New Zealand military collected data on phone calls of McClatchy contributor
New Zealand’s defense minister said Monday that an investigation is underway into a report that U.S. intelligence agencies helped his nation’s military track the mobile telephone calls of a freelance journalist while he worked for McClatchy Newspapers in Afghanistan. - New Zealand Defense Minister Jonathan Coleman said he’d seen “no evidence to support these claims at this point. However, the Defense Force is carrying out extensive record checks to see if there is any evidence that his occurred.” Coleman issued the statement in response to a report published in the Sunday Star Times of Auckland that said that the New Zealand military asked “U.S. spy agencies” to help them collect the “metadata” of cellular calls made by Jon Stephenson, a New Zealand freelance journalist who was based in Afghanistan. The data collection occurred in the latter half of last year while Stephenson was under contract in Kabul for McClatchy and was aimed at identifying Stephenson’s contacts, the report said, citing unidentified sources.