Wait! What? The GCSB gets secret intelligence that’s worthless? So why the hell are we in it?

21
1405

I’m sorry.

What?

Spy partners’ focus dictated lack of Far Right intelligence, GCSB boss says

International priorities dictated a gaping hole in the collection of far-right intelligence reports, according to the lead communications spy agency.

The Royal Commission of inquiry heard that the Government Security Communications Bureau got 7526 intelligence reports about terrorism and violent fanaticism in a three-month period in late 2018-19.

But not a single one was about right-wing extremism.

This “was not the result of the GCSB’s own intelligence collection settings”, the bureau’s Director-General Andrew Hampton told RNZ in a statement.

“The intelligence reporting GCSB receives from its international Signals intelligence partners is what those agencies collect themselves based on their own priorities.”

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These partners had their own legal mandates, which might also influence what intelligence they collected, Hampton said.

Let me see if I can get this completely straight.

It’s not the GCSB’s fault, that mass surveillance GCSB who gets hundreds of millions to protect us from threats, it’s not their fault that there was a massive failure in intelligence because our overseas partners only provide us with substandard intelligence that is warped by their own bias and legal blind spots?????

That’s the best they’ve come up with?

Look at how this excuse implodes later in the interview…

However, he added: “GCSB shares our intelligence and security priorities with its partners and, since the 15 March, 2019 attacks, has emphasised to them the importance to New Zealand of countering white identity extremism.”

…r-i-g-h-t.

So if the GCSB had told our partners in the first place that we were concerned about white supremacy they would have provided all they had?

See how that still comes back to the GCSB’s lack of ability to see white supremacy as a threat?

We opened ourselves to NSA mass surveillance for intelligence that can’t actually spot a legitimate threat and is so secret no one can evaluate whether or not this excuse is legitimate?

What the hell have we signed ourselves up to?

We know from Snowden that the 5 Eyes enables the NSA unfettered access to everything, Key ratified that and the GCSB received hundreds of millions to upgrade, but when challenged on why the hell they couldn’t spot a basic keyword search threat, suddenly it’s all the big guys feeding us crumbs and it wasn’t us excuses is it?

If we aren’t being protected from legitimate threats, why the hell are we in it?

How come we are less safe?

Let me be ver clear. I am in no way shape or form suggesting we give these clowns MORE powers, oh sweet Christ no, I’m merely demanding they utilise the powers they currently have!

The most dangerous mutations of white supremacy trace their narratives to certain historic events. A basic keyword search of those historic events would have had the terrorist pinging like a warning bell.

The Echelon programme that predates the Snowden revelations had basic keyword search functions, to pretend that isn’t possible now is simply not credible.

The issue here is that their own confirmation bias saw the enemy as Hager, Muslim students, Environmentalists, Māori nationals, German internet entrepreneurs and Unions.

Blaming the inability to think for themselves on biased intelligence from our Spy Lords only demands an answer to why we are beholden to those Spy Lords in the first place if they can’t spot a legitimate threat to us!

This still comes back to a cascade failure throughout the entire NZ Intelligence Apparatus to see white supremacy as a threat.

It is outrageous that they are getting away with this bullshit and dumping it days before Christmas.

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21 COMMENTS

    • They don’t just demean us, they demean themselves – although they’re so aloof and distanced from what it is they’re supposed to do, and represent “us”, the people (paid for by the peons) it won’t even register. Such is the nature of the second wave of the civil service – the corporate, supposedly ‘post-colonial’ civil service. Only the colonisers have mutated even if they come from similar geographic locations.
      The funny thing is that when it all turns to shit, they’ll be the first to scream mummy while they wonder what it was they did wrong. I probably won’t be around but I’ll make a prediction: History won’t just have rhymed, it’ll have repeated.

      • Don’t want to get semantic with you Tim, but I’m not sure that aloof is the right word here – aloof suggests some sort of elevated station, whereas those who’ve been cursed with working in the public service, know that management tend to be plain hopeless, but don’t know it. Perhaps a sideways sort of word, like the way that crabs scuttle and shuffle

        Stupid doesn’t know it’s stupid, and so damn stupid they think they’re frightfully clever revealing their ineptitude when folk out in the real world are actually busy – politicians do it all the time, knaves that they are, and cowardly.

