Norman Russel: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Speaker Recalled In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee[Sitting date: 20 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12599. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green):I rise on behalf of the Green Party to speak on Part 3 of the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill. This is an important part because it deals with the question of accountability and oversight of the Intelligence and Security Committee. Iwant to speak to my amendment on Supplementary Order Paper 313. I have moved this amendment in order basically to give the committee greater ability to inquire into these agencies. Currently the committee has a lot of constraints on it. If you think about a regular select committee if it is to be able to do its job it needs to be able to inquire into an agency to ensure that it is working.Currently under the Intelligence and Security Committee Act there are all these constraints—for example the functions of the committee do not include inquiring into any matter that is operationally sensitive. What this means is that basically the Minister can say that this is something that is operationally sensitive so you are not allowed to look at it. You might think that is OK and you would not want the secrets to come out. But if the Intelligence and Security Committee—operating essentially in secret because it meets in a closed session—cannot inquire into the operations of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and the SIS then nobody else from the democratically elected Parliament outside of the Prime Minister can inquire into the operations.This is particularly important for the issue that was raised in Parliament today which was around whether the GCSB is in receipt of money from the United States Government. When I have asked written questions of the Minister responsible for the GCSB as to whether the GCSB has received money from the US Government and particularly the National Security Agency the Prime Minister has refused to answer those questions on the basis that these are operational matters and he does not comment on operational matters. We know from the United Kingdom that the equivalent of the GCSB the Government Communications Headquarters has received something in the order of £100 million from the US Government in order to do the work of the US spy agencies in Britain. We can only assume that the New Zealand spy agency the GCSB is also in receipt of money from the US Government. We cannot prove it. We do not have the evidence. We do not have Snowden’s leaks to show that it has been getting money from the US Government. But when we have asked questions about it the Prime Minister has blocked us on the basis that it is operationally sensitive.That is why my amendment on this part—which basically gives the Intelligence and Security Committee the ability to ask questions about things that might be operationally sensitive—is important. If we cannot even ask whether the GCSB has been getting money from the US Government—if that simple question is blocked by the Prime Minister on the basis that it is operationally sensitive—then we cannot ask some basic questions about the GCSB. If the GCSB is in receipt of many millions of dollars of US Government money—and we cannot prove whether it is or it is not but clearly the equivalent agency in the United Kingdom is so why would not the equivalent in New Zealand also be receiving US Government money?I mean there is a logic to this thing—that the National Security Agency is giving out large amounts of money to its Five Eyes partners. It has given a whole bunch of money to the UK. It makes sense that it has also given a whole bunch of money to the GCSB in New Zealand. And if we cannot ask those questions because they are blocked by the Prime Minister on the basis that they are operational matters then it becomes incredibly difficult for the Intelligence and Security Committee let alone Parliament as a whole to do its job of keeping the GCSB accountable. That is why I have moved an amendment on Supplementary Order Paper 313 to basically give more power to the Intelligence and Security Committee to ask these questions.Obviously I cannot talk about what happens inside meetings of the Intelligence and Security Committee because under the statute under which it operates it is an offence to reveal anything that happens inside the meetings even though I have been on the committee for 5 years now. But essentially if you look at the statutes under which weoperate the GCSB can always block us asking questions on the basis of operational sensitivity. That is why it is very important that we remove this section from the Intelligence and Security Committee Act so that we can ask those questions.We cannot even get into the basic financial situation of the GCSB. You might think that the Intelligence and Security Committee cannot ask questions about whom the GCSB is bugging but surely the committee should be able to ask questions about the financial situation of the GCSB. But we cannot even ask questions about the financial situation of the GCSB—for example whether it is in receipt of large amounts of money from the US Government—because when we ask those questions as I did in my written questions to the Prime Minister he blocked the answers to those questions on the basis that they concerned an operational matter. It seems to me that the question of whether the GCSB is in receipt of large amounts of money is an issue of financial review as much as anything else. How are we meant to operate the powers of financial review over the GCSB and the SIS if we cannot even ask questions as to where their money is coming from—that is whether it is coming from offshore or whether it is coming from the New Zealand Government? We are not allowed to ask those questions.Under some of the improvements of oversight—and there have been some improvements some minor improvements and I have acknowledged those previously—one of those minor improvements is that the financial review sessions are meant to operate in public. This is an amendment that Peter Dunne managed to get up and it is a small improvement. But you realise how small the improvement is when in the financial review discussion of the GCSB which is meant to be happening in these public sessions we will not be allowed to ask—or at least we will not be able to have answered—some basic fundamental questions about where the money comes from even under the marginally expanded financial review powers that Mr Dunne has got put into this bill because we cannot ask the GCSB the question of where the money comes from and where its income comes from.You might think that it is just an act of generosity by the US Government that it gives the GCSB a whole bunch of money and it is an act of generosity that it has given £100 million to the Government Communications Headquarters in the United Kingdom. But if the GCSB is to be truly accountable to the New Zealand people this is in fact a critical issue. There is a saying is there not? He who pays the piper calls the tune. That is one of the sayings. When we—that is the taxpayers and people of New Zealand—are the ones who pay the money then it gives us some control over the purse strings of the GCSB because we are able to say “No we are not going to give you money for that.” if we do not like what “that” is or “We will give you money for ‘x’.” if we do like what “x” is.The problem is that if the US Government is a major funder of the GCSB—and based on the evidence from the United Kingdom and the Snowden papers it may well be true. Who knows? The Prime Minister will not answer questions on it. If the US Government is a significant funder of the GCSB then we lose that level of control over the GCSB’s functionality because if it wants to install a particular system that the New Zealand Government and taxpayers simply do not want to pay for then it can get funding from offshore to install those surveillance systems.I give you that on first hearing this may sound extraordinary. When I first heard that the National Security Agency had been funding the Government Communications Headquarters in the UK I could not believe it. It was only when it was confirmed by the papers that Edward Snowden released which obviously revealed the true extent of what is really going on with the surveillance state that we were able to establish that these large amounts of money were flowing from the National Security Agency in the United States into the other Five Eyes agencies and presumably into the GCSB. That is whythis amendment which might seem relatively small and perhaps not relevant to issues of financial review actually is entirely relevant to the financial review function. We cannot perform even the financial review function of the GCSB properly because the Prime Minister is using the defence of operational matters as a reason not to answer basic questions—for example the question of whether the GCSB is receiving money from offshore.There are a number of other issues that are related to this and I think Mr Goff has done a good job in covering those. They include the fact that the Intelligence and Security Committee is dominated by Government Ministers when in other jurisdictions Government Ministers cannot be on such an oversight committee; the fact that the committee has limited powers of inquiry and this is a significant restriction; and of course the fact that in other jurisdictions members of Parliament are not on the committee which gives it much more independence. All of these things could have been dramatically improved in the way that we dealt with this had we gone through a proper process of holding an inquiry into these agencies so we could actually start from a sensible starting point of asking what kinds of agencies we want and what kind of oversight they should have. Then the law would follow from that including the oversight of the Intelligence and Security Committee which we are dealing with under this part. The law would flow from such an inquiry rather than our dealing with this bill in front of us which the Prime Minister and the Government are very keen to push through this Parliament.I would say to the National members of the Committee that you should support this amendment to the bill. It is a constructive amendment to the bill so that we can do proper financial reviews of the GCSB. Currently we cannot because the Prime Minister will not answer questions on them.