Quote of the Day: On National’s Security Service

“Not entirely convinced that the government really ought to be rushing through
stronger powers for the security apparatus until they've sorted out perhaps a few
better control mechanisms preventing partisan use of the security apparatus.”
- Eric Crampton, ‘No, sir, I don't like it’

“The Moment of Truth”: Too many agendas

“A proper government is the agent of its citizens, not the master. In its role
as the agent, the default should be openness, not secrecy;  in very few
contexts is it appropriate for the government to operate in secrecy. Only
when the government can convince its citizens that secrecy is necessary
for protecting their rights is it acceptable. With respect to the NSA [and
GCSB and SIS] surveillance programs, that burden has not been met.”
- Yaron Brook, YARON BROOK'S POV — NSA MONITORING: SHOULD WE BE WORRIED?

IT HAD BEEN BILLED by Kim DotCon as “The Moment of Truth” – "a political bomb" – THE moment when he would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that John Key knew about DotCon before the raid on his house, and by implication that Key had conspired to get him into the country so as to get him into American hands.

It wasn’t that moment. The shred of evidence DotCon floated earlier yesterday had already been shot down as fraudulent, and nothing more on that score made any appearance at all.

It was billed by Laila Harre as being “framed” by Hager’s #DirtyPolitics, hyped by DotCon’s lawyer as being “Watergate on emails.”

It wasn’t that either (and really never was).

And it was promoted by the likes of Martin/Martyn Bradbury as something that would make your head blow off.

It may well have done that for him (but how would the rest of us ever know the difference.)

There was a wrestle of agendas going on among an ill-sorted collection of folk: a copyright thief keen to make it about him; a political party leader and activists running an election rally; a public launch of the fat German’s “communications suite”; the fat German’s lawyer launching anti-corporate barbs and trying to turn it into an anti-TPPA rally…

Take away the puffery of these poseurs, and the rambling irrelevance of Julian Assange, and in the end what you had was a story presented by Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden that needs sober consideration -- but will hardly get them given the context in which they were put, and the company in which these two global figures allowed themselves to appear.

And there was still a glaring absence of smoking guns.

Snowden claimed NZ’s GCSB as part of Five Eyes has been ramping up towards a system of mass state surveillance which, if true, is worrying. But what was his evidence?

He said the American National Security Agency (NSA) has a base in Auckland “and in the north of the country.” Sounds ominous, but Paul Buchanan suggested this morning the Auckland connection is probably no more than an NSA agent at the American Consulate in Auckland, who may have the services of a satellite dish. The facility up north one assumes is the Warkworth satellite station, which he suggests by implication is subject to monitoring. This deserves further investigation.

Snowden claimed that when working for the NSA in Hawaii he routinely handled metadata from NZ’s GCSB, and could easily drill down into the metadata to investigate content. But he had no specifics, no documentary evidence, just a discussion (on which he had expanded in his Intercept article earlier yesterday) about a checkbox on the XKEYSCORE system used to compile and analyse data.

That solitary checkbox, the Five Eyes Defeat … is what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty.

Snowden has always appeared genuine, and unlike others at this event appears to understand the importance and basis of “our most sacred rights” – not a gift from government, he said last night, but part of our nature as human beings.

When these things are collected, by any arm of government, without an individualised, particularised suspicion of wrongdoing, on the individual level, that is a violation ... of human rights -- that are not given to us by government,but are inherent to our nature.

He’s right, you know. But unless I missed it somewhere, he’s offered no direct evidence for his claims about mass surveillance in NZ than his testimony last night, his earlier documents about XKEYSCORE, and the reluctance of PMs, leaders of opposition, and former and present heads of GCSB to discuss XKEYSCORE.

He took a swing at the Prime Minister for his public claim that “there is not and there never has been any mass surveillance.” This is false, says Snowden, and only defended now by a Prime Minister “throwing classified documents in the air like Julian Assange.”

Clearly, Snowden sees himself as more careful with classified documents than Julian Assange, and the PM, but he still brought nothing more to back his claims but his cogent discussion and believable demeanour.

If there was a smoking gun last night, it was brought by Glenn Greenwald. While John Key was throwing classified documents in the air defending the non-commissioning of something called CORTEX, Greenwald was documenting a programme called SPEARGUN.

According to Greenwald, [and I’m relying for this summary on Keith Ng’s report] this project involved the "covert installation of 'cable access' equipment" on the Southern Cross cable (i.e. Tapping into New Zealand's traffic with the rest of the world). The existence of this capability cannot be denied.
    In response to the Southern Cross cable's operators saying that such a thing was impossible, Snowden (who videoconferenced into the event) asked (I'm paraphrasing): What makes the Southern Cross cable so special that it cannot be accessed undetected by the NSA, when everyone else around the world can be?
    The new documents show that the GCSB had a cable access project underway, followed by another document that Phase 1 was "achieved". More crucially, he has a message showing:

        (TS//SI//NF) New Zealand: GCSB's cable access program SPEARGUN Phase 1; awaiting new GCSB
    Act expected July 2013; first metadata probe mid 2013.

This shows that they had to wait for the GCSB Act to be passed before SPEARGUN could be used. i.e. The new GCSB Act - the one that supposedly wouldn't expand GCSB powers - expanded GCSB powers to allow them operate a metadata probe on the this cable which they'd tapped.

If there was a case to answer that was presented last night, then that was it.

THE BIGGER PICTURE TO all this is realising that the time-honoured protections against state intrusion into our lives has been breaking down philosophically, legally and politically, just at a  time when new technology makes the possibilities of this intrusion so much more widespread.

