Greenwald posts article on spying allegations ahead of 'Moment of Truth' event

American journalist Glen Greenwald has released a story on The Intercept website entitled 'New Zealand launched mass surveillance project while publicly denying it'.

The story comes ahead of tonight's 'Moment of Truth' event organised by Internet Party founder Kim Dotcom at the Auckland Town Hall where Greenwald is also due to speak. Hundreds of people are already said to be lining up to get into the event.

Greenwald's story said New Zealand's spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), worked in 2012 and 2013 to implement a mass metadata surveillance system as top government officials publicly insisted no such programme was being planned and would not be legally permitted.

It said documents provided by fugitive spying whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the New Zealand government worked in secret to exploit a new internet surveillance law enacted in the wake of revelations of illegal domestic spying to initiate a new metadata collection programme that appeared designed to collect information about New Zealanders' communications.

Snowden in a post for The Intercept published today, accused Prime Minister John Key of fundamentally misleading the public about GCSB's role in mass surveillance.

"The Prime Minister's claim to the public, that 'there is not and there never has been any mass surveillance', is false," the former National Security Agency analyst wrote. "The GCSB, whose operations he is responsible for, is directly involved in the untargeted, bulk interception and algorithmic analysis of private communications sent via internet, satellite, radio and phone networks."

He said while at the NSA he routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in his work with a mass surveillance tool shared with the GCSB, called X Keyscore. It searches for keywords and phrases that justify opening the metadata extracted from cyber messages.

There's little new in the story Greenwald has published today as he had already stated that the GCSB contributed large amounts of metadata on New Zealanders to the X-Keyscore database. The Five Eyes programme also involves Australia, Canada, the UK and the US.

The top secret documents provided by Snowden apparently show that the GCSB with ongoing NSA cooperation, implemented phase 1 of the mass surveillance programme codenamed 'Speargun' at some point in 2012 or early 2013. Speargun involved the covert installation of cable access equipment - an apparent reference to surveillance of the country's main undersea cable, the Southern Cross cable, which carries most of the country's internet traffic to the rest of the world.

After that was completed Greenwald claims in today's article that Speargun moved to phase two, under which "metadata probes" were to be inserted into those cables. The NSA documents note that the first such metadata probe was scheduled for mid-2013. "The technique is almost by definition a form of mass surveillance; metadata is relatively useless for intelligence purposes without a massive amount of similar data to analyze it against and trace connections through," Greenwald said.

Southern Cross Cable scotched the claim, saying its cables linking New Zealand to Australia, the Pacific and the US were untouched and that no equipment was installed in either the cables themselves or the landing stations that could result in mass interception of communications.

"I can tell you quite categorically there is no facility by the NSA, the GCSB or anyone else on the Southern Cross cable network," Southern Cross chief executive Anthony Briscoe said in a statement. "I can give you absolute assurances from Southern Cross - and me as a Kiwi - that there are no sites anywhere on the Southern Cross network that have to do with interception or anything else the NSA or GCSB might want to do."

The impending release of the NSA files from Snowden forced the Government to admit last week that its foreign spy agency had been gearing up for mass surveillance. Key admitted that the GCSB had been working on a business study for a form of mass cyber protection for more than a year following cyber attacks on several large New Zealand companies. He said he stopped the work in March 2013 after an internal review uncovered a number of problems at the agency. The review by Rebecca Kitteridge was sparked when illegal surveillance of Dotcom came to light in September 2012. Her report found a further 88 Kiwis were unlawfully snooped on over a decade.

Key denied there had been mass surveillance of Kiwis though he later said Greenwald's documents might show New Zealand had been spying on some of its trading partners. He said the Five Eyes countries had an informal agreement not to spy on each other. Key has also promised to declassify documents proving the GCBS had not engaged in mass surveillance on New Zealanders if that was what Greenwald claimed tonight.

But Greenwald's article said the documents indicate that Speargun was not just an idea that stalled at the discussion stage. Critically, Greenwald said, the NSA documents note in more than one place that completion of Speargun was impeded by one obstacle, the need to enact a new spying law that would allow the GCSB, for the first time, to spy on its own citizens as well as legal residents of the country.

The legislation eventually passed by National was said to merely provide oversight and to clarify that targeted domestic surveillance which had long been carried out by the agency was legal. Key has categorically denied the law would allow mass metadata collection on the public.

Opposition politicians have said Key should have disclosed the plans on wider surveillance at the time of public concerns on the issue.

Before tonight's reveal Key resorted to accusing Greenwald of trying to hijack this weekend's election by doing Dotcom's bidding before New Zealanders went to the polls. Greenwald's article today adds the rider that his travel expenses to New Zealand were paid for by the Internet Party and it had agreed to donate his speaking fee to a designated charity.

(BusinessDesk)