
New Zealand spying on Pacific islands, Snowden leaks say - happyscrappy
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-31741564
======
florianletsch
NZ Prime Minister John Key in August, 2013: "I'll resign if GCSB conducts mass
surveillance". Well, now'd be a good time.

Source:
[http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11111384)

~~~
aidos
I get sooooo cross when I read anything that Key says.

 _" If I wholesale blatantly flout the law as Prime Minister I'm never going
to survive anyway."_

That's such a twisted (and effective, it seems) way of convincing people that
he hasn't been involved in any wrong-doing.

Let us not forget his statement on the GCSB bill that allowed sweeping powers
for the spy agency (under his control) [1].

 _" All they can do is protect you, so it's against malware or a virus. ... On
your computer at home you almost certainly have Norton Antivirus...that is
exactly what that is, at a much higher level."_

Slippery doesn't even begin to describe the character of John Key.

[1] [http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/john-key-
defends...](http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/john-key-defends-the-
gcsb-bill-2013081419) (from 8:00 in the video)

~~~
kaybe
Well..

>Last month, Auckland man Shane Warbrooke put in an OIA request to the prime
minister's office, asking for "any evidence to disprove the theory that Mr
John Key is in fact a David Icke style shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering
humanity towards enslavement".

>"To the best of my knowledge, no. Having been asked that question directly,
I've taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both
have confirmed I'm not a reptile," a smiling Mr Key said today.

>"So I'm certainly not a reptile. I've never been in a spaceship, never been
in outer space, and my tongue's not overly long either."

[http://www.3news.co.nz/politics/john-key-im-not-a-
reptile-20...](http://www.3news.co.nz/politics/john-key-im-not-a-
reptile-2014021217)

------
gygygy
So everyone's spying on everyone. Wonder if these guys could all get a wiki up
and running, would save so much trouble.

~~~
Thrymr
There is essentially a wiki for the major English-speaking countries to share
intelligence:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement)

------
task_queue
Somehow, national security is contingent on knowing EVERYTHING the public says
and does. Total war has gone digital.

I never thought I'd see the day where a sarcastic slippery slope argument
about the Patriot Act made in 2004 would manifest into our reality.

~~~
smeyer
>where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004

I think many people were non-sarcastically making these slippery slope
arguments, at least in part because they feared these exact sorts of
scenarios.

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's why slippery slopes are not always fallacies.

~~~
Aoyagi
It's still a fallacy, arguing the fact that fallacious argument can turn out
to be true is a fallacy fallacy :)

~~~
TeMPOraL
Wait what? Fallacy fallacy is arguing that "it's a fallacy, therefore it's
wrong", AFAIR.

(Or, as it usually works over the Internet, "it pattern-matches some random
fallacy list I vaguely remember, so it's wrong!!111".)

~~~
Aoyagi
No I mean you said that "because it turned out to be true, the original
argument wasn't a fallacy", which is kind of "reversed fallacy fallacy" I
guess, but I don't think it matters which "direction" it goes for the name of
the phenomena. I might be wrong, obviously. I'll ask around...

The more I think about it the worse headache I get, so I'll leave it at that
and hope for the best.

------
bluekeybox
Yeah, that New Zealand imperialism has been getting out of hand lately.

------
Aoyagi
As a wannabe-kiwi, I'm hardly surprised. PM Key has been 'cooperative' with
the US in most things so it's not surprising Five Eyes are being used to
its/their fullest potential. Good thing GCSB has been talked about a lot even
before this revelation... And about TPPA.

~~~
gnat
Hey there, wannabe Kiwi. Look me up if you want to hit the ground running with
connections to the startup/tech world. I'm "Nat Torkington" and google finds
my contact details. Always happy to help Kiwis and wannabe Kiwis :)

~~~
Aoyagi
I appreciate the offer, but I'm currently stuck in EU railway sector and I
think we both know what state is KiwiRail currently in, heh.

------
phreeza
I wonder, are all these leaks actually still from Snowden himself or is the
name being used as a cover/branding for other sources now?

~~~
teraflop
Snowden leaked a huge number of classified documents to journalists, and ever
since, those journalists have been sorting through the material and publishing
stories based on what they find.

