These latest revelations about a whole raft of Government agencies contracting Thompson & Clark to spy on New Zealanders on their behalf are just the latest in a long, sordid history of the State spying on the people. Go back a decade and you’ll find:
- Thompson & Clark exposed as spying on environmental activists on behalf of the since gone bust Solid Energy
- Thompson & Clark exposed as spying on animal rights activists on behalf of the State
- Police spy/infiltrator/agent provocateur Rob Gilchrist exposed as having spied, for money, on a whole raft of activist groups for a decade
- The release of Security Intelligence Service files on many people (including me) that revealed a long history of obsessive spying on activists. In the case of the only organisation to receive its file – the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa – the file revealed that the SIS had spied on CAFCA for a quarter of a century.
The State, in the form of the Police and the SIS, has always spied on activists. I have been a political activist for not quite 50 years and have documentary evidence that I’ve been spied upon by both.
What is different about these latest revelations is the State contracting out its spying to private enterprise (thus providing itself with the all-important “plausible deniability”).
Plus, the fact that spying net has now been spread much wider than the usual suspects – Communists, protesters, activists, unionists, “eco-terrorists”, etc – right down into the ranks of the Mum and Dad homeowners who were unfortunate enough to be among the victims of the Christchurch quakes and to have an unresolved claim with the singularly unhelpful Southern Response. This is what happens when spies – authorised and unauthorised/privatised – operate in a bubble of arrogance, secrecy and impunity. First, they came for the activists; then they came for the insurance policy holders.
But this stuff is only the tip of the spyberg. It involves “humint” (human intelligence): infiltration, surveillance, covert recording of meetings, that sort of thing. The vast bulk of modern spying involves “elint” (electronic intelligence) and it is carried out 24/7/365, silently and covertly monitoring all manner of communications. In this country it is carried out by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), whose key tool is the Waihopai spy base.
The GCSB and Waihopai is used not only to spy on foreigners, as directed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the Five Eyes spy alliance with the US, UK, Canada and Australia. It is also used to spy on New Zealanders. When it was caught doing so illegally (take a bow, Kim Dotcom), the Key government did not punish the criminals but legalised the crime. Despite a massive campaign against it, the Key government amended the GCSB Act to allow the Bureau to spy on New Zealanders.
That’s the bigger picture here. Let’s have an inquiry into the whole covert world of State spying – the GCSB, SIS, Police and the contractors such as Thompson and Clark – and the cloak of anti-democratic impunity in which it operates.
In the meantime, Anti-Bases Campaign, which has been campaigning on this issue since the 1980s, is doing our small bit. We’ll be back at the Waihopai spy base on Saturday January 26th calling for it to be closed and for the GCSB to be abolished.
Murray Horton – Secretary/Organiser of Anti-Bases Campaign
wheres all those dumb NZders that voted for john and believed in his ever word
Glorified Crime Syndicate Base
Shoshana Zuboff, one of the clearest thinkers of the digital age:
There is no place that does not see you. You have to change your life.
More or less we say: We understand the internet (because we tweet a lot). Anyone who has read Shoshana Zuboff’s recent masterpiece book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, will doubt that. We do not colonize the digital world, it colonizes us – in the form of surveillance capitalism, which maps us like a foreign continent.
Again and again Zuboff draws the link to the Native Americans, who welcomed the Europeans as guests with unsuspecting curiosity, without realizing that they would soon be the victims of an ethnocide. They could not imagine what the arrival of the white man meant, because it was unprecedented. Just as the surveillance capitalism is not just a consequent development of technology and capitalism, but something radically new.
“Surveillance capitalism unilaterally claims human experience as a raw material for conversion into behavioral data. Some of this data is used to improve products and services, the rest is called proprietary behavioral surplus data, which is used in advanced fabrication processes, collectively known as ‘machine intelligence’, to produce prediction products that anticipate what we are now, will do soon or at some point.” This new form of capitalism was established by Google – until today, the group is at the forefront of this development.
The bosses of Google realized that they could not only optimize the search engine with the data of their users, but that they had collected more data than they actually needed. Especially through the various other services, by scanning e-mail content, and later by Youtube, which was bought up Google in 2006, the users produced behavioral excess data for Google.
This data was and is crucial to Google’s success because it allows it to analyze what the user will think, buy, and choose next. Advertisers, insurance companies, governments or political parties can thus promote Google predictive products that make people predictable and manipulable.
Glass bee.
“The discovery of excess behavioral data marked a critical turning point not only in Google’s own biography, but also in the history of capitalism.” Private corporations and government agencies now chase after this surplus worldwide with always new apps or devices, which is why the “Internet of Things” is actually the new big thing. Data production and accumulation is just beginning.
In the future, “every physical space and every trace of behavior in that room – buzzing bees, your smile, the temperature fluctuations in the closet, the wind in the trees, a conversation – can be computerized.” The “trend to replace society with certainty” is already being consistently pursued with sorts of “social credit systems” in some countries.
The house is burning.
Shoshana Zuboff is currently the smartest and most far-sighted thinker of the digital age. If she scatters anecdotes in some places, she does not do that to entertain. One day, according to one of these anecdotes, a lightning struck Zuboff’s house and it started to burn. While her family fled outside, Zuboff still tried to rescue photo albums and to keep the fire from spreading, closing room doors until she was caught by a fireman who dragged her out of the house. The next moment the house went up in flames: Zuboff had imagined what the smoke in the rooms would do, but not that the house would disappear completely.
The house, engulfed in flames, is the old capitalism that Zuboff was still looking for in Silicon Valley until she understood that surveillance capitalism had replaced it.
It’s just beside you.
———
This is an informal translation from https://www.freitag.de
Know the Scientist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshana_Zuboff
…and get A Five-Eyes Bonus:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9_PjdU3Mpo
The problem is that even if you could get Waihopai shut down, it’s not the only ‘spy base’ in NZ.
Seriously – do you think they’d rely on just one operation?
There are others. You’d need to take them down too.
Then there’s the cellular network – it knows where every single person who uses a cellphone is at any particular time, or where they last were if the phone is currently switched off. That’s a form of surveillance.
Do you think the Flybuys card that gives you rewards is really there for your benefit?
The government knows where you shop, how much you spend, where you’ve been and where you are every time you swipe that card.
Am I part of the tin-hat brigade? Not at all. There’s just a lot more going on that people realise.
Interested to know “Who are the Spooks in New Zealand” ? Who are they interested in and who are they working for New Zealand or the USA Corporates ?
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