First there was the annual report of the Inspector General for Security and Intelligence (IG), Cheryl Gwen. It is pretty damning, and echoes many of the criticisms raised in the State Services 2014 review of the intelligence community, especially regarding the SIS.
The IG's annual report was covered on stuff, but there is a better analysis on No Right Turn. The report is littered with findings like this:
In the course of these inquiries, I identified systemic shortcomings in the procedures followed by the NZSIS. […] The process of preparing and finalising those reports has been more protracted than I would have wished because of the time required for my office and for NZSIS to work through the systemic issues that I had identified.And it culminates in this conclusion:
As noted above, the Service lacked a compliance framework and policy, audit framework and dedicated staffing throughout this reporting period.[...] For those reasons, I cannot conclude that NZSIS had sound compliance procedures and systems in place.Note that the innocent sounding word ‘compliance’ means nothing less than the organisation operating within the law.
As if to counter the impression of an out of control organisation a reader would get from this report, a quasi-internal review by the SIS which had concluded in July was declassified a few days after the release of the IG’s report. It comes to the almost opposite conclusion:
The reviewer did not find any evidence of (nor was given any reason to believe there was) significant non-compliance within NZSIS.So everything is OK then? Maybe Cheryl Gwen is a bit too critical. Or maybe Rebecca Kitteridge is a lot less concerned about these things now that she is actually responsible for the SIS than she was in 2013 when she reviewed the GCSB. Her report back then read very similar to Gwen‘s report about the SIS does now. Sometimes the best way to shut critics up is to put them in charge.
