This thread is going great

>>4814462 (off thread)

Five Eyes, Fusion Centers, and how our data is collected, shared, and sold to foreign intelligence services, to U.S. government departments and even the U.S. Federal Reserve

This post was made on the main board so I am posting here please read post on main board

as this will be excerpts of the article sited in post rather than a re-post

New Zealand’s Watergate moment

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/18/exclusive-they-spy-with-their-little-eye/

NZ Spy Scandal: Elephants In The Room US Used NZ Spies to Spy on Third Countries Including France; US Army Ready for Unrest

By Suzie Dawson

January 18, 2019

I’ve spent six years alternately begging major NZ journalists to investigate state-sponsored spying on activists including me,

and, out of sheer necessity, reporting extensively on it myself from within the vacuum created by their inaction.

So it is somewhat bemusing to now observe the belated unfolding of what ex-Member of Parliament and Greenpeace NZ Executive Director Russel Norman

is describing as New Zealand’s “Watergate moment“.

In the wake of the bombshell release of a State Services Commission report into the affair, Norman wrote:

“My key takeaway is that under the previous government, no one was safe from being spied on if they disagreed with government policy.”

The sands are shifting: Over a dozen government agencies including the New Zealand Police are revealed to have been engaging private intelligence firms such as the notorious Thompson and Clark Investigations Limited to spy on New Zealand citizens engaged in issue-based democratic dissent, activism in general, or who were deemed to present an economic or political ‘risk’ to the bureaucracy or the private sector in New Zealand.

At its core, this scandal is a reflection of fundamental flaws in the very fabric of intelligence gathering practices in New Zealand, its infrastructure and network – where the collected data flows, whom the collection of that data serves and to which masters our intelligence services ultimately answer.

I agree with Russel Norman that this could be New Zealand’s Watergate moment. But there are major aspects which to this day, have not been meaningfully addressed,

if at all, by the New Zealand media – and of which the vast majority of the New Zealand public remain unaware, to their detriment.

Firstly: where is the data that is being collected by these spies really going? Secondly: who is directing New Zealand’s human intelligence assets and apparatus in foreign

intelligence operations?

And thirdly: what is the impact for Kiwis who unwittingly cross paths with our spy agencies in a country where the legal definition of ‘threat to national security’ has been removed?

there is so much more in this article and certainly worthy of investigation by kiwi anons

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/18/exclusive-they-spy-with-their-little-eye/

>>4814825

continuing:

ICWatch New Zealand

When the savant-like and (then) still teenaged M.C. McGrath, founder of the Transparency Toolkit, received an email from a member of the U.S. intelligence community threatening, “I promise that I will kill everyone involved in your website. There is nowhere on this earth that you will be able to hide from me,” he took the threat seriously. He had good reason to. His ICWatch initiative was using open source data to expose specific players, contracts and commercial relationships in the global intelligence community.

McGrath had discovered almost by accident that secret programs and projects, which would usually be hidden from public scrutiny, were often bragged about on the curriculum vitaes of current and ex-service members posted on LinkedIn. By pooling the publicly available data contained within their CV’s, he was able to shine light on many covert programs that we otherwise may not have ever known existed. Within the year he would resettle in Berlin, living in exile and his project rehoused at WikiLeaks. “Murderous spooks drive journalistic project to WikiLeaks” read the headline of WikiLeaks’ press release announcing their acquisition of ICWatch.

To my knowledge, no member of the New Zealand media has ever thought to peruse the ICWatch database to examine the extent of New Zealand’s involvement in that integrated “global network”, as the NSA so eloquently calls it. Or more appropriately, “the Total Force” referenced by ex-Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, when he redefined the term at a key moment post 9/11.

Jeremy Scahill, author of the fantastic read “Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army” described Rumsfeld’s policy as being what “would become known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine, where you use high technology, small footprint forces and an increased and accelerated use of private contractors in fighting the wars.” (The ‘Total Force’ wasn’t just used to encapsulate these civilian contractors but also to indemnify them from prosecution or civil liability.)

The American adoption of large numbers of private contractors into their military has helped to stretch their tentacles deep into the South Pacific. It turns out that little old New Zealand is so in bed with this for-profit global surveillance network as to account for several hundred references that appear in ICWatch.

A study of the fine print on each search result reveals multiple intriguing tidbits: a reference to U.S. Army personnel being stationed in New Zealand. Another is to a New Zealand military liaison officer being stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland, a major U.S. military base and home of the NSA. (The existence of these liaison positions was revealed some years back however it is interesting to ponder what files may have crossed that desk in recent years.)

By far the most fascinating reference to New Zealand that I have found in ICWatch so far is to a U.S. Army intelligence officer who claims to have integrated “Czech, British, New Zealand and Jordanian intelligence into the Brigade’s CI/HUMINT enterprise”:

>https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/18/exclusive-they-spy-with-their-little-eye/

>>4814825

>>4815786

At the 2014 ‘Moment of Truth’ event in Auckland, Edward Snowden spoke of having direct access to “full-take” signals intelligence information from New Zealand while working as an NSA contractor. All of it, directly from the pipe. He said that in order to access that information, he merely had to tick a check box which said “New Zealand”.

