Norman Russel: Intelligence and Security Committee — MembershipText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Intelligence and Security Committee — Membership[Sitting date: 13 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11136. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green):I am speaking on the proposal by the Government to appoint Tony Ryall to the Intelligence and Security Committee. I think that in considering this proposal we need to give ourselves a little bit of context. That context starts with—it does not finish with—the extraordinary events internationally of the last week whereby the international spying done with PRISM software run by the US National Security Agency was revealed to the world by Mr Snowden. As a leaker or a whistleblower he exposed the existence of an enormous conspiracy effectively which was that the US National Security Agency was spying on the electronic communications of basically everyone in America and essentially the electronic communications of most people in the world because so much of our internet traffic passes through America.The reason why that matters to us is not only that the US National Security Agency would have been spying on everyone in this House and pretty much everyone in New Zealand who uses the internet because at some point or another the traffic is routed via the United States. It is not only an issue because of what the agency would have collected it is an issue also because of what the intelligence communities might be doing in New Zealand and what the oversight is that the Intelligence and Security Committee is supposed to provide to those agencies. Were the reports that PRISMgenerated sent back to the New Zealand security agencies and were those reports looking at what New Zealanders were doing? We do not know the answer to that.The Prime Minister tells us that that is not true but of course the Prime Minister either has no idea—as we have seen in the past—or simply is not revealing the full truth. He does not answer many questions about this issue and when he does answer them the answers are not always right. So we do not know how much of the PRISM information was being passed back to the security services here.What we also do not know is whether the security agencies in New Zealand are attempting to establish their own domestic version of PRISM—whether that is what the Palantir company is trying to do. Palantir is a company established by some Silicon Valley high-tech people along with the Central Intelligence Agency—the Central Intelligence Agency was one of the founding investors of the company—in order to promote data mining or data analysis on a very large scale. It would appear that it has Government contracts in New Zealand now and is embedded in some Government organisations from what PRISM put on its website though the Prime Minister refuses to tell us as usual. So the question is whether the security agencies have established a similar kind of framework here and whether the Intelligence and Security Committee should be able to provide oversight over those kinds of activities.In other jurisdictions parliamentary oversight is taken a lot more seriously than it is in New Zealand. They have proper committees and they have real powers. For example the Norwegian committee is not made up of MPs. It is purposely made up of non-MPs so that it is independent of Parliament. It has powers to require intelligence agents to appear. It has the power to make those intelligence agents hand over information. The Intelligence and Security Committee in New Zealand has no such powers. It cannot force people to appear. It cannot force them to hand over information. Under the amendments that are being proposed by the Government that will not be changed. Basically they will not have to give us on the Intelligence and Security Committee information about what they are doing. So it is very difficult to have the kind of oversight that we need when we do not have the Intelligence and Security Committee as a proper committee.If you look at other jurisdictions even more of the Westminster-style jurisdictions you see that they do not have Ministers on these committees. By rule Ministers cannot sit on the intelligence and security oversight committees for the obvious reason that the Ministers representing the executive cannot provide independent oversight of what is an arm of the executive in the security services. In New Zealand we see that the Prime Minister who is also the Minister responsible for the intelligence services chairs the committee—an immediate conflict of interest. Then we have two other Ministers sitting on the committee—a majority of the committee are Ministers. So the executive has given itself authority and a majority on the committee that is meant to oversee the executive’s operations of the intelligence services. It is obviously not a serious kind of oversight.Appointing yet another Minister Tony Ryall—whatever may be the excellent qualities of Tony Ryall that Gerry Brownlee has described—on the Intelligence and Security Committee undermines its function and its purpose to provide oversight of the executive’s operation of the intelligence services. It is a clear conflict of interest which is why in other jurisdictions you cannot be a Minister and sit on the security oversight committee. It is so obviously a conflict of interest.Likewise the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security who is also meant to provide some kind of oversight should be an Officer of Parliament. Instead essentially the Inspector-General works with the executive. The Inspector-General should be anOfficer of Parliament like the Auditor-General or like the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment who report to Parliament rather than to the executive.If we want to have proper oversight of these agencies then we need to set up proper oversight functions. What we have seen internationally with PRISM with the tremendous growth of the secret surveillance State—though not so secret any more because it has all been revealed or some of has been revealed I guess—is that we desperately need dramatically improved oversight of the intelligence agencies. The Intelligence and Security Committee simply is unable because of its legislative mandate to provide that kind of oversight.It is impossible for the Intelligence and Security Committee as it is statutorily defined at the moment—and including the amendments the Government is pushing through—to do its function. In fact some of the legislative change that the Government is proposing will enable the security services to operate more of a PRISM-type scheme. The changes it is making to the Government Communications Security Bureau Act will mean that the bureau can spy on all New Zealanders whereas previously it was not supposed to be spying on New Zealanders. Of course it was spying on New Zealanders but it was not supposed to be.Likewise the changes to the Telecommunications Act will give the intelligence agencies the ability to require the telecommunications companies to give them back-door access to all internet traffic in New Zealand just like the PRISM system. So they are giving themselves the powers to establish at a New Zealand level something like what we have seen in the United States with PRISM. That is exactly what the changes to the Telecommunications Act are all about.This is I believe a deeply disturbing development and of course it has arisen since 9/11 in particular. It was there before but it has got much worse since then especially as the technological capacity of the State to monitor and provide surveillance of all electronic and online communications has developed further and further and we are now in a total surveillance environment. Everyone whenever they go online cannot be sure whether they are being surveilled by the US National Security Agency or by the New Zealand security services. That fundamentally corrodes privacy. At a fundamental level that is likeNineteen Eighty-Four where you had the television on the screen and you could never know whether or not they were watching you. That is the kind of environment we have now established with regard to online communications.That fundamentally undermines privacy and privacy is fundamental to being a complete human being. If you have no space and no time of your own when you know that you are communicating with other people in confidence and where you can discuss ideas honesty and openly where you can have thoughts in an uncensored manner you cannot possibly develop your identity as a person. That is exactly whatNineteen Eighty-Fourwas all about and what George Orwell was warning us about and that is exactly the kind of total surveillance State that has now been established. That is what Mr Snowden has revealed to us the National Security Agency was doing in the United States and we have no idea whether that is what the New Zealand security agencies are also trying to establish here and we do not have the legislative tools and the legislative teeth to actually find out what is going on inside those agencies.That is why we have supported a proper inquiry not only into what has happened with regard to Ian Fletcher and so forth but more important into what the role of these kinds of agencies is how much we need them and if we need them what kind of proper parliamentary oversight and democratic oversight they need in order to protect our privacy in order to protect our fundamental freedoms and democratic rights.