Can’t afford to miss anything, better spy on everything

Documents revealed by Edward Snowden says that New Zealand has been spying on South Pacific Islands.

What’s changed in the Key [government] years, is they now just grab everything – it all gets put into these American National Security Agency databases, it gets processed by these big intelligence computers and things.

Technology had moved on enough that they were moving to what they call the ‘collect it all’ approach in their intelligence gathering around the world, and so New Zealand is doing it’s bit in that.

GCSB – Government Communications Security Bureau were visited by XKeyscore trainers, in order to teach them how to you a programme which can collect everything, which it does.

While Prime Minister, John Key has refused the use of XKeyscore, former Chief of New Zealand Defense Force and Director of GCSB has said that GCSB agents were trained.

Samoa Spied?

An example of the routine South Pacific spying is GCSB monitoring of Samoa. The US-led Five Eyes alliance has allocated spying on Samoa to New Zealand, as part of what the July 2009 document calls the GCSB’s “South West Pacific Area of Responsibility”. The report, authored by the acting head of the GCSB’s computer network exploitation unit, discusses changes to Pacific Island mobile phone systems that were creating problems for GCSB monitoring of “target telecommunications networks within GCSB’s Area of Responsibility”.

It is the same with all the other South Pacific countries. The same 2009 GCSB report on “target telecommunications networks” discussed mobile phone networks in Nauru and Kiribati. By 2015 Samoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and Tonga have undersea cable communications but all the other Pacific Island nations still use satellites that are monitored by GCSB.

Fiji Spied?

The July 2009 report said GCSB staff had provided all their information on Fijian communications to the Australian DSD’s Military Support Unit that year. This was “to provide a Target Systems Analysis on the Command, Control and Communications of the Fiji Government … Up until now, GCSB’s major targets in the [Fiji] Government and [Fiji military] have kept a preference for Vodafone services”, it said, but they were increasingly shifting to Digicel cellphones. This strongly suggests there was a listening post in the New Zealand or Australian high commission in Suva targeting local mobile calls.

Why does New Zealand have to Spy on all of these Islands? Compared to NZ, all these Islands are nothing. Why are all the traffic data been collected? Since PM John Key took over, every data has been collected. This is what has been changed since before. PM John Key should allow independent inquiry as well if he wants to prove anything.