Snowden revelations about NZ

New Zealanders " like their fascism, the way they like their racism – casual. The “feeble and passive-aggressive New Zealand culture”.  Passionless People have given birth to a User Pays culture politically adrift in an ocean of selfies."

---Martyn Bradbury

Snowden: US helped create loopholes 

in NZ law
NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden says the United States' spy agency has helped find or create loopholes in New Zealand law to enable widespread spying.

NZ Herald,

11 March, 2014

In testimony to the European Parliament, the exiled former NSA worker said the agency's Foreign Affairs Division put pressure on other countries to change laws to create legal gaps through which mass surveillance could be carried out.

He said lawyers at the United Kingdom's GCHQ were also engaged in finding loopholes and both agencies slipped changes past unwitting politicians.

"In recent public memory, we have seen these FAD 'legal guidance' operations occur in both Sweden and the Netherlands, and also faraway New Zealand."

Mr Snowden offered no further detail in his testimony about pressure placed on New Zealand. His written testimony was sent ahead of a EU debate on freezing data agreements with the US.

It has been linked to new legislation passed in New Zealand last year which changed the laws governing the electronic spying agency, the GCSB, to allow it to spy on Kiwis. The government also passed legislation which extended the bureau's powers over intercepting information sent and received in New Zealand.

Mr Snowden told the EU: "One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivise EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance.

"These efforts to interpret new powers out of vague laws is an intentional strategy to avoid public opposition and lawmakers' insistence that legal limits be respected, effects the GCHQ internally described in its own documents as 'damaging public debate'."

The changes were used to "justify indiscriminate, dragnet surveillance operations", he said.

In listing New Zealand among countries targeted, he said: "Each of these countries received instruction from the NSA, sometimes under the guise of the US Department of Defense and other bodies, on how to degrade the legal protections of their countries' communications."

Cyber rights group Tech Liberty's spokesman Thomas Beagle said the new laws introduced in New Zealand last year appeared surprisingly quickly.

"It was like someone had it sitting in a drawer ready to go. Who is really writing these laws."

He said the greater concern was the lack of oversight. "It's never being able to test what they are doing what they say."

Read Mr Snowden's full written testimony HERE

Snowden: NSA setting fire to the internet

Edward Snowden has made a rare video appearance at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival in Austin, Texas, condemning mass government surveillance and urging members of the tech-savvy audience to take action against it.

NZ Herald,

11 March, 2014

Speaking from Russia, where he was granted asylum, the former intelligence contractor said proposed reforms at the US National Security Agency (NSA) show he was vindicated in leaking classified material.

He said he had no regrets about leaking classified information. Asked if he would leak secret government information again, he replied: "absolutely, yes".

INTERNET FIREFIGHTERS

Snowden said the US government's mass surveillance failed to catch the Boston Marathon bombers and warned that governments have created an adversarial climate on the internet.

"They're setting fire to the global internet, and you guys in the room are the global firefighters," Snowden said.

He appeared against a backdrop of the US Constitution with "We the people" written in large letters. The video feed was broadcast on a large screen before several thousand credentialed festival attendees in two conference halls and streamed live online.

"I saw that the Constitution was violated on a massive scale," Snowden said to applause, adding that his revelations of government spying on private communications have resulted in protections that have benefited the public and global society.

Last year, Snowden, who had been working at an NSA facility as an employee of Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked a raft of secret documents that revealed a vast US government system for monitoring phone and internet data.

The leaks deeply embarrassed the Obama administration, which in January banned US eavesdropping on the leaders of friendly countries and allies and began reining in the sweeping collection of Americans' phone data in a series of limited reforms triggered by Snowden's revelations.

Major companies also tightened up safeguards, but Snowden said that is still not enough to protect privacy properly, calling for stepped-up encryption that would make mass government surveillance too costly to conduct.

"The government has gone and changed their talking points. They have changed their verbiage away from public interest to national interest," he said, adding that this poses the risk of losing control of representative democracy.

He said the government's priority has been an expansive and ill-executed system of massive information collection instead of protecting the vast amounts of intellectual property that supports the US economy.

"We've got the most to lose from being hacked," he said.

TECH INDUSTRY

Snowden also called on the technology industry to become serious about protecting the privacy of its customers.

He said the early technology adopters and entrepreneurs who travel to Austin every year for the event are "the folks who can fix this and enforce our rights".

On stage while Snowden spoke were Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project and Snowden's legal adviser. All three men said that they wanted to raise a call to arms to developers and activists to build better tools to protect the privacy of technology users.

Snowden said even the companies whose business models rely on collecting data about their users "can still do this in a responsible way".

"It's not that you shouldn't collect the data," he said. "But you should only collect the data and hold it as long as necessary."

Ultimately, the tech industry can help fix the problem, Soghoian said.

"Most regular people are not going to download some obscure security app," he said. "They're going to use the tools they already have," which include Google, Facebook and Skype.

The technology community should pressure those companies to introduce security measures that are stronger and easier to use, Soghoian said.

GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY

Snowden took questions from moderators and those relayed from spectators around the world through tweets using the hashtag #asksnowden.

The first question came from Sir Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist known as the inventor of the World Wide Web, who asked Snowden how he would create an accountability system for governance.

"We have an oversight model that could work. The problem is when the overseers are not interested in oversight," Snowden said. "The key factor is accountability."

"We need public advocates, public representatives, public oversight," he said, including "a watchdog that watches Congress."

He believed the lack of accountability will have international consequences.

"If we allow the NSA to continue unrestrained, every other government will accept that as a green light to do the same," he said.

Soghoian praised Snowden for leaking evidence of government surveillance of private communications and holding the companies who were complicit accountable.

"We have Ed to thank for that," he said, to loud applause.

WHISTLEBLOWER OR CRIMIAL?

Wizner noted during Snowden's appearance that Republican politician Mike Pompeo wrote to organisers beforehand urging them to cancel the event, saying "the ACLU would surely concede that freedom of expression for Mr Snowden has declined since he left American soil."

"If there's one person for whom that is not true, it's Ed Snowden," Wizner said.

Facing US felony charges of espionage and theft of government property, Snowden has kept a low profile of late and has said he won't return until the United States changes its whistleblower-protection laws.

US Attorney General Eric H Holder has taken a strong stand against granting amnesty to Snowden, saying he caused harm to national security and should be held accountable for his actions. Holder has described him as a defendant, not a whistleblower.

Barton Gellman, a Washington Post reporter who has worked with Snowden, released a video of his own ahead of Snowden's appearance. He said Snowden wanted to speak with "the people who are building and creating the next generation of the internet" because "technologists" are "a group he wants to influence".

"He's looking for places where there can be reform" to "practices that he regards as overbroad and overly-intrusive", Gellman said.

The annual South by Southwest Festival, or SXSW, draw tens of thousands of people to Austin, with privacy and government surveillance a focus for the tech crowd's five-day gathering this year.

On Saturday, the festival hosted an hour-long video feed discussions with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who helped Snowden publish stolen NSA documents.

Speaking over Skype from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange hinted at forthcoming leaks and blasted the Obama administration for not taking Snowden's revelations more seriously.

"SXSW agrees that a healthy debate with regards to the limits of surveillance is vital to the future of the online ecosystem," festival organisers said in a statement.