Oversight? Yeah, right! Today’s Intelligence & Security Cmte

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 that the government vehemently denied it was engaged in.

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 clearly 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 question 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.

Valerie Morse is a Wellington based activist.

ENDS

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