings agencies out of the shadows

Rebecca Kitteridge, director of the Security Intelligence Service. Photo / Mark Mitchell

This week, we name the finalists for the Herald New Zealander of the Year. We’re profiling high-achieving Kiwis each day and announce the winner in the Weekend Herald.

Rebecca Kitteridge
For bringing light to dark places

The Security Intelligence Service has long been on the public conscious as a shadowy, Maxwell Smart-type body.

Largely, this image has developed around the infamous 1981 find of a briefcase containing an SIS identification, three cold meat pies and a copy of Penthouse magazine.

In the space of a year Rebecca Kitteridge, the first director of the SIS to come from a completely non-military background, has shucked off history through her forthright and no-nonsense approach.

What's more, she had already begun the same process with a damning report into the Government Communications Security Bureau in 2012.

It was desperately necessary. The intelligence agencies - the SIS and GCSB - had been trapped in the mire. They had not kept pace with a changing world, particularly in regard to the public's increasing need for transparency.

The need for transparency was growing, too, with the emergence of Edward Snowden's secrets and New Zealand's own intelligence crisis when it revealed the GCSB had bungled its own law so badly it had potentially illegally spied on dozens of New Zealanders. It came as the laws governing the GCSB were expanding.

Kitteridge was the right person at the right time, first at the GCSB and then the SIS. She came from a role as Cabinet Secretary to John Key's Government, a critical role impressing upon ministers the legal frameworks inside which they must operate. It is a role which requires a deep grasp of the letter and purpose of the law, and of the system in which it sits.

It was this rigid approach she transplanted on - not to - the GCSB. The bureau had strayed from the path of righteousness, not only in intent when considering the Dotcom career but more broadly in its practices and systems.

And then she came to the SIS. Problems which existed at the GCSB also existed at the SIS. Kitteridge has performed remarkable change in a short time, turning the SIS from a shadowy, inward-focused body into an agency which will comfortably engage with the public it is sworn to protect.

She has been given great political licence to bring change to an organisation which, in many ways, has never encountered change.

Her capabilities are such she has the confidence of politicians to effect such change, and talk about it at a string of speaking engagements which have been as much about security issues as about change management and leadership.

As a result, New Zealanders know more now than they ever have about the threats they face in and from the world. They know more about who is protecting them - and can have greater confidence than ever it is being done for the right reasons, inside the law.