The spy agencies claim to be interested in greater transparency; if you want to see what sort of response you get from either the GCSB or SIS, send off one of these letters:
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Below are three articles about surveillance in this country
There was a quiet gathering in Wellington in November 2006. It was a highly confidential meeting of the world’s top spy chiefs. There was the head of the CIA, ASIO, the Australian SIS, the Canadian SIS, MI6 and more, and they were all here to celebrate the 50th anniversary of NZ’s SIS.
It would have been good to listen in, to hear the self-congratulatory heroic deeds of our SIS – many of us grew up with the tales about the SIS spying on Bill Sutch in the 1970s. A lot was made of the list of 20 ‘subversives’ they provided to Rob Muldoon in 1981 and the SIS spy’s briefcase found in the same year, it contained a sandwich, a Listener article and notes. It was also said to contain some R18 magazines, although this has always been denied. In 1986 there was the media hype when a MoE worker was approached by the SIS to spy on people in her workplace, her co-worker was one of the people imprisoned for throwing eggs at Queen Elizabeth II. Aziz Choudry received an apology from the Crown and got an out-of-court settlement after two SIS agents broke into his home in 1996. Then there was Ahmed Zaoui, labelled a security risk by the SIS in 2002. In 2004 a SIS agent quit because he believed the SIS was wrong in spying on different Maori organisations and people.
Over the last few years there have been the tales of the SIS spying on children. Maire Leadbetter was followed as a ten year-old girl. There are also notes on Keith Locke’s file dating back to when he was a young teenager. Maire and Keith’s mother also has a detailed file, it includes accounts such as following her as she bought fish and chips.
Many people have been shocked at the level of spying that has recently become public, spying not just by the SIS but also by the police and private security organisations. Recent cases include the uncovering of paid informants to spy on Happy Valley activists, and the police paying Rob Gilchrist for more than a decade to spy on a variety of groups.
What we have to remember however, is that surveillance is not new. What is new, and always will be, is the ways and means that they do it. If they could have had a tracking device back in the 1950s, they would have used one as they followed Elsie Locke around New Zealand.
What changes is also the ‘enemy.’ For years, it was the fear of the ‘Reds,’ communists were the baddies. Trade unionists, socialists, Maori activists, unemployed activists and anti-nuclear protestors were the ones to be watched. Now, terrorists, environmentalists and anarchists have been added to the list. But even ‘terrorist’ is not a new label in this country. It has been part of the police and State vocabulary for a long time.
In 1973 US agents came to Wellington to train NZ police in surveillance of terrorists and criminals. A few years later one of the first official undercover cops was employed. In 2007 he published his auto-biography (Adrenalin Rush, by Andy Bell), it makes interesting reading. Bell’s second ever job as an undercover cop was to infiltrate the Wellington Resistance Bookshop and HART. He succeeded in sleeping his way into a position of power within the Wellington activist community.
In 1973 US agents came to Wellington to train NZ police in surveillance of terrorists and criminals. A few years later one of the first official undercover cops was employed. In 2007 he published his auto-biography (Adrenalin Rush, by Andy Bell), it makes interesting reading. Bell’s second ever job as an undercover cop was to infiltrate the Wellington Resistance Bookshop and HART. He succeeded in sleeping his way into a position of power within the Wellington activist community.
Another police officer’s autobiography (Cover-ups and Cop-outs, by Tom Lewis, 1998) talks about one role of the CIS was to ‘work in close liaison with the SIS.’ Before royal tours the CIS were ‘to update dossiers on radicals, anti-monarchists and extremists.’ Lewis goes onto say, ‘the compiling of dossiers on people became ridiculous….they were kept on people because they belonged to groups or organisations not because of anything they had done. It became difficult to distinguish between dissenters and criminals….’. In the autobiography, Lewis also admits that police themselves pretended to be 'radicals' and made bogus threats in order to get more funding to continue surveillance.
Put into historic context, the October 15th 2007 raids, Rob Gilchrist, private spies and the SIS files are not new and extraordinary. They are part of an on-going campaign of spying, harassment and intimidation by the State of people who threaten the status quo. They highlight the basic truth that maintaining social order and keeping the peace is a way the State keeps the people down.
