Isn't that their job? It used to / 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.
This is specifically New Zealand and this is an article about what is their job.
Here it is revealed they are permitted (under warrent) to copy data from NZ citizens networks | home devices.
It also indicates they are not permitted to keep that copy "for later on" after it has been examined.
There are many facets to SigInt - not the least (and one of the earliest applications) is the simple recording and mapping of messages - not their contents, just the mere fact that a message was broadcast or sent from Location X at Time T.
Here, specifically, the discussion is about the intrusion into a network (home LAN, etc) to retrieve data rather than the mere recording of a transmission across a wire or through a public network.
> "Our legislation ... allows us to access information infrastructures, which is more than just interception," the Director-General of the Government Communications Security Bureau, Andrew Hampton, said.
> It "also allows us to retrieve digital information directly from where it is stored or processed".
The extensive use of quotation marks suggests the author (unattributed, huh), editor and presumably their audience is unfamiliar with the concepts.
The best line, like all news articles written to a standard style, is the last one:
"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."
> «The potential hazard of target discovery activity, from a civil liberties and privacy point of view, is intrusion into the lives of people who have done nothing to merit the attention of a national security agency», the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security said [... He] assure[d] the public that the exploitation operations were scrutinised [... But 93% of] policies were overdue for review, and in some cases, including data analytics, were "non-existent"
: it is about global assessment and details of appropriate management of investigation.
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.
They don't have a constitution like the USA (which is a paltry check on government power, but it's something). Any scrutiny they apply is bound to be "we investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong" levels of accountability.
Your role as a proper spy agent is to use, amongst other means, computer network exploitation to take digital information!