Norman Russel: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9666. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green): I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party about the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill. It strikes me always as strange that it is the parties of the right that want to restrict our freedom. Time and again what we find is that the parties of the right want to intrude into our lives. They want to listen to our phone calls they want to read our emails and they want to know what we are looking at on the internet. And here we have in front of us yet another bill from the parties of the right—the National Party and the ACT Party supported I guess by Peter Dunne but I hope he changes his mind—to restrict our freedom and breach our privacy.Let us remember what this bill does. This bill gives the Prime Minister and the Government Communications Security Bureau greater powers to break into our houses to put bugs into our houses. It gives it greater power to listen to our phone calls without a warrant. It gives it greater power to look at our emails without a warrant—it does not need a warrant. It gives it greater power to monitor every activity that we do every second of every day. That is what a surveillance State is about. It is striking that it is always parties of the right that support the surveillance State that oppose freedom and that try to breach our privacy year after year after year and here we have another example of it.The tragedy of it on this occasion is that in the past the attempts to basically undermine our freedom have been justified by the war on terror or whatever and of course there was the “Red Terror” before that. On this occasion the justification for the expansion of the powers of the bureau to spy on us even more is in order to cover up the Prime Minister’s embarrassment. That is the tragedy of this particular piece of legislation. What stands behind it is the fact that the Prime Minister is embarrassed as the responsible Minister who was supposed to be keeping the Government Communications Security Bureau acting lawfully and failed. This bill to allow the spy agencies to intrude further into our lives—its sole purpose really or its main purpose driven politically is to cover up the political embarrassment of the Prime Minister and that is a tragedy.Why is it that the parties of the right always support further intrusion into our freedom and our privacy? I would argue it is because they think that they are never going to be the target of it. They think: “Oh we’re conservatives. The security institutions don’t target us. They’ll target those lefties those greenies those radicals—they’re not going to target us. So we don’t care that we give more power to the Government Communications Security Bureau to break into our houses and listen to ourphone calls because we’re not going to be the target of it.” and maybe they are right. I mean if you look at the history of the SIS it was found that it was spying on Aziz Choudry an anti - free trade activist. The SIS persecuted Ahmed Zaoui because he was a democracy activist in Algeria and had upset the Algerian regime. We know that in the Kim Dotcom case the Government Communications Security Bureau was acting on behalf of the US Government. The Obama administration of course is highly dependent on donations from Hollywood. Hollywood is very upset with Kim Dotcom and when Hollywood said: “Jump.” the Obama administration jumped; when Obama jumped then the Government Communications Security Bureau jumped because the bureau is part of the “Five Eyes” network.So we know that the targets for the security agencies tend to be groups of people whom parties of the right figure they are never going to be part of: lefties progressives greenies. So what would they care if they breached the freedom and the democratic rights and civil liberties of ordinary New Zealanders? Of course those ordinary New Zealanders whose freedom and civil liberties the parties of the right like the National Party are happy to breach are people like anti-apartheid activists. Of course we have a Prime Minister who cannot remember whether he was opposed to apartheid or not but those people who were opposed to apartheid—of course the National Party was not opposed to apartheid; the Prime Minister just cannot remember whether he was or he was not opposed to apartheid—were the targets of the security agencies. Those people who campaigned against apartheid were the very targets of the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau and those are the people who in the future given these new powers of the bureau will once again be the target of these agencies.It is very difficult for us to know what the agencies do. Only very rarely does it become clear what they are up to. The Aziz Choudry case is an exception and the Ahmed Zaoui case is an exception as is the Kim Dotcom case. Mostly we do not know what they do because they operate in secrecy. But when it is revealed what they do what we find is that their targets are progressives. That is whom they have targeted historically and this is a bill to give them more power.Mr Shearer from the Labour Party made a very valid case for having an independent inquiry. I believe that not only do we need an inquiry into the illegal activities of the Government Communications Security Bureau—an independent inquiry of which there has been none—but we need an inquiry as to what is the role of the security agencies. Remember these were established during the Cold War. They kind of ran out of steam after the Cold War ended and then they used the war on terror as a justification for what they were doing and now they are trying to find new justifications and cyber-attacks are part of it. There is no doubt that cyber-attacks are real—no question about it. The question is this: what should be the role of these kinds of agencies in a free and democratic society given that they involve fundamental intrusions into our freedom and civil liberties? That is why we need an independent inquiry that is broader than just the Kim Dotcom case and that goes into the role of the agencies themselves. If they are to exist then we need to know why they exist. We need to know what kinds of limitations on our freedom and democracy we are willing to withstand or put up with by the very existence of these agencies.I think this thing goes to the issue of oversight. What we know is that in other jurisdictions there is some kind of parliamentary oversight of these agencies. There is no parliamentary oversight of these agencies here. The sole democratic oversight is John Key. John Key as we have seen has forgotten his role amongst many other things. He has forgotten that his job is to protect our freedom and democracy from the intelligence agencies and he has not performed that function. In other jurisdictions there is democratic oversight. When I have spoken to people who have been involved in theintelligence community over the years what they have said is: “The thing we’ve always feared in a United States framework was that the congressional committee would pull us up and we would be forced to give testimony to the congressional intelligence committee about what we’d done and if we’d broken the law we’d be put in jail.”There is no parliamentary capacity in the New Zealand system for the Intelligence and Security Committee to force any of the agencies to give testimony. They do not have to say a word to us. We have no ability to force them to tell us what they are doing. I am a member of the Intelligence and Security Committee. We have no capacity to force the intelligence agencies to tell us whether they are acting lawfully or not. We have no capacity to force an intelligence officer to appear in front of the committee and tell us what they are doing. We have no capacity to inquire into it.If you think about it the Intelligence and Security Committee is going to have to consider this legislation. It would be a bit like if the Social Services Committee had to consider legislation about Work and Income but it was not allowed to ask any questions about how Work and Income operates; it was not allowed to ask how the unemployment benefit is administered or any of the other benefit systems; and it had to decide whether the legislation was good legislation or bad legislation without knowing or being allowed to ask a single thing about how Work and Income operates.The Intelligence and Security Committee that considers this legislation will have to make a decision about whether it supports the legislation or not without ever being allowed to ask a single question about how the intelligence community actually works in New Zealand. Under the statute under which it is established we do not have the right to do that. That is the level the woeful level of parliamentary oversight of the intelligence and security services in New Zealand. Is it any wonder that these agencies which have been living under a stone for three or four decades with no public scrutiny no sunlight ever exposed to them went dysfunctional? Are any of us really surprised that a group of a few hundred people who never never had any oversight became dysfunctional? The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security was a joke. There was never any oversight of what they did. They lived under a rock and they did what they liked. So at the end of it we found they were highly dysfunctional. That is what the Kitteridge report showed. Just in purely bureaucratic efficiency terms they were highly dysfunctional. We found they were operating unlawfully. Is anyone surprised when there is no proper oversight of these agencies?This bill does not put in place proper oversight of these agencies. There is still no democratic oversight. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security should be an Officer of Parliament. The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security should report to Parliament as the Auditor-General does or the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment does or the Ombudsman does. That should be the role of oversight. The Intelligence and Security Committee should be a committee of Parliament that has the right to require the intelligence agencies to appear before it and the right to force information out of them. We do not have that right.So in the absence of an independent inquiry in the absence of any parliamentary oversight and given the record of the intelligence communities to target progressive activists it is obscene that the parties of the right once again want to restrict our freedoms want to breach our privacy want to break into our houses and want to give these intelligence agencies all these expanded powers. We cannot support this bill.