At
the annual NZIIP conference on Wednesday 15th
July, the Privacy Commissioner said “... we've really only in the
last 40 years had public scrutiny of things where things go really
wrong, so the average view that people in the public have is of the
examples such as Ahmed Zaoui, Aziz Choudry, such as Kim Dotcom, where
the agencies have been seen to have been in breach of the law.”
It
was good to hear that John
Edwards acknowledged those three cases as examples of 'where things
really go wrong' in New Zealand's security intelligence. But he needs
to do his homework and read some history. The three cases listed may have 'gone really wrong' but there are others.
New
Zealand has a long history of things going wrong and laws been
breached.
Even the very beginnings of official state intelligence was mired in
controversy.
The
first official intelligence agency was the Security Intelligence
Bureau, it kicked off in 1941 with the arrival of Major Folkes, a
British MI-5 agent who only three years earlier had been working in
real estate.
Folkes was duped by a con-man named
Sidney Ross. On release
from
Waikeria prison, Ross travelled directly to Wellington and spun tales
of plotters and saboteurs in Rotorua planning to overthrow the
government and kill the prime minister. For three months he was
believed before finally been uncovered; he
was never charged in relation to the deception and Folkes
was fired and sent back to Britain. The tale only came to light when
Ross appeared in court at a later date on an unrelated charge of
safe-breaking. Ross told the judge the story and it became public.
Peter
Fraser, PM at the time, when questioned in the House about the
débâcle came out with the classic line “It is not advisable in
the public interest to discuss publicly the question of the means
adopted to ensure public security.” A statement very similar to
that trotted out by modern PMs.
After
Folkes left Wellington, the SIB was effectively taken over by the
police but
was reconstructed in the late 1940s after visits again by the MI-5
and then
finally in 1956
the SIS was
established. In 1969 the first NZSIS Act was passed.
But
even when the SIS became legal there continued to be 'things that
really go wrong'. The first director, Brigadier Gilbert, had to pay
damages to an Auckland barrister for identifying him as a communist
in a 1962 speech entitled 'Communist Cancer in our Society'. The barrister
was not a communist but an anti-nuclear activist and member of CND.
