In the 1980s New Zealanders believed their country to be cut off from NSA intelligence because of the then labour prime minister David Lange's refusal to allow the USS Buchanan, a ship with nuclear capability, into New Zealand territorial waters. But in reality, without consulting their government, the New Zealand services had in actually increased their collaboration with the NSA and accelerated the deployment of Echelon - at the risk of compromising the line then being taken by Wellington on Asian policy. It is transmitted automatically and because of the way the system is programmed, it does not allow the New Zealand party to know the key words used by its partners. The reverse, we suspect, is not true. This probably enabled the United States to use New Zealand infrastructures to spy on Greenpeace communications during its protests against the French nuclear tests on Mururoa atoll in 1995 without the Wellington intelligence services knowing, let alone the government.
Abuses are inevitable.
For example, a former Canadian spy, Mike Frost, accuses Margaret Thatcher of bringing Canadian operatives to London in February 1983 to keep an eye on two ministers of her own government who naively used their cell phones to hatch some political plot. The mystery surrounding the development of these systems strengthens the advocates of freedom of cryptography in their convictions. The man in the street has been systematically kept out of this debate. This security-minded approach is taken for granted on both sides of the Atlantic. But when it comes to economic intelligence, France is the United States' number one enemy.