There have been “nascent attempts” to combine online and offline approaches of foreign interference in Singapore, Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said on Wednesday (Sep 25).

One example, he said, was when Singapore political activists like Kirsten Han and Thum Ping Tjin met Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad in August last year and urged him to bring democracy to Singapore and other countries.

However, Mr Shanmugam said foreign interference has adapted to modern technology, stressing that the Internet has made hostile information campaigns cheap, easy and effective, and that states must be able to tackle them as issues of sovereignty and national security.

In the conference titled Foreign Interference Tactics and Countermeasures organised by the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), he reiterated that Singapore needed laws to deal with hostile information campaigns that might be orchestrated by foreign sources, stating that technology companies like Facebook cannot self-regulate due to conflicts of interest in their business model.