“Police State Down Under”, Mass Surveillance in New Zealand: Tapping the South Cross Sea Cable

Tuesday, September 16, 2014
By Paul Martin

By Binoy Kampmark
Global Research
September 16, 2014

The Southern Cross undersea cable network is extensive, linking Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii to the skeletal framework of the west coast of the United States. In the ownership stakes, Telecom New Zealand has an even half, with Australia’s second largest telecommunications provider SingTel Optus coming in at 40 percent. Verizon Business has the rest.

Some weeks ago, rabble rousing cyber activist Kim Dotcom and Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept were promising a harvest of revelations on New Zealand’s role in the surveillance fruit salad.[1] The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), which sounds like a benign desk shuffling company, is the country’s willing accomplice in the Five Eyes arrangement. Between 2012 and 2013, a metadata surveillance system was created, centred on the Southern Cross cable network. Big eyes indeed.

Seeing that the unimaginative were in charge of the operation, or at the very least naming it, the surveillance program obtained the code name “Speargun”, involving the covert installation of tapping equipment on the cable link. As to be expected, the entire operation took place in stages – the first being the initially seedy point of tapping the cable; and phase two being the use of “metada probes”, the first being ready by mid-2013.

As should be familiar by now, such probes are fundamental to obtaining the data from communications encompassing time, dates, senders, email addresses and phone calls, not to mention the substantive content.

The New Zealand prime minister, John Key, condescended to explain that internet surveillance laws enacted in 2013 were done so for a very simple reason: to amend “an ambiguous legal framework”. The GCSB legislation had triggered a chorus of “alarmist” calls, but, he said not too reassuringly in parliament, NZ citizens had nothing to concern themselves about.

His third reading speech delivered in August last year says nothing about what is actually to be done, but what has always been done in the spooks business. The work might reek of intrusive molestation, but all to the good. What the PM simply reiterates are those swill bucket observations that are second nature in the advertising business – the need to “protect New Zealanders” from “threats” that are “real and ever-present”.[2]

Key has never even felt a need to explain what these threats might be, ignoring the greatest rule of intelligence gathering in a democratic state: Gaps are necessary. Apertures in the system tend to be their salvation, the cautionary protection for good governance. But he doesn’t want to give that side of the bargain up. Just back obstinate paternalism, and hope for the best. Hence, it was sufficient for him to say that he had “been briefed by intelligence agencies on many issues, some of which have deeply concerned me.”

The Rest…HERE

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