Bitcoin Investor Peter Thiel Has “Secret New Zealand Spy Links”: NZ Herald

Trump advisor and Bitcoin investor Peter Thiel has “secret spy links” to the New Zealand government, a new expose suggests.

An investigation by local newspaper the New Zealand Herald reveals that the country’s government had contracts with Thiel’s Palantir Technologies, “controversial in the United States over its long links with National Security Agency surveillance operations.”

According to the Herald, the collaboration between Palantir and the New Zealand Defence Force, the Security Intelligence Service and the Government Communications and Security Bureau runs back “to at least 2012.”

Kennedy Graham, Green Party spokesman on intelligence and security matters, described the implications of the findings as “potentially huge” and called for a delay to New Zealand’s Intelligence and Security Bill, currently in its final stages of parliamentary ratification.

Requests for further details under the Official Information Act went unanswered, with reproduced responses “neither confirming nor denying” any of the claims put forward by the Herald.

Thiel, who has become President Donald Trump’s de facto technology guru, meanwhile, told a Houston conference this week he believes “the tide is going out” on globalization “in a pretty big way.”

Movement of goods, people and information were all facing “headwinds,” he said.