Patrick Gower interviews The Intercept's Ryan Gallagher

Headlines:

Gallagher says it’s “very dubious” whether it’s lawful for GCSB to be sweeping up information on New Zealanders as it spies in the Pacific.

He says politicians “play the terrorism card” when “that’s not at all borne out in these documents, and what you in fact see is that they’re doing a lot of spying just for political reasons, to do political espionage, to gather economic intelligence”

Says it’s not about China, but New Zealand spying on our “area of responsibility” so Five Eyes has global coverage

Gallagher states New Zealand’s Pacific spying is a “dragnet operation”.

“You have to understand that what you’re actually doing here is sweeping up data across the region indiscriminately. They’re not going after particular individuals.”

Says it’s difficult to protect your privacy online now, but privacy is not dead

Patrick Gower: Good morning, Ryan.
Ryan Gallagher: Good morning. Thanks for having me on.
Yes. Thank you for coming. I want to start with the most crucial question in all of this spying on our friends. I want to look at the legality of it, because it is illegal for the GCSB to spy on New Zealanders. To your mind, if it is effectively vacuuming up the information of New Zealanders in the Pacific on holiday for work, whatever, are the GCSB breaking the law by doing that, Ryan?
Well, I mean, I’m not a lawyer, but certainly people that we’ve spoken to— And I know that some prominent politicians in New Zealand are right now questioning, you know, whether this is illegal, and certainly we know that this kind of capability is going to be, by definition, sweeping in information on New Zealanders. So, you know, I would think this certainly is very dubious at the very least whether this is actually lawful or not.
Yeah, so for someone who is on holiday in the Pacific and may have been using their phone or whatever up there, they could well have been spied on, to your mind, having looked at these documents?
Well, absolutely, yeah. I think that that’s quite clear from the— You have to understand that what you’re actually doing here is sweeping up data across the region indiscriminately. They’re not going after particular individuals. It’s grabbing what they can. And so when you do that, by extension you are going to automatically be sweeping in information on anyone, and that includes New Zealanders. And we’ve also heard from, you know, Edward Snowden himself on this issue, who said that while he was actually at the US National Security Agency, he saw data on New Zealand citizens in these mass surveillance systems, getting swept up from bases in New Zealand. So that’s what we’ve been trying to shine a light on this week.
So there may be some legal issues, but is there a moral issue here as well, to your mind, in terms of this mass surveillance up there?
Well, yeah. I mean, I think, again, this is one of the core issues at stake here, and we’ve seen going back, you know, some 18 months with the Snowden revelations that lots of countries round the world, citizens are very up in arms about what’s being done for the moral reasons that they believe it has gone too far. Again, what we’re not talking about is just individual surveillance of bad people, of politicians or even just, you know, ordinary political espionage. This is a kind of bulk surveillance of ordinary citizens, and clearly that does raise a lot of moral and ethical issues that people are not too happy about.
So, when you’re online, is everything available to governments now? Is privacy dead online, Ryan?
I don’t think privacy’s dead. I mean… I think that’s a bad way to think about it. Certainly, online it’s very difficult to preserve one’s privacy when these mass surveillance programmes are going on, as we’ve seen. But there are ways that people can protect their privacy. You can use encryption and methods to protect your emails and phone calls. So it isn’t something that we just have to accept – you know, that privacy’s dead. It’s far from it. But certainly it’s difficult to protect your privacy in this environment, and that’s why I think it’s important that these revelations come out, so people can see what the government’s doing in the first place and then can respond to that, you know, whether it’s by using encryption or by encouraging reforms to change what’s happening. So I wouldn’t say privacy’s dead.
Ok. I want to look at the reasons for this spying on our friends. I want to look at the reasons for New Zealand spying on the Pacific. And one thing we do know is that the United States is very worried about the growing power and influence of China in the Pacific. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it? It’s about New Zealand spying, in some senses, on what China is doing up in the Pacific, Ryan?
Well, actually, I think that’s kind of misunderstanding what’s happening here. This isn’t just about China at all, and if it were just about that, it probably wouldn’t be as controversial a topic. What’s going on here is, you know, the agency, the GCSB, has been designated what they call an ‘area of responsibility’ within the secret Five Eyes surveillance alliance, which includes New Zealand as well as Canada and Australia, the US. And, you know, the point is that what they’re doing in this alliance is they’ve been designated an area to spy on across that region – not just China; it’s across the region. And this is part of, you know— The aim being to maintain coverage globally in terms of surveillance.
Yeah, sure. So you don’t think there’s an issue there with New Zealand essentially siding with America and keeping an eye on China? You don’t think that is the reason for us completely upping the ante and sucking up all that information out of the Pacific?
Pardon? Sorry. You just broke off there.
Yeah, I was just asking, do you think that’s—? You don’t think the influence of China is the reason for New Zealand doing this up in the Pacific?
Well, I can’t speak to what the motivations of what the agency is for doing what it’s doing. I mean, what I can see from the documents that we’ve reported on is that they are doing a dragnet operation across the region, and the aim of that is about maintaining this global surveillance capability to be included in this Five Eyes club.
And, Ryan, looking at that dragnet, what are the reasons for that? Is it just security or are there other reasons for it? For instance, is it for commercial reasons? Is it for economic reasons? Is it for diplomatic reasons? Is it for more than security?
Well, it’s definitely for more than security. I mean, the government often likes to come out when these stories are revealed, and they, you know, play the terrorism card and say that it’s all about some kind of apocalyptic threat that’s on the horizon. But actually, you know, that’s not at all borne out in these documents, and what you in fact see is that they’re doing a lot of spying just for political reasons, to do political espionage, to gather economic intelligence on what other countries are doing. But again, also coming back to— It’s about this Five Eyes alliance, and it’s about maintaining a capability that is global in scope, to be able to spy on any country at any time, you know, to maintain a sort of— I suppose it’s a kind of power stranglehold on world affairs, you know, to be able to maintain that capability.
In previous Snowden leaks, we’ve seen evidence that the United States has spied on leaders of other countries. Will we see that in these coming documents that you have seen? Has New Zealand been involved in direct spying on other leaders?
Well, you know, I’m not going to be revealing what we’re going to report, but we have a lot of great stories in the pipeline, and, you know, we’re going to be bringing those out in the coming days with the New Zealand Herald and also with the Sunday Star Times. I mean, but I’m not going to talk about what we are going to report. We’re still working on a lot of stuff. We’re still finalising the details. We’re still looking through a lot of documents. And you know what, I think the people are going to be surprised by some of the stuff we still have coming.
Thank you very much, Ryan.
Transcript provided by Able. www.able.co.nz

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