By Ankit Panda
New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau conducts mass surveillance of several Pacific states.
Reports citing classified documents leaked by U.S. National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden state that New Zealand is carrying out mass surveillance over several Pacific island states, including Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Nauru, Samoa, Vanuatu, Kiribati, New Caledonia, Tonga and French Polynesia. The New Zealand Herald notes that the data gathered was shared with the other members of the “Five Eyes” intelligence-sharing network, a grouping encompassing the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. New Zealand’s Green Party has lodged a complaint with the country’s Inspector General of Intelligence and Security claiming that the Government Communications Security Bureau (New Zealand’s intelligence agency) broke the law by spying on, among other target, New Zealand citizens’ activities in the aforementioned states.
Diplomatically, the revelations will likely cause a problematic backlash for Prime Minister John Key’s government. The nations included in the Snowden documents as targets of New Zealand’s mass surveillance are all friendly with New Zealand. The Intercept, which hosted the leaked documents, notes that the surveillance “is being carried out by GCSB from an intelligence base in New Zealand’s Waihopai Valley.” The report adds:
Intercepted data collected at the Waihopai site is being shared through an NSA surveillance system called XKEYSCORE, which is used to analyze vast amounts of emails, internet browsing sessions and online chats that are intercepted from some 150 different locations worldwide.
Read the full story at The Diplomat