What the GCSB are really saying

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GCSB decides it no longer needs warrants to access Five Eyes intelligence

Electronic spy agency GCSB has decided it no longer needs a warrant to request intelligence from its Five Eyes partners.

The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) has decided that under the law, it doesn’t need a warrant to obtain intelligence from partner agencies in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, but it will continue to obtain warrants when requesting intelligence on New Zealand citizens.

Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security Brendan Horsley raised concern about the “significant issue” in his latest annual report, published on Wednesday, questioning whether there would be sufficient oversight and ministerial supervision of the GCSB’s intelligence gathering from partner agencies.

Horsley also said the Security Intelligence Service (SIS), which conducts human intelligence or physical spying, had “rapidly expanded” its collection of intelligence data as it conducted “target discovery”.

This flew under the Covid radar but what the GCSB are really saying here through coded language is that NZ will now subcontract its vetting of Chinese students and visitors to the other 4 spy agencies to try and catch out obvious spies.

The legal fig leaf for this mass vetting of Chinese nationals is the pretense that information sourced from Australia, Britain, America and Canada will have been collected legally.

This is a total fiction post the Snowden revelations which revealed the NSA collected information illegally on an every day basis!

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By sidestepping the legal obligations of a warrant, the GCSB have allowed the mass surveillance of anyone entering NZ and no one really noticed.

 

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14 COMMENTS

  1. At this point our only hope is some really really strong solar flares. Because the average sleepy hobbit just don’t give a rats.

  2. It is a big issue to sidestep the warrant and I worry about the potential negative repercussions in the future.

  3. It is a big issue to sidestep the warrant and I worry about the potential negative repercussions in the future.

    • yes, well, they haven’t thought about the effects of removing the non-return valve…data leaks abound globally and yet our five/six eyes claim surveillance rights for who, really? When the Israeli army arrest a family because a six year old dropped a teaspoon on their roof and it was interpreted as stone throwing, what insidious amplification does this demonstrate? If a reading from a ‘g-tec’ type headset/cap array can accurately copy and extract thoughts, dreams and plans from a person’s brain there is a contemporary corollary, where the brain is also programmed- nature hates a vacuum, right?

  4. ” Unless of course you’re the most transparent Government…”

    That was the first warning that LINO were going to be no better than the previous corrupt National -Maori – ACT government.

    The Neo liberal stranglehold discourages transparency.

    Once again its not what they say , its how they behave ! and that is as close as we are going to get to transparency.

    ” I don’t recall ” is one of the most popular replies to a question you don’t want to answer.

    No one is ” on record ” saying anything with a straight face and the cosy fireside chats with the shyster and his deputy made sure of that.

  5. The GCSB is being used by capitalist foreign powers, i.e. the USA, the UK and others to make sure there will be no rowdy tenants in the new country they’re in the process of buying.

  6. Not a good move. If they want the help to catch the spies they should still need to have both a warrant and paper trail so that mis-use can be identified. And increasingly it is not about spies… as we see Green peace supporters, Green Party members, who have been spied on, who were not spies.

  7. can I just say hi and a big thanks to the spooks monitoring this site, we all appreciate your work keeping an eye on the dangerous lefties and the greenpeace hippies whilst ignoring the far right US evangelical subvertion of NZ democracy. sterling work chaps keep it up.

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