The Security Intelligence Service (SIS) has adopted new terminology from its Canadian counterpart to talk about threats.
SIS Director-General Rebecca Kitteridge. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
This means using "Faith Motivated extremism" to describe one end of the threat spectrum, and "Identity Motivated Violent Extremism" to describe the end that white supremacists inhabit.
In its recent annual review, SIS director-general Rebecca Kitteridge said this was a "deliberate change in our language" adapted from a "helpful framework developed by our Canadian sister agency".
"Our new terminology makes it clear that our concern is with violent extremists and terrorists of varying ideologies. Those threats should not be conflated with communities," she added.
Tim McSorley, of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group in Ottawa, said his coalition of watchdog groups had yet to see evidence in Canada that since the change in terminology spying was not still targeting Muslims unfairly.
"We haven't seen any proof that there's been an actual change in how they operate in the focus of their surveillance activities," McSorley said.
A catalyst for the change in terminology used by the Canadian agency was a January 2017 attack on a Quebec mosque that killed six people.
The shooter in this case however was not prosecuted as a terrorist.
The following year, in 2018, a Canadian report on terrorism broke new ground in naming white supremacists as a major threat, though the report primarily focused on Islamists, McSorley said.
This was followed by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) adopting the new terminology.
McScorley said treating white supremacists as a major threat didn't come without "pushback".
Recently, he said, several far-right groups have been designated as terrorism entities by Canada, though at the same time several Arab or Muslim groups have also been added to the list.
A total of six white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups have been designated terrorist entities in Canada, when none were before 2018.
While the list may be expanding a little, it isn't that Canada is shifting its focus away from one group, he said.
"There's nothing that clearly shows that they're lessening their focus on surveillance of Muslim communities."
In New Zealand, only one white supremacist has been designated as a terrorist entity.
Civil liberty groups in Canada were still getting reports of spies approaching Muslim university groups and youth there to talk about security threats, in a way they were not doing with Far Rightists, McSorley said.
Data collection
The other parallel of concern to the coalition watchdog was spy agencies in both Canada and New Zealand wanting to get access to more data.
This was a key thrust of the SIS commissioned Arotake report into how it performed in the lead-up to the March 2019 mosque attacks in Christchurch.
Canada's spy agencies won law changes in 2019 allowing them to use datasets. This was to compile "vast troves of information that aren't necessarily tied to a direct threat", McSorley said.
It is still pushing for more powers.
"They argue that they don't want to find a needle in a haystack, they want to build their own haystack, so just collect as much information as possible, and then be able to sift through it."
The coalition was pressuring the Canadian government on this, but instead it had legalised mass data collection even after it was proved the domestic agency had already been gathering it illegally, McSorley said.
"Canada in itself might be ahead of New Zealand right now, but in many ways, we're a follower of the US and the UK, where we've already seen these kinds of data collection regimes put in place.
"So, you know, there's a lot that we can probably learn from each other and look out for."