“We want to bring down Five Eyes,” said the fat German trying to get a chant going. Well, no “we” don’t. In a world with many threats, intelligence gathering is essential.

The reason we have state security is to protect our most sacred liberties – to protect them against the slings and arrows of war and outrageous criminality. That’s government’s job. But to protect our liberties against those agencies themselves, especially as the power of surveillance and analysis increases, we need more than just checkboxes. 

It is not a matter of left or right. Yes, the centre-right here are defending the GCSB’s alleged excesses and the left are running the argument against the abuse of power, but reverse political power and the positions would be reversed. The left are always against the abuse of power until they have it themselves. And remember too that this process started here under Helen Clark’s Labour, and has been carried out in US under the Democrats’s Obama.

The issue is not party political. It is protection against the state.

In “the old days” the need to obtain a search warrant was your protection against every state agency except the IRD. But we are now in a new age.

In this new age when searches of your data so much more easy than rummaging through your rubbish bins (as easy as tapping a cable, it seems), and analysis of data is as easy as writing a good data mining algorithm (still not that easy, to be fair) what separates our most sacred rights from the graveyard of lost liberty seems to be only the scruples of security agents themselves – and in New Zealand, so the claim goes, those scruples are being sacrificed for the excitement of being part of a world intelligence network in which New Zealand can be a player just as long as it supplies the (meta)data that keeps it in the big tent.

It is really a time for a new consideration of the checks and balances that tie up the agencies who act purportedly in our defence – and those who think it’s all okay now because a nice man is overseeing date collection might like to contemplate how they might feel if it were all overseen by the former PM, or her successor.

But that sober and serious job needs better “framing” than it did with all the agendas on display last night.

PS: I’ll be updating this post over the day as new info and analysis comes to light.

RELATED POSTS (TODAY):

• NZ Prime Minister isn't Telling the Truth About Mass Surveillance – Ed Snowden, THE INTERCEPT
• New Zealand Launched Mass Surveillance Project While Publicly Denying It – Glenn Greenwald, THE INTERCEPT
• The Questions for New Zealand on Mass Surveillance – Ryan Gallagher, THE INTERCEPT
• The Moment of Truth #1 – Tim Watkin, PUNDIT
• "Project SPEARGUN underway" - Keith Ng, ON POINT
• But what is truth – if you follow me? – DIM POST
• The smoking SPEARGUN – DIM POST
• Finny on Five Eyes – Charles Finny, KIWIBLOG
• Vision and dumbassery – Russell Brown, HARD NEWS
• It’s time to get angry – David Farrar, KIWIBLOG
• 'Moment of truth' - do believe the hype – Andrea Vance, STUFF
• Guardian Live Coverage

RELATED POSTS (PAST):

• Edward Snowden: hero or villain? Philosopher Leonard Peikoff in top form in two podcasts:
• “Q: Is it moral for a person to expose secret government programs which violate citizens’ individual rights, even if this may harm strategies which the government states are essential to national security? In other words, what is your estimate of the NSA now?”Download & Listen
• A follow-up to Dr. Peikoff’s previous podcast: An interview with Amy Peikoff on the NSA programs. Download & Listen
• #Snowden: One Year On
• Don’t shoot the messenger
• Phone-hacking by media so 2006
• #EdwardSnowden: Traitor?
• #EdSnowden reveals spooks have already cracked and hacked your software
• #SurveillanceState: Privacy for me, but not for thee, say National ministers
• #SurveillanceState: “But he’s such a *nice* man…”

TWITTER, AS IT HAPPENED (oldest to newest)…

John Key & the GCSB [update 2]

Two politicians are having lunch together. All of a sudden
one stands up and shouts: “You’re lying.”
“I know,” replies the other. “But just hear me out.”

Circumstance and coincidence, as Russell Brown observes, but there’s a hell of a lot of both about.

Last night's Campbell Live report on the complex story of the GCSB, the Prime Minister, Kim Dotcom, Ian Fletcher and the Americans may have left a few viewers scratching their heads last night. What, exactly, was Campbell saying and what was its import?
    … Certainly, the report was principally a re-stating of previously-aired facts. But its new claims were not immaterial.
    The most interesting of them was that in December 2011, incoming GCSB director Ian Fletcher took leave from his job in Queensland and flew to Wellington for meetings with John Key, acting GCSB boss Simon Murdoch and Hugh Wolfenson … in the same week that the surveillance of Dotcom began, but we continue to be told that neither Key or Fletcher had any advance knowledge of the surveillance operation or the raid. Key has said he did not know who Dotcom was until the day before the raid and up till now we've thought that Fletcher only came into the picture when he officially started at the GCSB 10 days after the raid.
    The programme also went back over the series of misleading statements [and memory losses] Key has made over his relationship with Fletcher and the circumstances of Fletcher's recruitment…

For a Prime Minister who Fran O’Sullivan reckons is “world class” -- speaking without notes, “completely fluent,” “very much in the mode of a former top-flight international businessman,” “the guy who served on the board of the New York branch of the Federal Reserve” – he continues to have a heck of a lot of very convenient memory loss.

“But he’s such a *nice* man…”  He wouldn’t lie, would he. (Well, only about his achievements and about tax cuts and raising GST and smacking and his share ownership and complementary medicines and manifesto promises and Maori seats and whether or not his GCSB bill will enable them to spy wholesale on all NZers and where he was when the Springbok tour was on (or was that just another memory loss?).

