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New Zealand spying on Pacific islands, Snowden leaks say
- jdimov 12y agoIn related news, your mom is spying on you. Question: who gives a damn. No one is entitled to privacy - no government, no organization and no individual. It's not one of your "human rights". In fact, it's not even a thing. Quite literally everyone has access to all of your personal shit and all of your super-secret secrets at all times. If you have a problem with this, switch planets perhaps, I don't know.
- Aoyagi 12y agoAs a wannabe-kiwi, I'm hardly surprised. PM Key has been 'cooperative' with the US in most things so it's not surprising Five Eyes are being used to its/their fullest potential. Good thing GCSB has been talked about a lot even before this revelation... And about TPPA.
- gnat 12y agoHey there, wannabe Kiwi. Look me up if you want to hit the ground running with connections to the startup/tech world. I'm "Nat Torkington" and google finds my contact details. Always happy to help Kiwis and wannabe Kiwis :)
- Aoyagi 12y agoI appreciate the offer, but I'm currently stuck in EU railway sector and I think we both know what state is KiwiRail currently in, heh.
- seren 12y agoSo is it mostly about French territories ? I don't think that the Vanuatu or the Fiji are a huge threat on the global scale.
- dbcooper 12y agoFiji has had a series of military coups in recent times. Of course NZ (and others) monitor them.
- chinathrow 12y agoThe "of course" argument can go home these days, seriously.
- wongarsu 12y agoBy all means, if New Zealand is worried about Fiji military coups, then it's the duty of New Zealand's intelligence service to monitor the Fiji military. The problem isn't that some nation is spying on some other nation, it's a problem of scale and scope. Fearing a military coup does not warrant "intercepting and storing content and metadata of all communications" happening on that island.
- rockyleal 12y agoIndonesia
- florianletsch 12y agoNZ Prime Minister John Key in August, 2013: "I'll resign if GCSB conducts mass surveillance". Well, now'd be a good time. Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11111384 http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
- josefresco 12y agoI guess one could argue this isn't Mass" surveillance since it was targeting specific nations. I don't agree, just that words can be twisted in hindsight to alter meaning.
- wongarsu 12y ago"Look, it's not Mass Surveilance, we are only spying on all communications of a few of our neighbour countries. It's not like we were spying on the whole world" I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that excuse would sound ridiculous. You can always say "I didn't do A because from now on I'm defining A so narrow that it doesn't include what I did", but that's not how language works.
- aidos 12y agoI get sooooo cross when I read anything that Key says. "If I wholesale blatantly flout the law as Prime Minister I'm never going to survive anyway." That's such a twisted (and effective, it seems) way of convincing people that he hasn't been involved in any wrong-doing. Let us not forget his statement on the GCSB bill that allowed sweeping powers for the spy agency (under his control) [1]. "All they can do is protect you, so it's against malware or a virus. ... On your computer at home you almost certainly have Norton Antivirus...that is exactly what that is, at a much higher level." Slippery doesn't even begin to describe the character of John Key. [1] http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/john-key-defends-the-gcsb-bill-2013081419 http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/john-key-defends... (from 8:00 in the video)
- kaybe 12y agoWell.. >Last month, Auckland man Shane Warbrooke put in an OIA request to the prime minister's office, asking for "any evidence to disprove the theory that Mr John Key is in fact a David Icke style shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering humanity towards enslavement". >"To the best of my knowledge, no. Having been asked that question directly, I've taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both have confirmed I'm not a reptile," a smiling Mr Key said today. >"So I'm certainly not a reptile. I've never been in a spaceship, never been in outer space, and my tongue's not overly long either." http://www.3news.co.nz/politics/john-key-im-not-a-reptile-2014021217 http://www.3news.co.nz/politics/john-key-im-not-a-reptile-20...
- gygygy 12y agoSo everyone's spying on everyone. Wonder if these guys could all get a wiki up and running, would save so much trouble.
- Thrymr 12y agoThere is essentially a wiki for the major English-speaking countries to share intelligence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement
- fintler 12y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellipedia
- razster 12y agoAt this point we should just unite and become one large populous.
- chinathrow 12y agoFull take, my a... Put those chaps in prison. There is simply no other place on earth for them.
- chinathrow 12y agoTo all the downvoters, I censored the a - if you have other reasons to not agree, please elaborate in a reply. Thank you.
- njkasndja 12y ago>please elabore in a reply Your comment is useless and contributes nothing towards a discussion, so there's that.
- chinathrow 12y agoThat's your opinion. My comment was to express my outrage - if that can't be part of a discussion, then...?
