Guyz,
Susie Dawson from New Zealand outlines the Five Eyes Go Around that Obama used, along with Eric Holder, to spy on US Citizens for corporations, for profit, for political gain, and for many other nepharious uses. They used information to bury anyone who went against them. They used information to make money. They had it all, and sold access to the information.
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
Special to Consortium News
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.”
This is a remarkable statement from Norman, who once sat on the very government committee tasked with oversight of New Zealand’s intelligence agencies. The futility of that lofty position was reflected in my 2014 piece “Glenn Greenwald and the Irrelevance of Electoral Politics“ which quoted Greenwald, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, saying of Norman:
“You had the Green Party leader here in New Zealand say in an interview that I watched that he was on the committee that oversees the GCSB [ Government Communications Security Bureau – NZ’s electronic spying agency] and yet he learned far more about what the agency does by reading our stories than he did in briefings. They really have insulated themselves from the political process and have a lot of tools to ensure that they continue to grow and their power is never questioned.”
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.
The media response has predictably walked the safest line – focusing on the egregiousness of the victimisation of the least politically involved targets such as earthquake insurance claimants and child abuse survivors, and honing in on the very bottom rungs of the culpability ladder. They are as yet failing to confront the international and geopolitical foundations that lie under the surface of outsourced state-sponsored spying in New Zealand.
……
This is the behemoth Goliath that those of us unlucky enough to be targets find ourselves up against. Far too often targets aren’t ISIS brides, foreign fighters, terrorists, drug traffickers, or even foreign militaries, as the heads of our security services keep claiming. They are instead regular citizens – activists, journalists, dissident academics, researchers, or as we now know even earthquake victims and child abuse survivors. Anyone who pisses off any of the entities in that flow chart can soon find that the data and powers of the collective global network are being utilised against them.
Ex-Green MP Keith Locke has been able to prove that he was targeted since the age of eleven. His victimisation tracks back to 1955, and extends through the new millennium, including three years during which he was a Member of Parliament – a position that is supposed to grant him some immunity from political targeting by security services. As recently as 2013 he was still being referred to as a “threat” in internal NZSIS documents. Why?
Keith writes:
In the SIS documents I was identified as an “internal” threat because I “wish[ed] to see the NZSIS & GCSB abolished or greatly modified”. The documents labelled this a “syndrome”.
Keith Locke isn’t the only New Zealander that wants to see the NZSIS and GCSB abolished or greatly modified. On the above grounds, every person in this crowd would be considered a threat.
More here…sauced
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/18/exclusive-they-spy-with-their-little-eye/