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

ByMartyn Bradbury

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.”

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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20 Comments

    1. 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.

      1. 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. “

        1. 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

  2. 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.

  3. 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

  4. 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.

    2. Come off it Trev, this government is very transparent, transparently neolib. A hug there, a smile there, better than a smarmy sneer, but the only change is in the mode of delivery.

  6. 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.

  9. 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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