The discovery that the products of our electronic intelligence gathering efforts and the output of our human intelligence network and their informants are being fed directly into the United States “global network” has massive ramifications. Particularly when we consider that the sources of that information may not just be from our overseas/military operations but also from our domestic policing operations. That it could include information obtained not just by our spy agencies and our police agencies – but by their subcontractors, like Thompson and Clark Investigations Limited.

>>4814825

>>4815786

>>4815850

The US is Dispatching Our Spies

However, we know thanks to WikiLeaks that the parasitic relationship between U.S. and New Zealand intelligence is not merely passive or voyeuristic.

We now have proof that the U.S. has been dispatching New Zealand human intelligence officers, sending them on overseas missions. And not simply to Afghanistan or Iraq. But in one case, to infiltrate a multitude of political parties contesting the 2012 Presidential elections of an ally – France.

While reported in France, the astonishing revelation was widely ignored by corporate media outlets across the five nations involved in perpetrating the espionage – the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

During the 2017 Internet Party campaign which I led, I used the one and only mainstream media radio interview that I was granted during the entire election season to drive home my concern about the implications of it. I told radio presenter Wallace Chapman:

“In February of this year, WikiLeaks published a document which is from the CIA. In the document, the CIA is dispatching New Zealand human intelligence spies to France, to penetrate political parties in the French Presidential election. So we hear about mass surveillance and about our data being sent to the United States but this is next level. This is the intelligence agency of a foreign power sending dispatch orders to New Zealand foreign intelligence personnel.”

>>4814825

>>4815786

>>4815850

>>4815892

The document itself is fascinating. It is the U.S. version of the dispatch orders, so the subsequent requirements pages (which are worth reading in their entirety, as they outline the specific objectives and types of information the U.S. wants to gather from each political party and even ranks them in order of priority) are largely marked S/NF meaning Secret/No Foreign Nationals – for the eyes of U.S. agencies only. The document states that “additional versions of this requirement have been sent to HUMINT collectors” which seems to suggest that the particulars of dispatch orders from the U.S. vary depending upon who they are issuing them to.

That the UK is named is fascinating. Logically, the UK version of the dispatch orders wouldn’t have disclosed that French political parties’ communications with the UK were part of the brief.

So not only are Five Eyes HUMINT spies being dispatched by a foreign power, they’re doing so for reasons that may not be known to them.

All of the above is a real-world illustration of the dangers of integrating New Zealand’s intelligence services with the “global network” and making our personnel available to ultimately serve the interests of a foreign nation.

A key point in the Cullen-Reddy “Report of the First Independent Review of Intelligence and Security in New Zealand“, undertaken in the wake of the GCSB movement and related spying scandals in New Zealand in the period 2012 onwards, has forever stuck with me. The Hon. Michael Cullen and Dame Patsy Reddy clearly stated:

“Close co-operation on operational matters also creates a risk of some loss of independence, both operationally and potentially also in relation to our intelligence, defence and foreign policy settings…New Zealand’s national interests… do not and cannot exactly coincide with those of any other country, no matter how friendly or close.” (Emphasis added)

>>4815914

A further WikiLeaks release shows that the U.S. weren’t only involving New Zealand in spying on France for political reasons alone. They were ordering us to steal commercial and trade secrets as well.

The beneficiaries of the spying (“Supported Elements”) are listed on the orders and include the United States Treasury, the Federal Reserve Board and the U.S. Department of Energy and Infrastructure, to name a few.

Which is all deeply ironic, for both ex-President Barack Obama and ex-Attorney General Eric Holder publicly asserted that the U.S. does not spy for economic reasons or engage in theft of intellectual property.

>>4815939

Preying on the Citizenry and Making a Profit

There is no doubt that the U.S. influence on NZ intelligence sharing policy was greatly enhanced by the ascendence of John Key to the office of Prime Minister in 2008. An ICWatch entry indicates that the U.S. was directly involved in drafting “enhanced” information sharing policy for our spy agencies:

The contractor named in the above screenshot commenced the role in October of 2008, less than a month prior to New Zealand’s 2008 General Election and stayed on through May 2015 so the project would have had to occur within that period.

Within those same years and beyond, New Zealand’s spy agencies have been “enhanced” by more than intelligence sharing – they have been given more money, and increasingly invasive powers, at every turn. This despite them having lurched from scandal to scandal, resulting in the GCSB in particular being permanently etched in the public consciousness and lexicon as little more than a meme, a joke, fit only to be depicted in a cartoon. (Or another cartoon, or another, or another, or another…)

Instead of being punished for the constant revelations of their illegal activity, the GCSB were ultimately rewarded with the granting of retroactive immunity for their crimes. Their incompetence earned them increased budgets and scope. Their non-subjection to any meaningful accountability appears to have been cemented by the release of yet another critical oversight report in 2018. The agency, famous for breaking the law, is apparently breaking the law again. It seems that either they have learned nothing, or perceive that they don’t need to, because they know full well that the true overseers of the “global network” are not in New Zealand at all; are perfectly happy with what they are doing; thus they won’t ever be made to change.

>>4815786

>>4815850

>>4815892

>>4815914

>>4815939

>>4815953

And there is still more in the article that I have not posted well worth a read

If we are going to take our country back we need to get behind, understand and disseminate work like this

Exclusive: They Spy With Their Little Eye

By Suzie Dawson

January 18, 2019

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/18/exclusive-they-spy-with-their-little-eye/