- darkwingduck 12y agoWelcome to HN, where your comments aren't censored, but insead they are 'groomed' by those who consistently cherish 'valuable' conversations by pandering to 'karma' points. The 'correct' dialog is to discuss how it's natural for our systems of governance to want to spy on everyone, and the 'correct' actions fall between accepting this or petitioning our masters to roll back 'some' of these advances. Your individual outrage is of no value to the collective.
- pastas 12y agoHow would the incentive of 'karma points' drive down votes? The two don't seem related to me (I say this from having a balance -10 karma points at the moment). Some comments, like the OP's clearly lack the elements of reasoned thought. In my experience, my downvotes seem to have been wielded when my comments offend the values of the down voter's social group - not when they fail to logically interface with the discussion. I think its clear that the majority of users seek to reinforce others who share their beliefs and penalize those they disagree with. Which seems rather primitive.
- belorn 12y ago"a foreign intelligence service that wasn't gathering some foreign intelligence, I'd ask him 'what the hell are we paying the money for?" The ye old argument of a defensive force. Why should we spend all this money on a army that just sit at home and wait for others to attack? This is of course different from when you have a defined target which threatens the country in a specific way. At that point, a defensive force and intelligence service should be deployed as it is appropriate to address that target.
- PJDK 12y agoSurely the point of the intelligence services is to find out who is threatening a country in a certain way?
- belorn 12y agointelligence services should operate the same way as the police do. The police job is to find out who commit crimes, but that doesn't mean they should invade peoples home at random in order to find out who the criminals are. Their start position is one where they suspect a specific crime is committed by specific people, and then go after those people using methods approved by society.
- rockyleal 12y agoThe righteous West is -has always been- corrupt and unworthy of trust.
- bilbo0s 12y agoI don't comment here to necessarily disagree with your assertion... only to say that the same is true for the rest of the world. ALL nations... are corrupt and unworthy of trust. It probably doesn't even make sense to say that this or that group of nations is "worse" than the others at this point in mankind's history. That would be like walking into a room full of pregnant high school girls... and picking the one you feel is the "most virgin".
- darkwingduck 12y agoI think you just extrapolated his comment about trust. I can trust most CEO's to be invested in the advancement of their company, but I wouldn't trust them not to speed in traffic. I would not however expect a CEO to be using his position to sabotage the company for some other company. American's have largely trusted their government's actions to be in the interest of the country as a whole, that veneer is skipping away. ... but hey, it's easier to dogpile on a down-voted posted, as that is the nature of social creatures. It's never enough to gray-out a post, everyone must down-vote in a play to damage disagreeable posts! Hub-bum-shebum,Hub-bum-shebum,Hub-bum-shebum
- pastas 12y agoMakes complete sense. Violent Muslim political groups operate throughout Malaysia, Indonesia and the Phillippines and NZ wants to make sure they don't use polynesian islands for covert training or staging attacks.
- bluekeybox 12y agoYeah, that New Zealand imperialism has been getting out of hand lately.
- phreeza 12y agoI wonder, are all these leaks actually still from Snowden himself or is the name being used as a cover/branding for other sources now?
- teraflop 12y agoSnowden leaked a huge number of classified documents to journalists, and ever since, those journalists have been sorting through the material and publishing stories based on what they find. In this case, the leak came by way of The Intercept, which employs Glenn Greenwald as an editor, who got the documents from Snowden in person in Hong Kong before Snowden went into hiding. So I don't see any reason to assume they're lying about where the material is coming from.
- task_queue 12y agoSomehow, national security is contingent on knowing EVERYTHING the public says and does. Total war has gone digital. I never thought I'd see the day where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004 would manifest into our reality.
- smeyer 12y ago>where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004 I think many people were non-sarcastically making these slippery slope arguments, at least in part because they feared these exact sorts of scenarios.
- task_queue 12y agoThere were and are many people calling it for what it is. Defenders of the bill would sometimes respond sarcastically with what they thought was hyperbole. The reveal about warrantless wiretaps slowly encroached on their retorts, but the FISA courts, NSLs and the mass collection of everyone's communications and whereabouts is really when we came full circle.
- TeMPOraL 12y agoThat's why slippery slopes are not always fallacies.
- Aoyagi 12y agoIt's still a fallacy, arguing the fact that fallacious argument can turn out to be true is a fallacy fallacy :)
- TeMPOraL 12y agoWait what? Fallacy fallacy is arguing that "it's a fallacy, therefore it's wrong", AFAIR. (Or, as it usually works over the Internet, "it pattern-matches some random fallacy list I vaguely remember, so it's wrong!!111".)