To my genuine shock, the GCSB Bill has managed to be slipped through Parliament with zero oversight and public discourse. I have never understood why my fellow New Zealanders have been so utterly devoid of any criticism of this draconian goose step towards a Police State, all because John Key, the anti-intllectual bloke we all want to have a beer with, is fronting it.
Let us all hope that this amazing piece of journalism by Campbell Live is enough to wake NZers up. We should as a country be grateful that John Campbell is at least one journalist who is refusing to let us be quietly led to the abattoir.
These new spying powers are about corporate profit motives and American hegemonic control. This is the 21st Century Stasi with every horror that brings where we are all criminals under surveillance 24 hours a day by an Orwellian state that doesn’t have our interests at heart.
While the mainstream media keep you dumb by focussing on the ‘Man Ban’, John Key is effectively passing the largest erosion of your civil liberties this country has seen since the 1951 Waterfront lockout. This legislation won’t be used against terrorists, it will be used against unionists, environmentalists, activists, brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, civilians and citizens.
We have quietly over the past decade had established a vast Intelligence Industrial Complex in NZ that doesn’t answer to Wellington, it is enabled, empowered and answerable to Washington. Over the last decade, funding for the SIS increased by 250% to $41 million in 2012, while the GCSB had its funding increased by 174% over the same period of time to $63 million.
Vast surveillance powers have been granted to the Organised Crime Intelligence Unit, Financial Intelligence Unit, Strategic Intelligence Unit, National Bureau of Criminal Intelligence, Identity Intelligence Unit, Threat Assessment Unit, Police Terrorism Investigation and Intelligence Group and the Special Investigation Group despite very few prosecutions in NZ for any of the things those agencies are supposed to guard against.
I concluded at the end of my Vance/Dunne Theory that..
I think that NZ is being used as a test market for a new kind of control. In the past America has usurped a nation’s sovereignty with armed militias and juntas. This outwardly obvious level of repression reflects poorly on America’s global image and makes things difficult for them domestically. I believe America is now focusing on capturing the Intelligence apparatus of countries and controlling those through access to their surveillance grid.
I fear that is what is happening in NZ and I am left deeply troubled by this insidious expansion of domestic intelligence.
This is a Washington Consensus we aren’t even conscious of.
…Our Prime Minister appointed his childhood school chum to run the GCSB for a reason. We have been conned by a multi-millionaire with his vacant aspiration and hollow optimism, we have been distracted by the nothings of a media more intent on keeping you stupid than informing us and we have been manipulated into agreeing with the concentration of power minus democratic oversight.
Our children who will grow up under this surveillance state will damn our collaboration because we have failed them.
There is nothing right, or honorable about John Key.
Welcome to the new casual fascism, and the worst part of it is that we did it all so willingly.
The fascist governments of Italy, Germany, and to some degree, Spain, were fronted initially by wildly popular leaders. Just saying.
An extensive propaganda machine helped project the aura/illusion of popularity. Should the GCSB bill pass perhaps down the road we can expect “the German look” to come back in fashion (looking over each shoulder before speaking something subversive).
Excellent Campbell Live piece. Sometimes I wish I had a TV
That was a stunning story on Campbell live last night. They really have upped their game this year and haven’t walked away from the reality of poverty in NZ, the reality of life for the people of Christchurch, the Kim Dot Com case and now the agenda behind the push for the GCSB bill and the impact it will have on society.
Campbell live went through a long period of being almost unwatchable, and had for some time an obsession with promoting fad diets and other assorted WTF? poly-filler type articles.
They turned around though and last night’s GCSB story was something that every NZer should have watched. Question is, was anyone paying attention?
Keys desperation in trying to get this through shows how much he is willing to sell our soul to the US hope Dotcoms day in court can reveal more than what we already know the matter needs more detail to emerge to change public perception about how deviant Key is
Top notch stuff. Have to stay tuned in the coming weeks for the other pieces. That’s how you get good ratings unlike our state broadcaster with the insult that is Seven Sharp, but like Key they’re comfortable with that.
So July 2011 was a busy time. Whenever there are these conferences looks like trouble’s brewing, that’s to be expected with these treacherous lackeys, have to take note to help piece together the sinister jigsaw.
As for this piece changing the public’s apathy over the GCSB bill, if recent history is anything to go by don’t get your hopes up.
Apathy is our middle name
New Apathy Zealand
‘We’ will be tripping over cadavers in the street before ‘we’ do anything.
Happy happy joy joy
New Apathy Zealand Inc?
NAZI?
If you haven’t got anything to hide then there is nothing to fear, right? This is the down to earth defence of mass intelligence gathering. The down to earth problem with this defence is that we all have something to hide somewhere in our lives and if the spies know have it on file they can use it to negotiate with us, or more crudely, blackmail us. So the journalist who had the affair that her husband doesn’t know about gets the call to tone down the story, the animal rights activist who cheated on their benefit gets told to report on what happens at the next committee meeting, the politician who got the undeclared cheque gets asked to stop asking questions, the neighbour who didn’t declare all their income to the IRD is asked to report on their neighbours.
We are all now potential agents of not just the GCSB, the SIS and the police but also the Australian, American and British agencies sharing the data. And we are all now a little bit less likely to be politically active or vocal.
Once this bill is passed, don’t email Nicky Hager for any reason and if for some reason you do, then don’t be surprised when your laptop, tablet, smartphone doesn’t work properly anymore and don’t believe them when they tell you its Microsofts fault or maybe you should, – ahh the dilemmas of the wired world eh?
Spying on its own citizen because of their opposing political leanings while at the same time allowing a great criminal money-laundering business in the centre of Auckland to expand and dictate laws to suit them (Sky City) – unfuckingbelievable. Yet it is happening right here in our little banana republic Niu Zild.
I see Johnny C’s poll on those in favour of the new GCSB bill attracted over 11.000 votes and 85% voted NO – not in favour, hmmm a case of Sharkey swimming with the dolphins but eating with the sharks, again!!!
But what will John Campbell’s ‘amazing journalism’ amount to?? Where do the feelings of the 85% go to from here?? John Key is, like Obama, just a puppet. He is ‘one of them’ – and if we were dumb enough to think otherwise – now we cannot fail to see the truth. Of course he is not working for our interests. He is working for an agenda of the elite – those who control the world from behind the scenes. NZers need to WAKE UP – along with most of the rest of the world…..before it is too late. 9/11 should have been the clue as to what was coming, but, yes, apathy is a great deterrent to truth seeking.
“The largest erosion of your civil liberties this country has seen since the 1951 Waterfront lockout” – much worse, I’m afraid. That was a nationalistic conservative event, the impact of which didn’t go outside New Zealand. This is part of a global event with huge ecological ramifications amongst other things.
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