And what of the meeting on

March 16, 2011, a week after it was announced that [former GCSB head General Jerry] Mataparae would be moving on from the job of New Zealand's top spy, [when] US director of National Intelligence James Clapper flew into Wellington for meetings with Key and others. … [And] another meeting, over dinner at the home of British High Commissioner Vicki Treadell on October 11, 2011, where the guests were Key, his head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Martin Wevers, SIS chief Warren Tucker, Ministry of Foreign Affairs CEO John Allen, Defence Force chief Lt Gen Richard Rhys Jones -- and Ian Fletcher, four months before taking up his role at the GCSB. All of them have declined to comment on the purpose of the meeting.
    The meeting at Treadell's home may simply have been a get-to-know-you for Fletcher. That wouldn't be unusual. But it does seem unusual that Fletcher, having been brought into the loop so far in advance of starting his new job, and then having flown over yet again for a meeting in the same week that surveillance of Dotcom actually began, remained innocent of what was a notable and legally perilous operation on behalf of the US government.

As Russell says, “Campbell Live may turn out to have grossly over-reached, as critics insist. But there seems every reason to keep digging.”

And to keep asking why foreign officers of the law like the FBI were given complete carte blanche to operate within our borders, with our GCSB acting apparently as handmaiden.

UPDATE 1:  Russell Brown updates subsequent events at Question Time this avo:

Key has just been pressed on the issues at Question Time.
        - He has admitted that *both* meetings with Fletcher were organised by his office.
        - But he insists he didn’t discuss the GCSB role at all with Fletcher at the breakfast meeting.
        - Asked about his false statement that Rennie came to him with the proposal to hire Fletcher: "that was
          my recollection at the time".
        - He “can’t be sure” whether DPMC briefed him about Kim Dotcom on December 14.
The last one is absurd. He’s been repeatedly pressed on his foreknowledge of Dotcom and insisted he’d never even heard of the guy until January 19. Now he says he hasn’t even checked to see whether he got a briefing on Dotcom from his own department?
    How on earth does he get away with this stuff?

UPDATE 2:  Dim Post:

But Kim Dotcom is only one of 88 instances of illegal spying that we know about, and the GCSB were, presumably, also conducting some surveillance that wasn’t against the law. Kim Dotcom is their only operation we’re aware of so I think there’s a temptation to build narratives around him. If we didn’t know about Dotcom and instead knew, say, that the GCSB had illegally spied on New Zealand based friends and relatives of Daryl Jones, the dual New Zealand/Australian citizen assassinated in a drone strike in Yemen in November 2013 (there’s no evidence this happened but it’s not unlikely) then we’d be looking at it all very differently and try to find meaning in Fletcher’s appointment there.
    Because Fletcher’s appointment is weird. Why did Key shoulder-tap this guy with no background in intelligence to be head of our signals intelligence agency and then repeatedly lie about it? Even if you don’t buy into the Campbell Live narrative and – like DPF – think its all an absurd conspiracy theory, that’s still a pretty relevant question.

Internet Party

Well, if in launching a political party your aim is to get everyone to talk about you, then the launch of Kim DotCon’s Internet Party has worked a treat.

Although I imagine the publicity wasn’t supposed to be generated because Fartin’ Martyn Bradbury was stupid enough to leavea draft paper about the party’s plans and programme lying around for Cameron Slater to publish, or for it to be revealed therein that Martyn Bradbury was being paid to “consult” for Hone Harawira’s Mana Party while being paid $8000 to spruik  DotCon’s Party Party to his friends and associates while also being paid an undisclosed sum to talk trades union at the trade-union funded Daily Blog – and that the Scoop website is not as politically independent as it once was.

Which means no-one is talking much about DotCon’s putative policy platform, whatever it might be beyond standing up against the surveillance state (hopefully) and for legalised theft of intellectual property (hopefully not) beyond speculation that Bradbury would only be involved if he found the policies congenial – which means every member of the human race is likely to find the opposite – and that he is on record as finding “Kim Dotcom’s economic vision a genuine way forward.”

Which, based on Bolshie Bradbury leaping out of Hone’s boudoir to get into bed with DotCon, could only be a Great Leap Backwards.

#SurveillanceState: The GCSB dividend

[H]e realized at once that he shouldn't have spoken aloud, and that by doing so
he had, in a sense, acknowledged the stranger's right to oversee his actions… 
    “And you should talk less in general; almost everything you've said up to now
could have been inferred from your behaviour, even if you'd said only a few words,
and it wasn't terribly favourable to you in any case…
    “But I’m not guilty,” said K. “there’s been a mistake. How is it even possible for
someone to be guilty? We’re all human beings here, one like the other.” “That is
true” said the priest, “but that is how the guilty speak.”
― Franz Kafka, The Trial

According to Roy Morgan, the polling company trumpeting a seven-percent dive in National’s fortunes in their latest poll, National is paying the price for John Key’s efforts to allow his spooks to allow his buggers to listen in, intercept, and pass around all our private communications.

If Roy Morgan are right, that is National’s deserved down-payment for limiting our online freedom in return for the illusion of a little temporary security.

Good. They deserve it.

But they’re still not listening—which, given the legislation in question, is truly ironic, no?

So, unless Peter Done-Nothing finally does something (and why would he, since he never has), or John Banks grows a spine (as unlikely as seeing him throw himself on a grenade), the a majority of one will still be whipped into the Ayes lobby this afternoon to vote these powers into law.

So to celebrate its passing into law this afternoon, I suggest you settle in at home tonight and watch what Orson Welles called his best movie: this stylish adaptation of Frank Kafka’s novel The Trial*—the story of one Joseph K. who wakes up one morning to find himself accused of a crime that’s never specified.

It’s not Orwellian.  It’s worse.