        Quote “ The public say they are getting cynical about politicians. They should hear how politicians talk about them”

        Another quote “ Politicians are interested in people the same way that dogs are interested in fleas.”

        Final quote “ Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.”

        Last final quote. “ A government which robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul. “

        • You must have worked in the public service (as I have).
          In today’s PS, the trick is to get the hell out before you get too far up the ranks.

          I think the same is probably true in the corporate world.
          The higher you get, the harder it is to be able to say “I was only following orders” with any credibility.
          I suppose there’s always the PR and spin-doctoring wing to get into though. Shit! I should have thought of that at the time and done a Comms and Marketing degree instead

  1. Intelligence agencies remind us what happens when you go looking for “the problem” to a predefined solution. Where “the solution” is paying billions of dollars every year (across the 5 eyes nations) to the military and intelligence services (and there respective subsidiary industries in the private sector) to protect us from lethal, perpetual and ever present enemies.
    As these enemies prove difficult to locate in reality they have to be conjured up to meet the prescribed story line. As the Australian SAS so aptly demonstrated in Afghanistan – “intelligence reports tell the soldiers there are 6 Taliban in this village” ergo “there are 6 Taliban in the village” even if in the real world there are 6 impoverished male farmers with nothing what so ever to do with the Taliban.
    Another great example of this is in policing – a documentary followed a police force in a small US town. The town had a tiny population and a close to zero percent crime rate. Nevertheless, the brave sheriff and his deputies were armed to the teeth – they had access to armored vehicles, full body amour and military assault weapons including grenade launchers. Inevitably these warriors have to find an enemy to fight because that is what they are directed to do. Even if the enemy is a group of unruly teenagers in the poor part of town. The phrase “using an F15 bombing run to crack a nut” springs to mind.

  2. People might realize the real enemy is them. These agencies don’t give a flying f&^k about your safety, never have. What they care about is making damn sure people, ordinary people, don’t organize.

    Time to start organizing. If you don’t know how – go here and download the pdf and get started. https://libcom.org/organise

  3. This was meant to be the most open and transparent government or was that another promise not carried over from the last period of power.

  4. But surely @ MB that you can see that our entire security apparatus including our police, our ird, our local gubbimints, our banking, our bureaucracy, etc are entirely white and think they’re supreme without fear of contradiction? Our entire country’s a fucking neo nazi will-fuck-you-up-in-a-heart-beat system managed by sociopaths and dumb ones at that but that doesn’t matter because they’ve crafted and scripted mandates that protect each other and their cronies. Do you honestly think we’d have a poverty and homelessness disease in our rich country if good people were in control?
    Ares holes rule here. It’s been that way for fucking years. It’d be my opinion that our gcsb/sis/sas etc would be on far higher levels of alert looking for the well intended and those with good intentions slipping through the net to threaten their all bought and paid for status quo. tarrant’s a fucking hero to those bastards. @MB? We’re in a minority. There will come a time when we’ll have to be careful of what we write, if that time’s not already here.

    • A couple of years ago, when TDB went rather quiet, I thought the moment that you allude to had arrived.

      That time corresponded with the Guardian ramping up its anti-Russia campaign to new levels of absurdity (all the nonsense about Russia ‘invading’ the Crimea an poisoning everyone who disagreed, whilst rigging the US elections), and removing the Environment from its headline reporting.

      Coincidentally, Charles Hugh Smith has just posted an item on his blog, highlighting the very phenomenon that is worrying Martyn and you.

      This ‘if you question the Approved Narrative, you put a big day-glo target on your back’ particularly caught my eye.

      Whilst the US is the land of extremes, NZ is not that far behind in its Orwellian newspeak, thought police narratives. Totalitarianism is in firm control, particularly when it comes to finance and economics. TINA live on. And the ‘idiotic’ masses can’t see it.

      I often think of George Carlin when thinking about the mess we are in. One of his best (there are so many brilliant analyses): “Think about how stupid the average person is. Then remember that half the population is even more stupid than that.”

      What CHS has to say about deleting contrarians in the US (as per Winston’s daily task in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth):

      ‘Big Media: Selling the Narrative and Crushing Dissent for Fun and Profit

      December 21, 2020

      The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy.

