Tech and AI

New Zealand warns foreign states are posing as partners to install tracking equipment

By Staff Writer  |  15 August 2026

Its intelligence service says operators of ground based space equipment were led into partnerships whose foreign state links had been deliberately hidden. Those operators now carry a statutory authorisation duty and an annual reporting duty on their own due diligence.

The New Zealand Security Intelligence Service published the fourth edition of its Security Threat Environment Report on 13 August. Most of it concerns matters a British reader will treat as somebody else's problem. One section does not, because it sets out, in detail a government rarely gives, what a disguised commercial partnership looks like to the company on the receiving end of it.

The subject is ground based space infrastructure, meaning the equipment that tracks objects in orbit and collects scientific data from the ground. New Zealand's position makes it a useful place to put that equipment. The service says the same qualities that attract legitimate operators attract states seeking to advance military capabilities and intelligence operations.

We are highly interconnected with the rest of the world, we produce leading innovations, hold important security partnerships and are located in the strategically important Pacific region, close to Antarctica.

Andrew Hampton, Director-General of Security, New Zealand Security Intelligence Service

What the deception looked like

Over the previous twelve months, the report says, New Zealand's intelligence agencies identified actors working for foreign governments who were trading on the industry's reputation for cooperation and partnership. Operators already established in the country were led to believe they were entering a commercial or research partnership with a foreign entity. The entity's links back to a foreign state had been deliberately obscured.

The report names one instance. An organisation based in the People's Republic of China with close links to its government was found in the past year attempting to install its own equipment in New Zealand. The service, working with other agencies, says it disrupted that attempt, that it was not the organisation's first, and that it is unlikely to be the last. Legitimate operators are told to sharpen their due diligence because future attempts will probably be better hidden.

The same report describes the wider method in terms that apply well beyond one sector: a front company approaching a supplier, an offer of employment aimed at moving technology or knowledge out of a business, false declarations on end use, and goods routed through several jurisdictions and trade hubs so that the final customer cannot be identified. The service adds that a state trying to obtain technology through a front company may be attempting to breach the same organisation's cyber defences at the same time.

The counterparty who arrives with a research collaboration and the intruder testing the firewall may be working to the same brief. Treating commercial due diligence and information security as separate exercises is what allows both to succeed.

The duty is now written into the licence

Operators of this equipment in New Zealand are regulated under the Outer Space and High Altitude Activities Act. They must obtain authorisation to carry out regulated activities, and their annual reporting must verify that their protective security and due diligence arrangements remain current.

That last requirement is the one worth marking. It converts due diligence from something a board does when a deal appears into a continuing obligation that has to be evidenced every year to keep an authorisation. A company that carried out proper checks on a partner in 2024 and has not looked since is not compliant, whatever it found at the time.

Why it reads across

Britain has its own rules on foreign acquisitions and investments in sensitive sectors, and the same argument about continuing obligations is being had here. The value of this report is not the assessment, which is a matter for its own government, but the case study. It tells a supplier what the approach actually looked like: not a hostile bid, but an ordinary sounding research partnership from a counterparty whose ownership was one step further back than anybody checked.

Mr Hampton says the report is meant to help people understand the threats they face and the risks that need managing. On this section it does something more useful than that. It describes a transaction that would have passed most commercial diligence, and says plainly why it did.