* PS: The film is now in the public domain, and as such has never received an official home video release.

#SurveillanceState: “But he’s such a *nice* man…” [update 4]

[I]n Friedrich Dürrenmatt's novella "Traps," which involves a seemingly innocent man put
on trial by a group of retired lawyers in a mock-trial game, the man inquires what his crime
shall be. "An altogether minor matter," replies the prosecutor. "A crime can always be found."
- Daniel J. Solove, “Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have 'Nothing to Hide'”

Instead of protecting our private communications, the state plans to invade them.

There are people about, loads of them,who are okay with that.

In a veritable swamp of stupidity that I had to confront around me yesterday, I think the stupidest thing I heard in response to the GCSB Bill was a vox-pop on the wireless. It was a self-confessed National voter. He said he had nothing to fear, because John Key wouldn't do anything to hurt him.

That, my friend , is the stupidest thing I have heard in a long time of hearing very stupid things. I wonder how he would feel if it were Helen Clark giving herself the power to drop in on all your emails and phone calls, as she might have done? Or if it were Muldoon with the power to prohibit you protecting your privacy that John Key is giving the Executive?

Because that is really the way to think about this. If you think it's okay giving government the power to read our emails and tap our phone calls and use them all against us, and the reason you think it's okay because you support this government and your Mr Key is a nice chap, then just imagine a government with  the power to read your emails and use them against you that you don’t support.

Imagine a government enjoying these powers in which the other side is in power.  The other side whom you despise. Because in your life-time, they will be.

Imagine then a government to which you’re sternly opposed, whose policies you’re protesting, who has sicked their bureaucrats and their Inland Revenue Department on you (as Barack Obama for example did recently on his private political opponents)—and who has also been given the power to read all your communications and to do what they wish with them.

Or just imagine a bureaucracy who’s decided that you are against them.

Can you imagine a Helen Clark or a Robert Muldoon with those powers?  The fact is, as Rob Hosking points out, it will be for all of us the way the inadvertent Teapot Tapes bugger was treated:

This is an extension of state power, a large and rather vague one; it relies on public servants to stay within some very poorly defined rules when they have demonstrated they even cannot stay within more strictly defined ones…
    It is not enough to blame all this on the prime minister, or even his office. 
    It would be great if it were that simple.
    The problem goes much deeper.
    It is about the enablers: the timid and toadying functionaries who will throw law and principle out the window in order to curry favour with their superiors. 

There were those at last night's Town Hall meeting to oppose this bill who argued that John Key knows what he is doing. That he is consciously using the state’s powers to stifle dissent.

I do not agree. I do not say John Key knows what he is doing. I say John Key does not understand what he is doing, and has no conception of what he is releasing into the world.

He is of a piece with his former Minister of Injustice, Simon Power, who rammed through changes to the court system to make it more efficient that had the effect of leaving it less just—with Power peremptorily throwing out rights to silence, to trial by jury,and  to presumption of innocence,  with nary a hint he understood he was throwing out age-old protections against government doing us over.

So too when John Key proposes making the spying apparatus of the SIS and GCSB available to the police, without the normal limited judicial warrant. It’s like he’s never heard of the separation of powers, or legal restraint.

And so too last week, for example, when Key told John Campbell it was "totally incorrect" that "the Government effectively through GCSB will be able to wholesale spy on New Zealanders,” he wasn’t lying, he just had no clue he was totally wrong.  Because as Law Society head Rodney Harrison QC argues, wholesale spy power is precisely what the GCSB bill means for Kiwis.

The Prime Minister's attempt to reassure New Zealanders we are not sleepwalking into a total surveillance society is, unfortunately, flawed in its legal analysis …
    In a nutshell, the reason why Mr Key is wrong as a matter of law in claiming that New Zealanders have nothing to fear from the GCSB bill is that his limited analysis of the three new functions to be conferred on the GCSB totally overlooks the point that the statutory intelligence-gathering powers of the GCSB are also being considerably expanded, at the same time as its functions are. When the totality of the changes is considered, we have a major increase in the overall role and powers of the GCSB. That, in some instances, the Prime Minister's authority is required for the GCSB to proceed cannot alter this.

I invite that ignorant fellow on the radio, and all those who think like him, to consider how distant that authority will seem to a bureaucrat intent on doing you over for your own good.  Or how much that authority will be worth when the Prime Minster’s name is Cunliffe.

UPDATE 1:  The government is threatening an ISP founder with criminal charges for his decision to shut down the business, rather than agree to some mysterious court order giving them access to customers’ data. Yes, it’s in the US. No, it would be no different under Key’s new powers.

UPDATE 2:  ACT, the self-called Liberal Party is going to vote for this bill. Canterbury Uni economist Eric Crampton argues this should instead be a moment when ACT’s time has finally come.

ACT is already predicted to die in the next election. There's a 61% chance that ACT returns zero electorate MPs in the next election. Unless they move from an expected 1.2% vote share to a 5% vote share, the Party has greater than a 60% chance of dying in 2014.
If you're going to die in 2014 anyway, jump on this grenade while you're doing it. Die in a blaze of liberal glory, killing the GCSB legislation at third reading and forcing them to take the whole thing back to the drawing board. It might make it harder to get into coalition with National next time round if you do get back, but it could also start drawing in votes from that part of the electorate that cares about civil rights and tech freedom but shrinks in horror from the thought of Russel Norman being anywhere near the Treasury benches.
    If you can't do that, please have the courtesy to actually die in 2014 so that a liberal party might emerge…

UPDATE 3:  Video of last night’s Stop the GCSB Bill meeting at Auckland’s Town Hall:

This video is courtesy of SlipStream and Daily Blog.

