John Minto’s address to the TICS Bill (Telecommunications Interception Capability and Security) public meeting in Wellington on 23 September 2013. Both the GCSB and TICS Bills have since become Acts. Ed.

There’s been a lot said about the GCSB Bill and now the TICS Bill – the legal baseball bat the GCSB will wield against telecommunications companies to enforce compliance with spying on New Zealanders. The debate so far has centred on the expanded powers of the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) to spy on New Zealanders. Like a lot of people I felt like a proper idiot because I didn’t think they spied on us – the legislation was clear that they couldn’t and I believed them when they said they only gathered foreign intelligence. But the conspiracy theorists were right – they were spying on us all along. What idiots we were to believe their lies.

Waihopai Spy Base

What I want to do here is bring the debate back to the most important role of the GCSB which is as part of the global “Five Eyes” network – the nickname for the UKUSA Agreement signed after the Second World War, where the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada agreed to cooperate in a global intelligence gathering network. As a result the Tangimoana spy base near Palmerston North was established in the early 1980s and then Waihopai base near Blenheim was built in the late 1980s to conduct this surveillance for the network – a network controlled by the US National Security Agency (NSA – the US equivalent of the GCSB – much bigger than the US Central Intelligence Agency [CIA]), which is the wholly dominant partner in the alliance.

Waihopai was established under the 1984-90 Labour government and it’s very interesting to read Dave Lange’s foreword to Nicky Hager’s 1996 book “Secret Power” where the former Prime Minister and Minister of Intelligence and Security, who approved the $50 million for Waihopai, said he had no clear idea what the base did until he read Nicky Hager’s book a decade later. What is obvious is that our spies see their first allegiance to the US rather than to the democratically elected Government of New Zealand.

Just one other example tells us all we need to know about the GCSB. Back in early 2003 when the US was trying to get United Nations Security Council support for a resolution endorsing an invasion of Iraq, the NSA sent an e-mail to its partners in the Five Eyes network. The e-mail was from Frank Koza, the NSA’s Deputy Chief of Staff (Regional Targets), and requested that the Five Eyes spy on members of the UN Security Council – in particular Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea – in an attempt to get leverage to pressure those countries to support a UN Security Council resolution to invade Iraq.

So while the Helen Clark government was refusing to support the invasion, the GCSB was working for the US to get support for an attack – all in the name of cooperating with our intelligence partners. We can be thankful for the whistle-blower Katharine Gun* who was the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ, one of the Five Eyes’ agencies) analyst who leaked that email in a brave attempt to avert war. We should congratulate her for doing so at huge personal risk just as we should celebrate other heroes such as Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning) and Edward Snowden – thank heaven for these courageous humanitarians. *See Bob Leonard’s review of “The Spy Who Tried To Stop A War: Katharine Gun And The Secret Plot To Sanction The Iraq Invasion”, by Marcia and Thomas Mitchell, in Peace Researcher 39, January 2010, http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/pr39-183b.htm. Ed.

So what’s changed with the GCSB’s role in spying on New Zealanders with the GCSB and the TICS Bills? The GCSB legislation extends the role of the GCSB to spy on New Zealanders – making legal what the agency was previously doing illegally. It also reaffirms the role of the GCSB to “cooperate with our foreign intelligence partners” and so what does this mean today? We already know they spy on the United Nations and European governments from a series of leaks and blunders (Brazil’s President cancelled a trip to US President Barack Obama in September 2013 because of revelations the US was spying on email communications from the Brazilian President’s office. And, since John gave this speech, there has been the huge scandal following the revelation that the NSA had routinely spied on the personal mobile phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She was one of 35 world leaders spied on by the NSA – but not on John Key, according to him. Apparently he doesn’t say anything that the Yanks consider worth listening to. Ed.).

GCSB Enables NSA To Spy On All Of Us

But what do they do now and what role does New Zealand play? Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing has lifted the lid and the spying is far more comprehensive and far more intrusive than most of us imagined. It involves the wholesale collection of data – not just metadata as our Prime Minister tried to say – and its storage for retrospective spying on everything we do or have done. And I say “we”, because it’s not just the US citizens but all of us here in New Zealand; who are also in the NSA’s sights.

In the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations US officials have been struggling to justify their mass surveillance programme. They say that if you want to find a needle in a haystack then you have to be able to search the whole haystack. The GCSB’s role is to provide the New Zealand and South Pacific part of the haystack for the National Security Agency to search. The GCSB requires a warrant to spy on New Zealanders – in theory at least – but the National Security Agency doesn’t and under the GCSB’s role to “cooperate with our foreign intelligence partners” the GCSB gives the NSA access to all our communications for them to search as part of their global surveillance.

Here is the crucial point - there is nothing in this legislation (GCSB or TICS Acts) which would prevent the wholesale spying on New Zealanders as revealed by Edward Snowden. If the Prime Minister is asked about this he will refuse to comment on how we cooperate with the US (e.g. he has refused to confirm or deny whether New Zealand is part of the global surveillance through Prism – the code name for the NSA’s global spying method, revealed by Snowden - but will say he can assure us the GCSB follows the law and if it wants to spy on New Zealanders it needs a warrant and has proper oversight of that process. In other words Key will sidestep the issue).

In ten years time when this mass surveillance of New Zealanders is exposed we will have a Prime Minister throw up his or her hands in horror and say how upset s/he is that this has been going on – and the law will be changed to allow mass surveillance by the NSA. This legislation is not about keeping us safe but rather it’s about keeping the flow of intelligence from Waihopai to the US so it can pursue its global military, political and commercial objectives more easily.

Why the surveillance anyway? The driver of terrorism in the world today is US foreign policy. Instead of facing this and developing an independent foreign policy New Zealand politicians engage in the most embarrassing toadying behaviour towards the US. Who is the most servile NZ politician when it comes to the US – John Key, Jonathan Coleman or Murray McCully? Feeling nauseous? Join the club. Experience tells us we can’t trust anything the GCSB says, so let’s not have them treat us like idiots again. We must roll back this legislation. On a brighter note – for a marvellous musical presentation about the Waihopai spy base I suggest you Google “Jeff Simmonds” and “Waihopai” for a great little Kiwi song which tells the truth about New Zealand’s involvement in US wars through Waihopai. And there is the annual January protest at Waihopai, run by the Christchurch-based Anti-Bases Campaign.