      The U.S. has entered an extremely dangerous time, and the danger has nothing to do with the Covid virus. Indeed, the danger long preceded the pandemic, which has served to highlight how far down the road to ruin we have come.

      The danger we are ill-prepared to deal with is the consolidation of the private-sector media and its unification of content into one Approved Narrative which is for sale to the highest bidders. This is the perfection of for-profit Totalitarianism in which dissent is crushed, dissenters punished and billions of dollars are reaped in managing the data and content flow of the one Approved Narrative.

      So don’t post content containing the words (censored), (censored) or (censored), or you’ll be banned, shadow-banned, demonetized, demonized and marginalized. Your voice will be erased from public access via the Big Media platforms and you will effectively be disappeared but without any visible mess or evidence–or recourse in the courts.

      That’s the competitive advantage of for-profit Totalitarianism–no legal recourse against the suppression of free speech and dissent. And if you’re shadow-banned as I was, you won’t even know just how severely your free speech has been suppressed because the Big Tech platforms are black boxes: no one outside the profit-maximizing corporation knows what its algorithms and filters actually do or exactly what happens to the disappeared / shadow-banned.

      Shadow-banning is an invisible toxin to free speech: if you’re shadow-banned, you won’t even know that the audience for your posts, tweets, etc. has plummeted to near-zero and others can no longer retweet your content. You only see your post is online as usual, because this is the whole point of shadow-banning: you assume your speech is still free even as its been strangled to death by Big Tech black box platforms.

      Since Andy Grove’s dictum only the paranoid survive is my Prime Directive, I’ve paid a bit more to have access to server traffic data. So I can pinpoint precisely when I was shadow-banned: my overall traffic fell off a cliff and the number of readers visiting from links on Big Tech platforms fell from thousands to near-zero.

      The new consolidated Big Media Totalitarians play an interesting game of circular sources: in the traditional, now-obsolete / suppressed form of journalism, a reporter would be required to identify a minimum of three different sources for the story, and make at least a desultory effort to present two sides of the issue.

      That model is out the window in the USSA’s Big Media Totalitarian regime. Now reporters only have to use a completely bogus, fabricated source in another Big Media story. Just being in another Big Media platform / publication is now “proof” that the source is legitimate.

      In other words, investigative journalism is nothing but a Potemkin Village of circular sources conjured out of thin air by Big Media. Here’s an example from my own experience of being shadow-banned.

      1. A completely bogus organization pops up out of nowhere and doesn’t bother identifying its owners, managers or sources.

      2. This complete travesty of a mockery of a sham fabrication then issues a list of websites which it claims, with zero evidence, are stooges / outlets of Russian propaganda.

      3. With zero investigation of this slanderous, evidence-free “source,” the venerable Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos) publishes an evidence-free hit piece glorifying this fabrication on Page One.

      4. The other Big Media giants then amplify the bogus slander because it came from a “legitimate source,” the Washington Post.

      Do you understand how circular sourcing works now? Once a flagrantly bogus bit of propaganda is embraced by one Big Media giant as part of the Approved Narrative, then every other Big Media / Big Tech corporation promotes the fabrication as “real news” even as it is obviously the acme of “fake news”, a complete fabrication.

      The fake “source” was called PropOrNot, and the list included dozens of well-respected independent websites, all slandered with a completely fake accusation for one reason: each site had published some content that cast a skeptical eye on the crowning of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the crushing of Bernie Sanders’ campaign by Big Media’s Approved Narrative.

      As long as you post videos of kittens and kids dancing, you’re OK because your content (owned and controlled by the platform you posted it on–read the terms of Service) is free to the platforms and they use your content to “engage” users which generates billions in profits.

      But if you question the Approved Narrative, you put a big day-glo target on your back. Now if you’re a multi-millionaire, you know, a top 0.1% per-center, you can afford to keep posting dissenting views even after you’ve been demonetized and your income falls to near-zero.

      The rest of us aren’t quite so privileged. This is another of the toxic elements in Big Media / Big Tech’s consolidated control of what was once known as free speech: They don’t have to ban your content outright, which might cause a few ripples of tame protest; all they have to do is starve you into submission by strangling your source of income.