UPDATE 4: From around the Twitter-Bookface-verse:

#SurveillanceState: When acts of honour are made illegal

"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done
|today, then any act of honour or restitution has to be hidden underground."
-Ragnar Danneskjold

The government wants to spy on your communications and harvest your private details. Actually, they already consider they have the power to do that—and have done  it to some—now they just want to do it legally.

Their argument is they need to spy on you to protect you.

But this argument falls at the first hurdle. If the “war” they are engaged in involves warding off terrorists, then that war requires naming and targeting the enemy. It does not require, and nor should it involve, a massive spying dragnet on New Zealanders.

The government says it will be careful with the information about us that it harvests.

But the kerfuffle over the public release of journalist Andrea Vance’s private details gives us a clue how little the agents of government value the privacy of our private details.  We have their assurance this is not the tip of an iceberg. But people’s private details have been made public in vast numbers by ACC, by the Ministry of Health, and by Paula Bennett’s Ministry of Social Development. “Oops,” they say after it happens. But “oops” doesn’t help those who’ve been blundered upon.

And the news that government departments who extract private information from us will soon be sharing information with the Inland Revenue, the department dedicated to extracting money from us, gives cause for great alarm--particularly in an age when cash-strapped governments will do anything for money, and in the US the Inland Revenue Service has been used by Presidents past and present to frighten and scare off their political enemies. 

This is just one reason to spurn the argument that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear from Big Brother monitoring your communications. Because those communications will more and more routinely be used against you to enforce, right or wrong,either the government’s will or the will of those in government.

Consider the revelations that the very journalist who broke a story about illegal spying was snooped on by Parliament’s bureaucrats. “The violation of Vance’s privacy is a prospect now facing every citizen in the country under the GCSB Bill,” says Gordon Campbell, and he’s right. Get offside with the government of the day, and don’t be surprised if your private details become public, whether by design or by incompetence. “The boundaries of privacy are being erased for no discernible reason, and in the absence of any proportionate threat… But who will be watching the watchers [under the new bill]? Why, it will be the same kind of people – in key respects, the very same people – who brought about the Andrea Vance scandal.”

Bullied investigative journalist Jon Stephenson is another local case in point. His communications were allegedly monitored on behalf of the very defence force that a leaked NZ Defence Force document reveals lists investigative journalists as subversive threats.  Would you like to be surveilled by the American NSA at the invitation of our Army? Or bullied by the SAS because what you say makes someone uncomfortable?

Kim DotCom is another case in point.  What he is alleged to have committed is a crime, fair enough. But while that crime has still yet to be proven, his life has been made public, his property has been stripped, and the NZ government has bent over backwards to give agents of the US government access beyond law, and without proof, to do over a New Zealand citizen.

Which makes the argument ‘we have nothing to worry about’ absurd. Because at the moment the US government’s departments and security agencies are going rogue. Journalists are bugged and surveilled; political campaigners are targeted by the IRS; air travellers are humiliated and delayed; and a programme of drone strikes controlled by the CIA, and apparently monitored by no-one, suggests any idea the powers given them by the PATRIOT Act to fight terrorists has long become simply power itself, exercised for the sake of itself.

Again, you may not like everything about Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or even Nicky Hager, but if what they and others have been revealing does not leave you using the word “frightening” to describe many of those revelations, then your head is planted more firmly in the sand than Cameron Slater’s fingers are in his ears.

If it was disturbing when we learned Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacked people’s phones,  then how much more frightening is it when folk are surveilled by people with an arsenal of guns, drones and IRS agents, and not just a basement full of printer’s ink.

When you realise what they can do to you, why would you not think twice about what you’re doing.

Whistle blowers like Manning and Snowden have become heroes to many because what they’ve exposed about illegal hidden government operations would not have appeared in public without them—and what have exposed about legal government operations is frightening.  As Ragnar Danneskjold says in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,

"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honour or restitution has to be hidden underground."

That’s a dangerous place in which to operate.

The Ayn Rand Center’s Yaron Brook makes the relevant final point that only needs one addition to make it local:

A proper government is the agent of its citizens, not the master. In its role as the agent, the default should be openness, not secrecy;  in very few contexts is it appropriate for the government to operate in secrecy. Only when the government can convince its citizens that secrecy is necessary for protecting their rights is it acceptable. With respect to the NSA [and GCSB and SIS] surveillance programs, that burden has not been met.

And nor is it likely to be.

#SurveillanceState: An opposition leader has emerged [corrected]

Why is Russel Norman considered by so many the de facto leader of the opposition—despite Labour leader David Shearer having that titular role? And why is Labour considering having Norman in a senior role in any coalition they lead—despite his party’s loony economics, bankrupt proposals and misanthropic policy positions?

Perhaps he’s taken seriously, despite his frequent insanity, because when he gets it right he’s good—he’s very good.  And on his opposition to having the GCSB listen in to all of us whenever they feel like; to the government taking journalist’s phone records whenever they want to; to the monitoring of journalists’ communications by the defence forces,  he’s been virtually alone in integrating all of the attacks on privacy and a free media—and being very articulate in doing it. Listen here here, for example [from 3:30 1:50], to his succinct response this morning to these issues.

And David Shearer has been virtually silent, except when pushed.

CORRECTED: Audio link fixed.