Put into historic context, the October 15th 2007 raids, Rob Gilchrist, private spies and the SIS files are not new and extraordinary. They are part of an on-going campaign of spying, harassment and intimidation by the State of people who threaten the status quo. They highlight the basic truth that maintaining social order and keeping the peace is a way the State keeps the people down.
We cannot get scared by surveillance – we must assume that it is there, as it has always been. We must continue to learn to work around it and even with it.
We have to ensure that the next time there is a quiet gathering of the world’s chief spies in this country, they are outed and publicly humiliated as the fools that they are. They are the real enemy of the people, not the activists, protestors and community organisations and groups that they spy on!
The SIS and police are agents of social control that must be removed.
by Annemarie Thorby, 2009
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by Annemarie Thorby, 2009
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A short history of
the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS)
the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS)
The Security Intelligence Service is New Zealand's internal intelligence agency, which was set up to spy on New Zealanders and foreign people and organisations within New Zealand who are regarded as a threat to the country's security. 'Security' has a very specific meaning for the SIS: it is defined in the SIS legislation as covering espionage, sabotage, terrorism and 'subversion' (planning to overthrow the state by force) plus two poorly defined recent extensions covering threats to New Zealand's 'international and economic well being'. The SIS also vets people in or applying for senior government jobs, gives security advice to government departments and, in recent years, it has begun some overseas intelligence collection operations, about which very little is yet known.
The SIS is one of New Zealand's main two intelligence agencies. It currently has about 200 staff while the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which is designed primarily to spy on other countries, is about twice that size.
The SIS history divides into three eras: Cold War (1956-1990), post-Cold War (1990-2001) and War on Terror (2001 to the present). First the Cold War.
The SIS was established in 1956, the midst of the early Cold War, at the instigation and with the assistance of the British intelligence services. In 1955-56 the British also encouraged and helped New Zealand set up the Special Air Service (SAS) and the NZ Combined Signals Organisation (predecessor of the GCSB). The three organisations were designed for helping fight on the US/UK side in the Cold War: the SIS monitoring Soviet and other communist activity in New Zealand; the GCSB predecessor helping long-distance radio interception of Soviet and other communist activity around the world; and the SAS fighting alongside British and allied special forces against 'communist' movements in South East Asia.
Based in Wellington, the SIS dedicated a lot of its resources through the Cold War to monitoring the embassies and any other activities of communist countries in New Zealand. In practice this meant routinely tailing cars and bugging the communications of diplomats and any delegations visiting New Zealand from these countries. There were squads of surveillance staff whose main work was waiting for cars to leave the Soviet or Chinese embassy and following them around the city. I have talked to people who did this job. There were also observation houses watching the Soviet and Chinese embassies (a large two-storey house across Messines Road from the Soviet embassy and a two-storey house a few houses down Glenmore Street from the Chinese embassy, that can be identified because the upper window juts out from the front of the house giving a view along to the embassy). There was also a fake record company in an old brick building at the bottom of the Ngaio Gorge in the 1960s housing the SIS's telephone tapping equipment. A nearby building in Kaiwharawhara Road contained the monitoring operations and surveillance teams in the 1990s.
The SIS's other main target was local communist and socialist groups, as part of world-wide monitoring of these groups by their US and British allies. This spying was done under the security category of 'subversion'. Although, of course, New Zealand has no history of people trying to overthrow the government by force, but subversion was used as the pretext for spying on all sorts of progressives groups: unions, students, iwi, the nuclear free and environment movements and so on. The SIS has released some of the personal files it kept on progressive people during this era and they reveal an astonishing scale of intrusive and completely unnecessary surveillance. These released files also show that the was not equally interested in all progressive or left-wing people. They appear to have monitored this wide range of organisations primarily to find out about anyone from communist and socialist groups, their allies' preoccupation. It was all very political, with no interest shown in local groups with close ties or funding from the US government but an obsessive interest in any links to Eastern Europe or China.
In many ways this was just silly and irrelevant to New Zealand. But there was harm caused to the individuals and groups targeted. Some people's careers were unfairly and seriously harmed; and many people had fear about their groups being infiltrated and monitored (fears which were often correct). It had a negative effect on all sorts of political activity. One very large SIS case was that against the well-known New Zealander Bill Sutch: senior public servant, author, public intellectual. At 8.40pm on 26 September 1974 he was arrested near the top of Aro Street in Wellington (the remains of a concrete public toilet mark on the spot, near the corner of Holloway Road). The SIS accused him of passing information to a Soviet embassy officer. It appears that Sutch had met with a Soviet embassy person. But he was very far from being a traitor. He was one of the great New Zealanders of his time, but of intense interest to the SIS because of his left-wing beliefs. There was a five-day trial, where he was acquitted, but the stress was so great that he had died within a year of the arrest.