      Thanks to watertight terms of service, even a multi-millionaire is legally powerless against the USSA’s Big Media Totalitarian regime. By posting content, you already gave away all your rights. So you can go solo and post content on some obscure corner of the web that no one knows exist, but that’s the functional equivalent of being banned and demonetized.

      So go right ahead and enter a sound-proof box and scream your head off; nobody can hear you. Welcome to the totally privately owned, legally untouchable Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime that will let you know what’s in the Approved Narrative because that’s all you’re allowed to see.

      Gordon Long and I cover these topics and many more in our latest video Buying the Narrative (35:41) Since I’d like the video to actually be viewed more than 11 times, I avoided using the terms (censored), (censored) or (censored), and that’s the final fatal poison delivered by our profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime: self censorship. You know what you can’t say, so don’t say it. Stick with the kitten videos and you’ll be just fine.

      You’ll be just fine but you no longer live in a functioning democracy. The profit-maximizing Big Tech / Big Media Totalitarian regime hasn’t just strangled free speech and civil liberties; it’s also strangled democracy.

      It’s all fun and games until the pendulum of Totalitarian Consolidation and its Approved Narrative reaches an extreme (like, say, right now) and the pendulum swings back to an equal extreme at the other end of the spectrum. Keep in mind that hubris and money are no match for history: the more powerful you claim to be, the greater your fall. The way of the Tao is reversal.’

      Full article and graphics here:

      https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec20/sell-narratives12-20.html

    • ” @MB? We’re in a minority.” Well maybe so @ CB. ATM (that’s at the moment), that is what they perceive, except the mathematics of it all don’t really add up that well.
      No doubt you’ll be regarded as a bit of an amusement, though possibly someone to watch.
      Unfortunately for me (me me me me I I I ), I probably won’t be around to watch it all play out, much as I’d loik to in this space going forward.
      My predictions are that just as the Empire lost its Jewel in its Crown after having managed ‘rule of the masses’ based mainly on bluff and the threat of force – the majority of natives eventually got restless and came to realise they didn’t have anything else to lose.
      In that geographic ‘space’ today: same shit, just a different stink with a Chai Wala at the helm captured by the same sort of promise of treats and trinkets earlier colonisers tried on.

      Ah well ….. cudda shudda wudda …. pffft ….. next

      We did have a chance to make it all work – obviously just not the people to do it, even given the mandate they’d won

  5. They just allegedly caught two alleged Indian girls, allegedly muzzies in Auckland, allegedly planning an attack in Canterbury University allegedly bigger than the Christchurch attack. So if they can only see half the game, at least they allegedly catch half the problem. Did those kids have the means? Well, we can only allege they might.

  6. Our 5eyes (Some say 6eyes as Israel has some blurred cooperative relationship with 5eyes) partners are the problem not the solution. Nearly every significant conflict since WWII has been engineered by them. Putin suggested Russia join NATO a few years ago but no way was that war mongering organization going to agree to its ownredundancy. The USA perpetually inflames conflicts and ensures no peace is made with other great powers using provocations laughingly called “Freedom of Navigation exercises, sabotaging reasonable diplomatic negotiations with North Korea, supporting Jihardis (Moderate Rebels haha) in Syria, Afghanistan and even at home when it suits their geopolitical aims and creating the bullshit “Russia Hacking” narrative that their idiot politicians and media repeat endlessly. Here the malicious UK intelligence service rears it’s ugly little pea-brained head in support of the corrupt anti-democratic FBI and CIA. Why? So the money flows to the corporate arms manufacturers and to the Pentagon, so the ailing petro-dollar can be afforded a few more months of life support, so the Western financial system can continue it usurious practices against the Global South and so the worlds natural resources can be captured for Western corporate profits.
    And lastly that nasty little turd of a country that uses victim-hood as a weapon. Driving genuinely peaceful people such as Jeremy Corbett from power and funding western politicians that will do its bidding so it can maintain its genocidal apartheid regime of daily atrocities against the Palestinian people.
    These are our partners in 5eyes. They thrive on war, discord and chaos. No doubt our own representatives are as blind to their crimes as they are to what they should really be doing to protect New Zealand .

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