Internet Fascism and the #SurveillanceState

Whatever you think about Kim DotCom, spied on by the GCSB, he was never considered a terrorist. Whatever you think about American journalists, lawyers and law firms, banking firms, corporates, NGOs, judges and politicians--all spied on by the NSA—they’ve never been considered terrorists either. Yet, asks our guest poster Ben O’Neill, wasn’t the rationale for the huge expansion of agencies like this that they needed to be so big to fight terrorism ? So why are they invading privacy on a scale dwarfing the crimes that launched the Leveson Inquiry.

What is the purpose of telecommunication and internet surveillance?

The NSA presents its surveillance operations as being directed toward security issues, claiming that the programs are needed to counter terrorist attacks. Bald assertions of plots foiled are intended to bolster this claim.[1] However, secret NSA documents reveal that their surveillance is used all-too frequently to gather intelligence to achieve political goals for the US government. Agency documents show extensive surveillance of communications from allied governments, including the targeting of embassies and missions.[2] Reports from an NSA whistleblower also allege that the agency has targeted and intercepted communications from a range of high-level political and judicial officials, anti-war groups, US banking firms and other major companies and non-government organizations.[3] This suggests that the goal of surveillance is the further political empowerment of the NSA and the US government.

Ostensibly, the goal of the NSA surveillance is to prevent terrorist acts that would harm or kill people in the United States [and ditto for eth GCSB]. But in reality, it seems the primary goal is to enable greater control of that population (and others) by the US government.

When questioned about this issue, NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was unequivocal about the goal of the NSA: “to own the internet and find out what everybody is doing.”[4]

“To own the internet” — Public-private partnerships in mass surveillance

The internet is, by its very nature, a decentralised arrangement, created by the interaction of many private and government servers operating on telecommunications networks throughout the world. This has always been a major bugbear of advocates for government control, who have denigrated this decentralized arrangement as being “lawless.” Since it began to expand as a tool of mass communication for ordinary people, advocates for greater government power have fought a long battle to bring the internet “under control” — i.e., under their control.

The goal of government “ownership of the internet” entails accessing the facilities that route traffic through the network. This is gradually being done through government control of the network infrastructure and the gradual domination of the primary telecommunications and internet companies that provide the facilities for routing traffic through the network. Indeed, one noteworthy aspect of the mass surveillance system of the NSA is that it has allegedly involved extensive cooperation with many “private” firms operating under US law. This has allegedly included major security, telecommunications and internet companies, as well as producers of network software and hardware.

Examples of such “public-private partnerships” are set out in leaked documents of the NSA. An unnamed US telecommunications company is reported to provide the NSA with mass surveillance data on the communications of non-US people under its FAIRVIEW program.[5] Several major computing and internet companies have also been explicitly named in top secret internal NSA material as being current providers for the agency under its PRISM program.[6] Several of these companies have issued denials disavowing any participation in, or prior knowledge of the program, but this has been met with some scepticism.[7] (Indeed, given that the NSA did not anticipate public release of its own internal training material, it is unlikely that the agency would have any cause to lie about the companies they work with in this material. This suggests that the material may be accurate.)

Many of these companies have supplied the NSA with data from their own customers, or created systems which allow the agency access to the information flowing through telecommunications networks. They have done so without disclosure to their own customers of the surveillance that has occurred, by using the blanket advisement that they “comply with lawful requests for information.” By virtue of being subject to the jurisdiction of US statutes, all of these companies have been legally prohibited from discussing any of their dealings with the NSA and they have been well placed for retaliatory action by the many regulatory agencies of the US government if they do not cooperate. In any case, it appears from present reports that many companies have been active partners of the agency, assisting the NSA with illegal surveillance activities by supplying data under programs with no legitimate legal basis.

This has been a common historical pattern in the rise of totalitarian States, which have often sought to incorporate large business concerns into their network of power. Indeed, the very notion of “public-private partnerships” in this sector readily brings to mind the worst aspects of fascist economic systems that have historically existed. The actions of US companies that have cooperated in the NSA’s mass surveillance operations calls into question the “private” status of these companies. In many ways these companies have acted as an extension of the US government, providing information illegally, in exchange for privileges and intelligence. According to media reports, “Such cooperation is an extremely delicate issue for the companies involved. Many have promised their customers data confidentiality in their terms and conditions. Furthermore, they are obliged to follow the laws of the countries in which they do business. As such, their cooperation deals with the NSA are top secret. Even in internal NSA documents, they are only referred to by the use of code names.”[8]

We began this discussion by asking the purpose of telecommunication and internet surveillance. The answer lies in the uses to which those surveillance powers are being put, and will inevitably be put, as the capacity of the NSA expands. The true purpose of the NSA is not to keep us safe. Its goal is to own the internet, to own our communications, to own our private thoughts — to own us.

Ben O'Neill is a lecturer in statistics at the University of New South Wales (ADFA) in Canberra, Australia. He has formerly practiced as a lawyer and as a political adviser in Canberra. He is a Templeton Fellow at the Independent Institute, where he won first prize in the 2009 Sir John Templeton Fellowship essay contest.
This post first appeared at the Mises Daily.

#SurveillanceState: Kim DotCom and *that* GCSB hearing

“The highly-anticipated confrontation between Kim Dotcom and Prime Minister John Key at yesterday’s  Security and Intelligence Committee hearing of submissions on the GCSB bill turned out to be mostly dull.” Until it wasn’t. Which has all been well reported.

Russell Brown’s roundup summarises the exchanges, the commentary, and hosts three submissions made mostly by other less prominent geeks opposing the extension of the GCSB’s powers (including one Michael Koziarski, formerly known as ‘NZ’s youngest Objectivist’) .

As Russell says, “The active participation of geeks in civil society benefits everyone.”

I might add to that, “… and of Objectivists.”