Later, in 1981, the SIS prepared a list of 20 supposed subversives involved in the 1981 Springbok Tour protest organisation, which was released to the press by Prime Minister Robert Muldoon. The SIS was later successfully sued for publicising incorrect information in the dossier.
It is important to note that a lot of the SIS monitoring of progressive groups and people stopped at the end of the Cold War. Today a lot of people still fear they might be monitored by the SIS but, as far as I know, relatively little of the subversion monitoring continues. This is unnecessary fear, which needlessly chills political activity, so it is worth people knowing that it is mostly in the past (although police intelligence monitoring of political groups in New Zealand continues). The SIS should have removed the 'subversion' category from the SIS Act at the end of the Cold War but it did not. The potential for unwarranted monitoring and abuse of the agency's powers continues.
The 1990s post-Cold War era was a period of crisis for the SIS. The agency floundered, its main long-term anti-communist rationale gone, and it really should have been closed at that time. It used secrecy to protect itself from change as it followed the allied agencies in trying to find new roles to justify its existence. This is, for example, the period when SIS officials persuaded the then National Government to broaden the definition of 'security' to include the woolly concept of threats to New Zealand's international and economic well being. Shortly after this definition was put into legislation in 1996, another high-profile SIS case hit the news when free trade opponent Aziz Chaudrey had his Christchurch house broken into by SIS officers. A friend of Aziz's caught them in the act and followed the officers back to their 4WD car, which was registered to an SIS front company called Amalgamated Office Services and based on the first floor of an office building in Waring Taylor Street in central Wellington. The SIS was sued over the break in and paid Aziz a large but undisclosed sum, more than enough to pay off his mortgage. In 1999 its functions were extended to giving secret advice in immigration cases, a new power that has lead to innocent people being harmed.
The SIS's make-work years ended on September 11, 2001. Like secret services around the world, the Service recreated itself as an anti-terrorism agency and received large increases in budget and staff, plus the expansion of its role to overseas operations. There was actually no significant change to the terrorist threat level in New Zealand (it was still very low), but the SIS had a new lease on life. As in previous eras, there were soon casualties. The activities of agencies such as the SIS always impact most on small subsets of society, not everyone equally. After the September 11 attacks it was particularly Muslim people, anyone from Middle Eastern/Arabic countries and other people from repressive countries where 'terrorist' is an easy attack on political opponents. The SIS got extra staff in Auckland who started alarming Muslim people by turning up at their homes (in the countries many come from, a visit from the security forces is very serious trouble.)
The greatest known casualty was former Algerian MP Ahmed Zaoui who was accused of being a terrorist when he sought asylum in New Zealand and who was belligerently hounded by the SIS through years of legal battles before he was grudgingly admitted not to be a threat. He has lived peacefully in New Zealand since. There is undoubtedly work the SIS does that, if the public knew about, it would support. But there is no evidence of a single dramatic case in recent decades where the SIS has deterred threats or defended New Zealand. Meanwhile the war-on-terror era has given the SIS greater powers and more resources, and more mistakes and abuses like the Zaoui case may well follow. The agency is still closely allied to the Anglo-American agencies that set it up and is still closely aligned with their priorities and biases.
public talk by Nicky Hager, 1 February 2011
http://www.nickyhager.info/a-short-history-of-the-new-zealand-security-intelligence-service-nzsis/public talk by Nicky Hager, 1 February 2011
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Surveillance By Default:
There's a lot of information on everyone out there
There's a lot of information on everyone out there
In 2012 a New Zealand police officer said that 'the police have a lot of information on everyone'. He said it matter-of-factly whilst giving evidence in a court-case.
A brief round of laughter rippled through the court in response to his statement, but the fact is he was not joking and he was not exaggerating. There is a lot of information about everyone held in various places – available to not only the police and other government agencies but also private companies.
