New Zealand Plays “Follow the Leader” on spylaws

New Zealanders often brag that their country is a world leader. They claim it was first to create a welfare state and give suffrage to women. The 1984-1990 Labour Government declared the country nuclear-free, while, according to the Economist, it simultaneously set about "out-Thatchering Mrs Thatcher" by applying textbook neoliberal economic theory on an unsuspecting New Zealand public to a degree never seen in any other OECD country. Now, some rosy-spectacled commentators like The Guardian's Jonathan Freedland claim that Helen Clark's Labour Party-led government, elected in 1999, is leading the world away from the blind faith in the private sector and market dogma that has characterised so many social democratic governments worldwide.

Whatever the truth of such claims, when it comes to state surveillance and its security and intelligence legislation, this wannabe "world leader" is as meek as a lamb, doing the bidding of its Big Brothers in the USA, the UK, Australia and Canada.

A New Zealand Parliamentary committee is considering submissions on the first part of legislative changes necessary to give New Zealand Police and intelligence agencies new powers to hack computers, and intercept emails, faxes and pager messages. State surveillance agencies are specifically exempted from the amendment's provisions, sold to the public as a benign anti-computer hacking/electronic crime measure.

For all the local intelligence community's obsession with monitoring "foreign-influenced" activities, a "foreign hand" lurks behind the latest changes. They are largely motivated by US pressure to standardise and synchronise global methods and capabilities for intercepting electronic communications to assist its own intelligence operations.

Together with proposed amendments to the Telecommunications Act, requiring internet service providers and telephone companies to install equipment and software so that their systems can be intercepted, the proposed law change closely resembles Britain's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. This compels all Internet service providers operating in Britain to be connected to a new MI5 email interception centre, and to hand over encryption keys so that all messages can be read. A dedicated centre may not be built in New Zealand, but the effect will be the same.

The government is denying links between the new law and FBI plans to make other countries adopt its requirements for surveillance of electronic communications. But Assistant Police Commissioner Paul Fitzharris admits that "proposed legislative changes would bring New Zealand into conformity with most, if not all, of the International User Requirements" - which are virtually identical to those promoted by the FBI since 1992. Local police say that they know of no instances where a crime had been plotted using email, and that criminals would be cautious about what they said online.

New Zealand intelligence agencies have been subject to unwelcome attention recently. In 1996 Wellington activist/researcher Nicky Hager released his internationally-acclaimed book "Secret Power". This exposed New Zealand's role in an integrated international electronic and signals intelligence network, governed by the secret UKUSA intelligence agreement between the USA, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It highlighted the Echelon project, involving satellite interception spybases in these five countries automatically and continuously searching for key words in billions of messages. New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) sends raw material that it collects directly to the NSA.

Since 1988, protest camps and demonstrations near the GCSB's Defence Satellite Communications Unit, the Waihopai spybase in the sparsely-populated South Island, have demanded its closure, and the GCSB's abolition. Waihopai's function includes spying on the international communications of South Pacific nations.

New Zealand has always obediently played a junior role in the Western alliance, cooperating with the USA, Canada, Australia and the UK. In 1956, the NZ Security Intelligence Service (SIS) was established after pressure from Britain, its organisation strongly influenced by MI5.

During the Cold War, like their western counterparts, New Zealand intelligence and security agencies served to protect an ideology which was anti-communist, anti-Soviet, and anti-Third World liberation. The SIS conducted investigations of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the anti-apartheid movement which grew throughout the 1970s, peaking with mass mobilisations throughout the country during the 1981 South African rugby team's New Zealand tour. It spied on trade unionists, students, academics, diplomats, political refugees, and others.

The New Zealand Police Criminal Intelligence Service (CIS) grants itself a broad mandate to collect information on people on the basis of their political beliefs, and views formed by police intelligence officers that their activities may potentially involve a breach of the criminal law. Their work in this area has much in common with political elements in police forces elsewhere which routinely monitor, harass and criminalise political organisers and activities. The CIS and the SIS liaise closely.

Political and technical information about "subversion" and "counter-subversion" was routinely shared among western security and intelligence agencies during the Cold War and no doubt continues. After the Cold War these agencies have struggled to justify their continued existence and budgets by constructing other threats to "security".

Targets clearly include opponents of globalisation and neo-liberal economic policies, Maori (Indigenous Peoples) advocating the right to self-determination, and some migrant communities. One newspaper editorial commented: "The state religion changes from anti-communism to free trade, but the secret priesthood can still carry on persecuting unbelievers"

In July 1996 two SIS officers were interrupted breaking into my house while I was organising a conference opposed to corporate globalisation, two days before an APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) Trade Ministers Meeting began in Christchurch. The break-in occurred two weeks after a law change assuring us that the SIS would not institute surveillance of anyone engaged in lawful advocacy, protest or dissent. The same amendment contained a controversial redefinition of security. It added the "making of a contribution to New Zealand's international well-being or economic well-being" to an existing "protection of New Zealand from acts of espionage, sabotage, terrorism, and subversion, whether or not they are directed from or intended to be committed within New Zealand".

