FBI Director Christopher Wray discusses potential misuses of artificial intelligence at Stanford University as part of the FBI's Emerging Technology and Securing Innovation Security Summit in California's Silicon Valley.
Video / FBI
New Zealand tech businesses need to be aware they may be targets, victims or accidental abettors of hostile intelligence gathering in the looming great power conflict.
That’s the message from the Five Eye intelligence partners, which recently met at Stanford University’s Hoover Institute in the United States to swap notesabout how emerging technology and innovation brushed up against the demands of modern security.
The partners were concerned about everything from states like China infiltrating tech firms to steal intellectual property to potentially stealing tech with military application like using new synthetic biology technology to create a pandemic-style bio-weapon.
Hoover Institute Director and Fellow, and former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, chairing a discussion with the Five Eyes top brass, gloomily remarked, “If you think a pandemic now looks bad, then think about what a pandemic tailored to a population looks like”.
The message for civilians was put most clearly by Ken McCallum, the Director-General of Britain’s MI5: “If you’re working at the cutting-edge of tech today, you might not be interested in geopolitics, but geopolitics is interested in you”.
The challenge mainly comes from China, where recent national security laws mean that every citizen and tech company has an obligation to assist in the state’s intelligence gathering.
The Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Mike Burgess warned that while all nations engage in spying, the Chinese Government was engaged in the “most sustained theft of intellectual property and acquisition of expertise that is unprecedented in human history”.
The challenge for the five nations is that the openness their economies, which tech companies use to great effect to tap investment and grow into new markets, is exploited by unfriendly countries for their own ends.
Speaking to the Herald after the conference, the Director-General of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, Andrew Hampton said it was important to raise awareness among the firms themselves and the venture capital firms that invested in them “of some of the threats, particularly state-sponsored threats to tech innovation”.
Hampton said the conference was attended by a handful of big tech investors who invested in New Zealand firms and had relationships with them.
Hampton said that for some firms a fix could be as simple as having good practices around cyber security, but for others, it was to be aware of who you were partnering with.
New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, Andrew Hampton, centre, with his counterparts. Photo / Supplied
“Something that’s particularly relevant to New Zealand is around safe collaboration and safe investment,” Hampton said.
“New Zealand’s tech sector is currently our second biggest export earner. It grew nine times faster than any other sector last year. One of the key things that’s been driving that innovation has been the willingness of New Zealand companies to partner with other people globally to seek investment across the board.
“Now, we certainly don’t want to stifle that, that’s really key, but we do want to encourage companies, particularly those who are start ups or those who are, investing in these companies to just be bringing that national security lens to what they, what they do,” he said.
This could mean if going into a joint-venture with another firm, having a clear understanding about who was able to access your information if you entering a joint-venture with another firm, or if you were growing into a new market, thinking about the risks of that market.
In the United States, the Biden administration has created new rules around the trade in particular sensitive technologies, particularly computer chips. This makes it more difficult for China to access this technology, but also acts as a barrier to some chip firms’ growth.
Hampton said that the intelligence agencies’ advice to ministers regarding threats had already informed some New Zealand legislation.
“In New Zealand we have seen in recent years changes around foreign investment screening so that national security considerations are now part of the consideration of foreign investment proposals - that was informed by intelligence,” he said.
“We’ve seen changes to electoral financing [laws] ... risks around foreign interference was part of that,” he said.
The types of influence depended on what sector someone was in, but one thing firms should be cautious of were “dual use” technologies - technologies with a civilian and military application.
This was an issue not just for firms, but for innovation at universities too.
Firms could suddenly find “there’s a potentially a dual military use of that technology and not only could that make them more of a target for someone who’s after their IP it may catch them up in regulatory regimes that they didn’t even know about”.
This means the firm is not just threatened by espionage, but it might also find itself subject to more stringent regulation as befits companies operating in sensitive areas.
Thomas Coughlan is Deputy Political Editor and covers politics from Parliament. He has worked for the Herald since 2021 and has worked in the press gallery since 2018.