#SurveillanceState - Ayn Rand & Russel Norman agree

Russel Norman rightly points out that John Key’s expansion of the powers of the GCSB is “part of a global picture of an expanding surveillance state.”

What we heard yesterday [at select committee with John Key in the chair doing little more than doodling and keeping time] was about the expansion of the powers of the GCSB. And remember, these people don’t need a warrant from a judge to intercept your communications. They can just intercept them. So what this means is it’s part of a global picture of an expanding surveillance state, which is increasingly able to penetrate all our private areas… All our privacy is being removed …
    Essentially [what this bill says] is the state is allowed to act unlawfully, and later on we’ll fix up the law … It’s meant operate the other way around: In a democratic society, the law is supposed to govern the way the government operates.
    [If this bill makes it onto the books] I imagine they’ll will figure out how to expand [the powers] further, and further, and intrude into everyone’s private lives.  What the Law Society said was that this organisation was supposed ot be an external organisation, a spy agency; it’s now been turned into a domestic and external spy agency, and it’s been done without the normal constraints.  When the police want to listen in to your conversation, they have to go to a judge, and they have to show to the judge they’ve got probable cause, so they’ve got a right to do it; these people don’t have to go to a judge, they just go and listen to what you’re doing, read your emails, all that kind of stuff…
    To live in a society where you have privacy, where you have places where you’re not worried that the state is not constantly monitoring you, is critical to what it means to live a decent life.

Just be clear. The Key Government is ramming through measures giving government spooks carte blanche to go through your email, listen in to your telephone calls, and compile data about all your online habits.Without a warrant. Without even the say so of a judge. With only the oversight of a Prime Minister who doodles while his bill burns through the house.

Yes, they’re already doing that. But they’re presently doing it by breaking the law. By breaking the few constraints on doing us over that do currently exist.

And very soon, under John Key’s guidance, those constraints will be gone.

I can’t resist quoting from Nicky Wire, whose band the Manic Street Preachers played Auckland last night, who once observed “"here's a worm in human nature that makes us want to be dominated."

Gratifying to see Rand and Norman on the same page in resisting ‘Die Wurm.’ Would that more would join them.

SURVEILLANCE STATE: How to Give the NSA (and GCSB) the Finger

Your government is listening to you—but not in the way you hoped for. Simon Black from the Sovereign Man website offers you a few tips to keep your private communications private.

On March 10, 1975, a group of US diplomatic and national security officials gathered at the office of the Turkish foreign minister's office in Ankara. Henry Kissinger was among them.

The discussion turned to foreign aid and supply of parts for military equipment, at which point Kissinger (Secretary of State at the time) suggested something that violated the law.

William Macomber, the US Ambassador to Turkey, said, "That is illegal."

Kissinger didn't miss a beat, replying,

"Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings, 'The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer."

Then, in an almost cartoon-like reaction, the room filled with laughter. You can practically see the rising cigar smoke and fatcats slapping each other on the back as they stick it to the little guy.

But that one quote, probably more than anything else, sums up the US government's attitude: they will do whatever they want, legal or not, Constitutional or not. Most government in the western world follow the same principle.

Just in the last few months, the US government has been found using its tax authorities to bully political opposition groups. They've confiscated phone records of the so-called 'free press'. And they've been caught, very publicly, spying on... everyone.

It's a sad state of affairs when NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden has been forced to flee to the governments of China, Russia, Venezuela, and Ecuador in order to avoid rotting away in a US prison, simply for publicizing the government's very unconstitutional crimes.

Now they've revoked his passport-- something typically reserved exclusively for international paedophiles according to Chapter 4, Title 22 of the US Code.

It's as if the government is happy to continue bending or breaking the law in order to destroy someone who blew the whistle on them breaking the law. Very strange indeed.

Back in the Land of the Free, attention seems to have shifted. The discussion in Congress is not "let's shut down these programs," but rather, "how do we crucify Snowden?"

Make no mistake, these spying programs have been around for a long time. And they're here to stay. Which means we all have a choice to make.

Either we can (a) simply accept that the government is spying on us, or (b) we can take some very simple steps to take back some of our privacy. And freedom.

The good news is that it's fairly simple to do this in the digital world. There are a number of tools, many of them free and open source, to help you safeguard your privacy.

Over the last two weeks, my team and I have put together a special report about digital privacy and security; it covers everything from email to text messaging to VOIP. And we're giving it away absolutely free, no strings attached.

There's a lot of really important information in here, and many of these steps are very, very simple to implement. You don't need to be a techie. You just need to care about your own freedom.

You can download it here. And, please do share it with friends and family.

Simon Black
Senior Editor, SovereignMan.com

SURVEILLANCE STATE: This is, hands down, the scariest part of the NSA revelations

Apologists for the US government’s NSA surveillance program, PRISM, (the system set up to collect every piece of data you and I generate) normally fall back on the same talking points when trying to rationalize the situation. Normally, they'll point out that no one involved actually broke the law, or that the information and "metadata" gathered won't affect American citizens.
Pardon us if we have a tough time believing them. Or forgetting the implications for non-American citizens.
Sure, they can make the claim that no one broke the law--the same way no US government officials in the 1960s broke the law by prohibiting African-Americans from voting. The laws on the books, the infamous Jim Crow laws, prohibited an entire group of people from their constitutional right to vote. (And like the laws over the GCSB soon to be on the books here in New Zealand, it’s easy for new laws to retrospectively ensure there are very few laws for anyone listening in to anyone else to actually break.)
But perhaps the even bigger concern should not be the PRISM system itself, but the “metadata” that they and the GCSB have been collecting. A word that seems foreign to most people, but will probably become more common as this story continues to develop, the collection of metadata is what affects us all. In one way, it's what defines your presence on the Internet. And the related concern is very real: when data on hundreds of millions of citizens are gathered around the world and shared by a whole network of worldwide government agencies, bland assurances that citizens of your particular state agency may not be spied upon are somewhat unassuring.
And as today's Guest Post by Washingtonian magazine writer Shane Harris will show, it's what the NSA and GCSB are collecting, the metadata, that should be the most disconcerting thing to come out of this most recent scandal.

