Spy agency uses 'computer network exploitation' to take digital information

This title sounds like it’s part of a Job Description.<p><i>Your role as a proper spy agent is to use, amongst other means, computer network exploitation to take digital information!</i>

Isn&#x27;t that their job? It used to &#x2F; still is referred to as signals intelligence since information was first transmitted over the air in the old days and later over the wire. Since everything is behind SSL encryption now they need to increasingly hack into the devices to get the info instead of just intercepting it.

Why does this sound a lot like a hardware backdoor like in motherboard or CPU...

The extensive use of quotation marks suggests the author (unattributed, huh), editor and presumably their audience is unfamiliar with the concepts.<p>The best line, like all news articles written to a standard style, is the last one:<p>&quot;The report showed he reviewed 63 spying warrants, 49 of them the most serious kind, a Type 1, which lets an agency carry out an otherwise unlawful activity in order to collection information about a New Zealander.&quot;

&gt; One of the country&#x27;s two spy agencies has revealed [...]<p>Anyone who thinks their country only has only two spy agencies is only fooling themselves. (This applies to pretty much any country.)

Bear shits in wood

This should be shocking, but after hearing that bears do it in the woods, nothing is going to surprise me...

In other news, bricklayers lay bricks.

The state of NZ right now is such that the government can do whatever and their Mouth of Sauron of a PM will be out there sweetly providing justification for what they want to do in the name of fighting terrorists, COVID deniers, or whatever.<p>They don&#x27;t have a constitution like the USA (which is a paltry check on government power, but it&#x27;s something). Any scrutiny they apply is bound to be &quot;we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong&quot; levels of accountability.