In this case, the leak came by way of _The Intercept_ , which employs Glenn
Greenwald as an editor, who got the documents from Snowden in person in Hong
Kong before Snowden went into hiding. So I don't see any reason to assume
they're lying about where the material is coming from.

------
seren
So is it mostly about French territories ? I don't think that the Vanuatu or
the Fiji are a huge threat on the global scale.

~~~
dbcooper
Fiji has had a series of military coups in recent times. Of course NZ (and
others) monitor them.

~~~
wongarsu
By all means, if New Zealand is worried about Fiji military coups, then it's
the duty of New Zealand's intelligence service to monitor the Fiji military.

The problem isn't that some nation is spying on some other nation, it's a
problem of scale and scope. Fearing a military coup does not warrant
"intercepting and storing content and metadata of all communications"
happening on that island.

------
belorn
"a foreign intelligence service that wasn't gathering some foreign
intelligence, I'd ask him 'what the hell are we paying the money for?"

The ye old argument of a defensive force. Why should we spend all this money
on a army that just sit at home and wait for others to attack?

This is of course different from when you have a defined target which
threatens the country in a specific way. At that point, a defensive force and
intelligence service should be deployed as it is appropriate to address that
target.

~~~
PJDK
Surely the point of the intelligence services is to find out who is
threatening a country in a certain way?

~~~
belorn
intelligence services should operate the same way as the police do. The police
job is to find out who commit crimes, but that doesn't mean they should invade
peoples home at random in order to find out who the criminals are. Their start
position is one where they suspect a specific crime is committed by specific
people, and then go after those people using methods approved by society.

------
chinathrow
Full take, my a... Put those chaps in prison. There is simply no other place
on earth for them.

~~~
chinathrow
To all the downvoters, I censored the a __\- if you have other reasons to not
agree, please elaborate in a reply. Thank you.

~~~
njkasndja
>please elabore in a reply

Your comment is useless and contributes nothing towards a discussion, so
there's that.

~~~
chinathrow
That's your opinion. My comment was to express my outrage - if that can't be
part of a discussion, then...?

~~~
darkwingduck
Welcome to HN, where your comments aren't censored, but insead they are
'groomed' by those who consistently cherish 'valuable' conversations by
pandering to 'karma' points.

The 'correct' dialog is to discuss how it's natural for our systems of
governance to want to spy on everyone, and the 'correct' actions fall between
accepting this or petitioning our masters to roll back 'some' of these
advances.

Your individual outrage is of no value to the collective.

~~~
mikestew
pastas, your account is hell-banned so you need not worry about being
downvoted anymore. As for your -10, you have your own narrative but let me
give you the perspective of someone who had little interest in the
"disassociating woman" article and no personal stake in it. Your first two
comments on HN ever are a single word discounting the post, with nothing to
back it up. To many (including myself) that's a waste of electrons. Your more
eloquent responses amount to the same thing, just with more words. You can
write that off as "just <my> opinion" (to which I add "duh"), but ask yourself
what it was you said that has more substance than just being contrarian.

In summary, if you come into a thread shitting all over things with nothing to
back up what you say, you'll get downvoted.

~~~
darkwingduck
I think you robo-posted to the wrong thread bud.

#edit then in that case you'd think the post would be judged as having no
value and be downvoted.... oh wait, that would require a lack of hypocrisy.

~~~
mikestew
Sorry, can't reply to dead posts so I highjacked your reply. If you don't have
_showdead_ turned on, you won't see the dead post from user _pastas_ that I
replied to. _pastas_ has a theory on his -10 karma, a theory with which I
disagree. The unrelated article was referenced because his comments there make
a better example.

------
rockyleal
The righteous West is -has always been- corrupt and unworthy of trust.

~~~
bilbo0s
I don't comment here to necessarily disagree with your assertion... only to
say that the same is true for the rest of the world. ALL nations... are
corrupt and unworthy of trust.

It probably doesn't even make sense to say that this or that group of nations
is "worse" than the others at this point in mankind's history. That would be
like walking into a room full of pregnant high school girls... and picking the
one you feel is the "most virgin".