This is, hands down, the scariest part of the NSA revelations

Forget PRISM, the US National Security Agency's system to help extract data from Google, Facebook, and the like. The more frightening secret program unearthed by the NSA leaks is the gathering and storing of millions of phone records and phone location information of U.S. [and non-US] citizens.

According to current and former intelligence agency employees who have used the huge collection of metadata obtained from the country's largest telecom carriers, the information is widely available across the intelligence community from analysts' desktop computers.

The data are used to connect known or suspected terrorists to people in the United States, and to help locate them. It has also been used in foreign criminal investigations and to assist military forces overseas. But the laws that govern the collection of this information and its use are not as clear. Nor are they as strong as those associated with PRISM, the system the NSA is using to collate information from the servers of America's tech giants.

Metadata are not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Content of emails and instant messages -- what PRISM helps gather -- is. An order issued to Verizon by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court instructs the company to supply records of all its telephony metadata "on an ongoing, daily basis." Although legal experts say this kind of broad collection of metadata may be legal, it's also "remarkably overbroad and quite likely unwise," according to Paul Rosenzweig, a Bush administration policy official in the Homeland Security Department. "It is difficult to imagine a set of facts that would justify collecting all telephony metadata in America. While we do live in a changed world after Sept. 11, one would hope it has not that much changed."

By comparison, PRISM appears more tightly constrained and operates on a more solid legal foundation. Current and former officials who have experience using huge sets of data available to intelligence analysts said that PRISM is used for precisely the kinds of intelligence gathering that Congress and the administration intended when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 2008. Officials wanted to allow intelligence agencies to target and intercept foreigners' communications when they travel across networks inside the United States.

The surveillance law prohibits targeting a U.S. citizen or legal resident without a warrant, which must establish a reasonable basis to suspect the individual of ties to terrorism or being an agent of a foreign power. In defending PRISM, administration officials have said repeatedly in recent days that the FISA Court oversees the collection program to ensure that it's reasonably designed to target foreign entities, and that any incidental collection of Americans' data is expunged. They've also said that press reports describing the system as allowing "direct access" to corporate servers is wrong. Separately, a U.S. intelligence official also said that the system cannot directly query an Internet company's data.

But the administration has not explained why broadly and indiscriminately collecting the metadata records of millions of U.S. citizens, legal residents [and non-U.S. citizens and residents] comports with a law designed to protect innocent people from having their personal information revealed to intelligence analysts. Nor have officials explained why the NSA needs ongoing, daily access to all this information, and for so many years, particularly since specific information can be obtained on an as-needed basis from the companies with a subpoena.

Here's why the metadata of phone records could be more invasive and a bigger threat to privacy and civil liberties than the PRISM system:

1. Metadata are often more revealing than contents of a communication, which is what's being collected with PRISM. A study in the journal Nature found that as few as four "spatio-temporal points," such as the location and time a phone call was placed, are enough to determine the identity of the caller 95% of the time.
2. The Wall Street Journal reports that in addition to phone metadata, the NSA also is collecting metadata on emails, website visits, and credit card transactions (although it's unclear whether those collection efforts are ongoing). If that information were combined with the phone metadata, the collective power could not only reveal someone's identity, but also provide an illustration of his entire social network, his financial transactions, and his movements.
3. Administration officials have said that intelligence analysts aren't indiscriminately searching this phone metadata. According to two intelligence employees who've used the data in counterterrorism investigations, it contains no names, and when a number that appears to be based in the United States shows up, it is blocked out with an "X" mark.
   But these controls, said a former intelligence employee, are internal agency rules, and it's not clear that the FISA Court has anything to say about them. In this employee's experience, if he wanted to see the phone number associated with that X mark, he had to ask permission from his agency's general counsel. That permission was often obtained, but he wasn't aware of the legal process involved in securing it, or if the request was taken back to the FISA court.
4. The metadatabase is widely available across the [foreign and domestic] intelligence community on analysts' desktops, increasing the potential for misuse.
5. The metadata have the potential for mission creep. They are not used only for dissecting potential homegrown terror plots, as some lawmakers have said. The metadata are also used to help military forces overseas target terrorist and insurgent networks. And they are used in foreign criminal investigations, including ones involving suspected weapons traffickers [and fat German copyright infringers].

For all these reasons, and probably more yet to emerge, it's the metadata that are of bigger concern. By comparison, PRISM is a cool name, a lame PowerPoint presentation -- and business as usual.

** Shane Harris is a senior writer at The Washingtonian magazine and the author of The Watchers: The Rise of America's Surveillance State. This article originally appeared here.

[Ed. note: What the government does with the data they already have is out of our hands. Asking them to give back your privacy is likely not going to happen. So it looks like it's going to be up to us to make sure that whatever information we give them... is useless.
The way the system is set up makes things difficult. All metadata run through a handful of Internet hubs. So you have to make sure that the information they receive can't be traced back to your computer.
So be careful what you share on the Internet. And stay tuned…]

[Hat tip and permissions Laissez Faire Today]