14 DAY TRIAL // Despite denials that the New Zealand government was allowing its intelligence agency to spy on the country’s citizens via a controversial law that was recently passed, there is evidence to the contrary.
In 2012 and 2013, the New Zealand spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), was busy working on implementing a mass metadata surveillance system the whole time.
The Intercept reports that documents provided by Edward Snowden and that are part of the NSA trove show that the government has been working in secret to exploit the aforementioned Internet surveillance law.
Following the NSA leaks from last year, there’s been a lot of discussions about New Zealand’s role in the whole mass surveillance efforts. The country’s government put together a new law at the time, allowing domestic spying, although officials denied that this was even a possibility and claimed that the purpose of the bill was to protect people’s safety.
Prime Minister John Key has said on numerous occasions that the law was designed to fix an ambiguous legal framework and it won’t be used as a spying tool on New Zealanders. Documents from the NSA, however, indicate the very opposite – mentioning that they are expecting metadata from the GCSB following the implementation of this new law.
Snowden points the finger at John Key
“The Prime Minister’s claim to the public, that ‘there is no and there never has been any mass surveillance’, is false. The GCSB, whose operations he is responsible for, is directly involved in the untargeted, bulk interception and algorithmic analysis of private communications sent via internet, satellite, radio, and phone networks,” said Edward Snowden.
In fact, he mentioned in a live event from New Zealand, called “The Moment of Truth” and which is still going on, that data on the country’s citizens had been coming in for a lot longer.
Snowden said that, while working for the NSA, he routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders through the X KEYSCORE program, a mass surveillance tool the NSA shared with the GCSB and other intelligence agencies members of the Five Eyes.
The whistleblower noted that analysts could easily check the box saying that they didn’t want data from New Zealand to show up, but it was only that – a simple option in the system. He says that it’s problematic when, through a piece of legislation, a country’s government basically unchecks that box for all the citizens it is supposed to represent.