It may be that private companies hold even more information than the police do. Every day as we go about our daily business, the majority of us unwittingly give out a lot of personal information. It seems like we have to give more personal information out about ourselves when buying a ticket through Ticketek for a football game, than what we used to have to give out to get a passport. And that is done unquestioningly.
We can even give information unwittingly. A person recently bought a Snapper card with an Eft-pos – no information was given in the transact, just one swipe of the card; one week later an email arrived offering the new Snapper card holder discounts. We leave traceable electronic footprints everywhere.
Many of us also share stories and personal information on Facebook that we would never swap with a stranger on a bus. People publish photos of their children, lovers and partners for all to see, giving personal details about family life and habits.
We joke about Google, Facebook and Twitter keeping tabs on us, but it runs much deeper than that. Surveillance is becoming increasingly overt and commonplace by default. The concept of privacy is disappearing.
But when we try to talk about it, it sounds like paranoia.
A brief round of laughter rippled through the court in response to his statement, but the fact is he was not joking and he was not exaggerating. There is a lot of information about everyone held in various places – available to not only the police and other government agencies but also private companies.
It may be that private companies hold even more information than the police do. Every day as we go about our daily business, the majority of us unwittingly give out a lot of personal information. It seems like we have to give more personal information out about ourselves when buying a ticket through Ticketek for a football game, than what we used to have to give out to get a passport. And that is done unquestioningly.
We can even give information unwittingly. A person recently bought a Snapper card with an Eft-pos – no information was given in the transact, just one swipe of the card; one week later an email arrived offering the new Snapper card holder discounts. We leave traceable electronic footprints everywhere.
Many of us also share stories and personal information on Facebook that we would never swap with a stranger on a bus. People publish photos of their children, lovers and partners for all to see, giving personal details about family life and habits.
We joke about Google, Facebook and Twitter keeping tabs on us, but it runs much deeper than that. Surveillance is becoming increasingly overt and commonplace by default. The concept of privacy is disappearing.
But when we try to talk about it, it sounds like paranoia.
State surveillance and other spies
To have our daily actions recorded and noted is nothing new. We are already aware that a significant amount of covert spying occurs by the police and other state security agencies.
In recent history, US agents came to Wellington in 1973 to train police in surveillance tactics of both 'criminals and terrorists'. In the mid-1970s New Zealand police officially began an undercover police-officer programme. One of the first officers, Andy Bell, published his autobiography in 2007 (Adrenalin Rush). In it he talks about one of his jobs being to infiltrate the Wellington Resistance Bookshop and HART. He formed relationships to get into a position of power within the Wellington activist community.
Another police officer, Tom Lewis, also talks about surveillance in his autobiography (Cover-ups and Cop-outs, 1998). In the 1970s and '80s, as a CIS officer (Criminal Intelligence Service), Lewis had to 'work in close liaison with the SIS.’ In preparation for royal tours the CIS had ‘to update dossiers on radicals, anti-monarchists and extremists.’ In the book, Lewis says that, ‘the compiling of dossiers on people became ridiculous…. they were kept on people because they belonged to groups or organisations not because of anything they had done. It became difficult to distinguish between dissenters and criminals….’. Lewis also admits that Dunedin CIS officers used to pretend to be 'radicals' and made bogus threats in order to get more funding to continue surveillance.
It was also in the 1980s that then Prime Minister Rob Muldoon released an SIS list of allegedly radical and subversive people involved in the 1981 Springbok Tour protest organisations. The SIS must have been doing some surveillance to name those people, even if they did have incorrect facts.
There has been other coverage over the years of SIS spying on groups and people, or asking others to spy on their behalf. But there was a lot of media coverage following the SIS's brief period of 'glasnost' in the mid-2000s. In 2006 Warren Tucker became the new director of the SIS and announced a more open policy. People were able to apply for their SIS files, and if they were no longer a 'security threat' or under active surveillance, their file was released.
What became public was the amount of spying and gathering of information the SIS appeared to do on anyone slightly involved with the 'left'. Some of the more notable files brought to light were that of Maire Leadbetter and her brother Keith Locke. The spying on both began before they were even teenagers – they were children of activists. Other more minor files included one on a woman who happened to buy a communist magazine twice.
The period of glasnost did not last long, and by 2009 more and more people were denied their files. The SIS seems to have sunken back into its closed-door policy.
