This week saw the introduction of another surveillance term to the world: 'Operation Speargun'.
It is another of a growing list of
surveillance programmes and tools that have come to light over the
last year: Prism, Boundless Informant, XkeyScore, Tempora,
Shelltrumpet, Honeytrap, Egoistic Giraffe, Evil Olive, Blarney,
Stormview, Thin Thread, Muscular, Moonlightpath, Spinnernet, Trial Blazer,
Treasure Map...to name a few. Most of the names are as bad as the
Five-Eye powerpoint slides revealed by Edward Snowden since leaving
his job as a sub-contractor with the NSA.
Glenn Greenwald, the former lawyer
turned journalist who has been helping Snowden, came to NZ to release
the documents. Within hours of Greenwald's arrival Prime Minister
John Key was on the attack, describing Greenwald as 'a loser' and
'Dotcom's little henchman'.
Key also played the jingoist nationalist card and several times
pointed out that Greenwald was a foreigner and not with New Zealand's
interests at heart. He even went so far to say, “We are a good
country doing good things. This guy turns up ... he's not a passionate New Zealander.”
John Key has also once agan been
repeatedly reassuring us that the GCSB is not involved in mass
surveillance in NZ. He is keen for us to believe that the GCSB, in
fact all the Five-Eye members, always act legally and never spy on
their own citizens – they only spy on 'threats'.
Yet one only has to look at the swathe
of material revealed by Snowden to know that the Five-Eyes are a
force unto themselves. The five original key agencies that make up
the Five-Eyes: the United States NSA, the British GCHQ, the Canadian
CSEC, the Australian DSD and the NZ GCSB, have been and are involved
in mass surveillance and data collection of people worldwide,
including in their own countries.
They are not government run
organisations that only focus on 'signals intelligence'. The
Five-Eyes are intelligence agencies involved in mass data collection
and surveillance. They are also agencies involved in pro-active spying, entrapment schemes and smear tactics.
'The Moment of Truth' – Operation
Speargun
On Monday 15th September
Greenwald and Snowden revealed Operation Speargun – a Five-Eye
programme to be operated in NZ. A surveillance programme that the
GCSB was working on, and had laid the foundations for, prior to the
changes to the GCSB Act going through last year.
Operation Speargun was a programme to
hack into the Southern Cross cable and install covert cable access
equipment capable of monitoring all communications to and from NZ.
The programme was ready to go, the first phase had occurred.
According to NSA documents, it was only waiting for the new GCSB Act
for it to be activated. (For some reason the government had decided
to follow the law. Possibly the scandal over the illegal surveillance
of the 80 plus New Zealanders that came to light in the Kitteridge Report meant the government wanted to play safe.)
