Intelligence and Security Committee review of NZSIS and GCSB
The public portion of today’s annual review of the GCSB and NZSIS was a stage managed public relations exercise in which
it appears that the new (acting) Director of the GCSB lied to the Select Committee. Certainly we won’t get any straight
answers from these people about the vast spying apparatus of the GCSB revealed this week by Nicky Hager.
Kitteridge and all those ‘bad people’
The Intelligence and Security Committee heard Directors Rebecca Kitteridge (NZSIS) and Una Jagose (GCSB) both giving
high praise for the work of their respective agencies – and banging on about ‘those people who want to hurt New
Zealand’s interests’. Kitteridge’s comments were contradictory of course because she said the NZSIS is protecting New
Zealanders from those bad people who wanted to harm ‘our interests’ – ‘not New Zealanders,’ she said, yet the NZSIS are
of course responsible for spying on a great many New Zealanders – most of whom, we would assume they define as those
same ‘bad people’.
It’s all legal, cross my heart!
As for Una Jagose new acting GCSB director, she is a lawyer through and through, parsing her words so that she couldn’t
be pinned down on the claims put forth by Hager. Jagose repeated over and over that all of the work was ‘authorised’ –
as she searched through the new GCSB Act to back up her claims. But in the end she claimed that there was no mass
collection and that there was some control that New Zealand exercised over access to the material by other Five Eyes
partners. By ‘accountability’ or ‘auditable’ actions we can only presume she means that analysts at any of the Five Eyes
agencies have to tick a box on their screen to say ‘yes’ it is legal for them to do what they are doing as they search
the massive NSA XKeyscore or Prism databases. This is precisely the surveillance that NZ opponents of the new Act said
was going on all along, and the government vehemently denied it engaged in this activity.
It’s worth remembering at this point that nothing in the material released by Edward Snowden/Nicky Hager has been
inaccurate or untrue. So are we to believe the head of the agency or are we to believe the NSA documents which clear say
that New Zealand is conducting mass surveillance?
What scrutiny?
Instead of having her feet held to the fire, Jagose was let off easy. The Labour party utterly failed to use the
opportunity to ask the questions and demand the answers that we deserve to know. Andrew Little and David Shearer
swallowed the line that essentially anything revealed about the agencies compromised national security and gives those
bad guys a leg up.
So what are they doing?
As for Key, his primary motivation at the committee today was to get Jagose to say that the agency was doing less
surveillance now than seven years ago. This is a stunning revelation insofar as the budget of the GCSB has nearly
doubled in that time from $42 million in 2007 to $73 million. So it would seem that among other things the GCSB is doing
less with a lot more money. So much for the Nats tightening the belt down here in Wellington.
It’s nothing new, so why are we in the same place?
We have known since 1996 when Nicky Hager first published ‘Secret Power’ what the GCSB does. Everything he asserted then
has been borne out by events and documentation.
The GCSB is an integrated part of the US National Security Agency. It always has been. The GCSB provides full take
collection of data for the benefit of the NSA and other Five Eyes partners. Presumably, New Zealand can access the
material in the NSA databases.
The real questions that we should be discussing is whether the New Zealand government should be involved in this global
spying and surveillance apparatus. Instead, successive governments have been so interested in denying and obfuscating
the truth that we are limited in the ways we can have a community debate about whose interests this serves. Instead we
have a select group of people telling us that we need to trust them to do whatever they want to do all in the name of
‘New Zealand’s interests’ – meanwhile they continue to lie further about the extent of their activities even when asked
directly.
The ‘interests’ that the Five Eyes partnership serves is one that condones the use of torture, extraordinary rendition
and drone assassinations while surveilling every digital person on the planet. We have every right to know what they are
doing, and demand that it stop.
ends