Other than the spying done by the police and SIS, spying by private companies also received some media coverage in the late 2000s.
It was news in 2007 when it was confirmed that Solid Energy had employed a private security company to help them in their 'security'. Christchurch man, Ryan Paterson-Rouse, had been employed by Thompson and Clark to spy on the 'Save Happy Valley Coalition'. Another person employed by the same security company was law student Somali Young – her job was to report on various Wellington groups.
Other spying that was considered newsworthy, was the unmasking of Rob Gilchrist in 2008. He was employed by police for more than a decade to spy on both individuals and community groups. Among the groups he spied on were the Green Party, unions and student associations.
Rob Gilchrist was also mentioned during the trial of the so-called 'Urewera 4', the only four people who ultimately ended up in court as a result of police Operation 8. It was during that court case that the police officer said police here 'have a lot of information on everyone'.
Surveillance was an issue in the police raids of October 15th 2007.
During the trial it became clear how much private information police had collected on individuals by using data readily available to the police from bank accounts, cell phone accounts, 'Trade Me' records and computer logs.
Surveillance normalised
It was a reminder that eft-pos purchases, credit card swipes, cheques written, internet sites visited, emails sent and received, chats on the computer, comments written on the net, SMS texts sent and received, phone numbers dialled and received – all are recorded and can be accessible to security agencies.
But there is other private data readily available out there too. Shopping cards, such as Fly Buy, Foodtown and Farmers, retain information about people – where they shop, what they buy. Library cards also hold a lot of information about people.
Cameras placed inside and outside shops also video us. But for the most part, we are immune to the numerous CCTV cameras up and down the country that record our movements and other details, such as what we are wearing, with whom we are talking. Many people don't give a second thought to the use of automatic number plate recognition technology on the Northern Motorway, and there was not much of an outcry when it became known that they were also in use on the Auckland motorway system.
Surveillance is becoming normalised and acceptable. What once existed in only science-fiction such as 'Minority Report' or George Orwell's '1984' is now becoming a reality.
Even a billboard can be taking note of you. Electronic billboards can track people. Using facial recognition programmes to scan passer-bys for age, gender and ethnicity, this data is then used to make conclusions about shopping habits and the billboard can change adverts to reflect the 'needs' of the majority of people on the streets.
Westfield, New Zealand's largest shopping mall chain, announced on 14th March 2012, that they are investing $1.4billion in electronically tracking shoppers in their malls. In November 2012 there was an article in the Dominion Post about 'smart shop dummies' also being created to track customers in stores.
But people will not only be tracked by bill-boards. As RFID chips become increasingly common, billboards are being adapted to be able to scan for them. This means billboards reading all the smart devices you happen to have on your person. You walk past and your smart credit card, cell phone, passport, and anything else you have with an RFID chip, are all automatically scanned. All that information is retained in some computer file somewhere.
A US ski-field using RFID technology excitedly proclaimed in 2012, that from each individual they “have a treasure trove of addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, along with skier habits.”
Drones are also becoming more common. They were used in the 2012 London Olympics and have been trialled already by some English police stations. Within the next few decades they are meant to become common place. Drones will ostensibly be used for such benign things as finding lost trampers, crop and farm monitoring, and shipping and road surveillance. By 2015 the US want them to also be a normal part of life. Drones are already made in New Zealand.
In Europe Project Indect is steadily becoming more of a reality. Indect aims to 'comprehensively monitor urban areas' through integrated CCTV video surveillance, drones and monitoring of phones and computers. The idea is to have constant surveillance of public areas which means 'illegal' and potentially 'criminal' behaviour can be detected and stopped before it happens. Pre-emptive policing can occur and people be detained and questioned on the basis of data from a computer programme which labels their behaviour as suspicious.
Britain is introducing legislation to allow the British intelligence agencies, police and other security services to monitor in real-time all email and social media.
Surveillance is now embedded in our daily lives and we are becoming increasingly oblivious to it. Privacy is becoming an out-moded quaint relic of the past.
The police officer in the Urewera 4 Trial was only partially right – yes, the police do have a lot of information about a lot of people. But combined with the data held in private hands, there is enough information out there for police to construct whatever story they want to about us.
We do have something to worry about and we are not paranoid.
By Annemarie Thorby, 2 December 2012.