Security agencies have long interpreted "subversion" to justify spying on movements, organisations and individuals promoting social, political and economic ideas perceived to challenge dominant social or economic interests. But critics of the 1996 amendment argued that the redefinition of "security" gave the SIS a carte blanche to spy on opponents of unregulated foreign investment and free trade, and on Maori who challenged the policies, practices and authority of the New Zealand government at home and in international forums like the UN. Auckland University law professor Jane Kelsey wrote that "changes to the definition of "security" seem designed to secure a further closure of debate....The very essence of a democratic society is that it secures the best possible outcome for its people through freedom of speech and a genuine contest of ideas. It appears that the ...government feels unable to sustain the status quo in the face of free and open debate, and is attempting to intimidate and monitor those who threaten to get in its way."

I subsequently brought a landmark civil case against the Government, charging the SIS with trespass and unreasonable search in breach of the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, maintaining that the SIS had no legal right of entry into private property. In December 1998 the Court of Appeal found in my favour, ruling the break-in illegal. In reply, the then National Party Government - aided by the Labour opposition, rushed through legislation expanding the powers of the SIS by allowing them to enter private property, and retrospectively approved all other SIS break-ins between 1977 and 1999.

In February 1999, the SIS paid for Dame Stella Rimington, former head of Britain's MI5 to fly to Wellington as an expert witness to support the proposed law change giving the SIS powers of entry. She said that without the power to enter property to install listening devices, the SIS could not play a full part in the international intelligence community. Later that month, FBI director Judge Louis Freeh visited Wellington to discuss APEC security arrangements with the SIS, Police and the Prime Minister.

Despite public opposition, the law was passed before New Zealand's biggest ever security operation for September 1999's APEC Summit. The definition of "security" was meaninglessly tweaked in a cosmetic exercise to dispel concerns about its breadth.

Then, last May, two dozen trade unions, community organisations, academics, religious and political leaders called for a parliamentary inquiry into the Police CIS's role in targeting political organisations and activists.

This followed a High Court case brought by university lecturer David Small against the Police, following police searches - purportedly for "bomb-making equipment" of our respective homes within days of his discovering the botched SIS break-in. In evidence, CIS officers admitted photographing participants at a fund-raising quiz night and peaceful demonstrations, watching my home and workplace, and monitoring attendance at meetings on globalisation and other social justice concerns, over a period of many years. They had actively assisted the SIS in covering up their botched break-in. One CIS officer claimed that Dr Small had first come to his attention in the 1980s, through writing articles about Pacific independence issues - hardly evidence of potential criminality.

Maori nationalists have clearly been under surveillance. In 1997 the houses of two Maori lawyers advocating indigenous sovereignty were broken into at exactly the same time in different cities. The only material disturbed in both instances were papers about constitutional change in New Zealand already in the public domain. In 1999, the Wellington Maori Legal Service revealed that an independent security firm had swept its offices and found that phonecalls were being intercepted externally. Maori lawyer and activist Annette Sykes also discovered that her phones were being tapped and a location-tracing device placed on her car. The Police and SIS stayed silent. Maori Legal Service solicitor Taki Anaru said he was sure that the SIS was bugging several Maori nationalists "because the definition of national security is so broad these days".

New Zealand's intelligence and security agencies remain tightlipped about their current targets and their interest in electronic communications between activists. But a August 2000 Canadian Security Intelligence Service report, "Anti-Globalization - A Spreading Phenomenon" advocated "careful monitoring" of Internet communications between individuals and groups opposed to globalisation "to determine the intentions and goals of demonstrators, and to forestall unexpected incidents." In recent years, Canadian and Australian state surveillance operations targetting Indigenous Peoples' organisations have attracted unwelcome publicity.

Behind its image as a country which bravely took on the USA over the nuclear issue, New Zealand remains a willing junior subcontractor in the Western Alliance's international intelligence gathering and surveillance network. For an administration founded on colonisation and the dispossession of Maori, and still wedded to market economic fundamentalism, domestically, those who challenge dominant colonial and economic orthodoxies and their overseas networks are clearly considered fair game for surveillance.

In its bid to further expand SIS, Police and GCSB powers, Clark's government is sidestepping some uncomfortable questions about these agencies' roles in monitoring and managing domestic dissent. Modelled on Blair's New Labour, (which has just enacted the draconian Terrorism Act 2000) it warmly embraces Third Way politics - aka "globalisation with a smiley face". It seems equally committed to maintaining and extending the national security state apparatus, and willingly complies with the wishes of its senior intelligence partners in the US and the UK. For all the rhetoric, it is hard to distinguish between New Zealand's largest political parties, Labour and National, on security and intelligence matters. Together, they have the numbers in Parliament to push the law change through.

Many New Zealanders count sheep to get to sleep. But New Zealand's national security state is still helping its Western Alliance buddies count political dissidents.