It took seven months for police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks - but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.
It took seven months for police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks - but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.
An internal report released under the Official Information Act (OIA) said this was despite the team already proving its worth many times over in countering violent extremists.
The unit still does not have dedicated funding, despite a warning last July it risked being turned off .
This is revealed in 170 pages of OIA documents charting police intelligence shortcomings over the past decade, from pre-2011 extending through to mid-2020, and their attempts to overhaul the national system since 2018. These show police had no dedicated team before 2019 to scan the Internet for threats - what is called an OSINT team, for Open Source Intelligence .
Police were lauding their counterterrorism intelligence system shortly after the mosque attacks, even though they knew parts of it were in a woeful state.
Police did not review their performance in the lead-up to the mosque attacks, instead they fed into the Royal Commission of Inquiry. File photo
Photo: RNZ / Alexander Robertson
In April 2019, a month after 51 people were killed, the national intelligence manager said the system s effectiveness over the past decade deserves credit and should be celebrated .
But police knew the intelligence section was haemorrhaging staff and had been panned in internal reviews - and even now has major problems, according to documents released under the Official Information Act (OIA).
Police had no dedicated team to scan Internet before mosque attacks Phil Pennington
It took seven months for police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks - but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.
An internal report released under the Official Information Act (OIA) said this was despite the team already proving its worth many times over in countering violent extremists.
The unit still does not have dedicated funding, despite a warning last July it risked being turned off .
This is revealed in 170 pages of OIA documents charting police intelligence shortcomings over the last decade, from pre-2011 extending through to mid-2020, and their attempts to overhaul the national system since 2018.