Norman Russel: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — Referral to Government Administration Committee In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill — Referral to Government Administration Committee In Committee[Sitting date: 06 August 2013. Volume:692;Page:12353. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green):I rise on behalf of the Green Party tonight to oppose this Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill. We are focusing our comments here on Part 1 which is probably the most substantial part of the bill. I have put up a series of substantial amendments to Part 1—10 separate amendments that try to deal with some of the worst aspects of this bill. Although it is hard to fix this bill because it is fundamentally flawed we have put up a series of amendments to try to improve the bill.The first amendment that I want to talk about is the amendment in Supplementary Order Paper 316 which is about including metadata in the definition of communications. Metadata of course is like the data about data. If we were to use therecent example of Mr Dunne’s emails when the Henry inquiry accessed Mr Dunne’s email logs without his permission it accessed his metadata—so that was whom he sent emails to whom he received emails from the subject of those emails the time they were sent and whether there were attachments—but that did not include the actual content of the emails. This is what is called metadata. There are those from the Government side who argue that the definition of communication includes metadata but I think that that is not really very clear. So what we have suggested in this amendment using Supplementary Order Paper 316 is to make sure that metadata is included in the definition of communication.I think that the recent experience of the Dunne and Vance emails is relevant to this amendment. The reason why it is relevant to this amendment is that in the mind of the Government—in the mind of the Prime Minister’s office and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet—when it was considering the Henry inquiry it drew a distinction between Mr Dunne’s metadata and the content of Mr Dunne’s emails. So it thought it needed further authorisations in order to read the content of Mr Dunne’s emails than it needed to read the metadata around them. So even though the Government has at times argued that metadata and data are treated the same by this piece of legislation when it came down to applying some kind of principles—whatever principles Mr Henry had in mind when he conducted his rather unusual inquiry—in practice what we saw was that the Prime Minister’s office and the inquiry established by the Prime Minister clearly differentiated between Mr Dunne’s metadata which they did not seek his consent to access and which they just stole from his email accounts and the content of Mr Dunne’s emails.So when we come to consider this bill what is clear I think is that we do need to establish right up front that the definition of communication needs to include metadata because we have seen from the practice of this Government just in recent weeks that this Government believes that it can have access to all our metadata and it does not need to ask us. It can go into my email account or anyone else’s email account and steal our metadata—whom we have emailed and whom we have not—because the Prime Minister believes that that is his right. It is his right to steal our metadata if he is running some inquiry into some security breach; therefore he can go in and read your metadata—whom you sent emails to and whom you got them from whom you phoned and whom you did not phone—rather than the actual content of those phone calls. So I believe it is important that we make the amendment to make sure that it does include metadata at this point.The second amendment of the 10 amendments to this part that I would like to talk about for the moment is an amendment about deleting new section 7 in clause 6 of the bill. This is essentially to keep the existing objective of the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). The purpose of this is that a fundamental aspect of this bill that we have in front of us tonight is to transfer the GCSB from what was supposed to be a foreign-focused agency—it was supposed to be turning its surveillance activities on the rest of the world not on us. But under the bill that the Government is proposing here tonight it is proposing to turn the powers of the GCSB against New Zealanders. That is what the significance is of new sections 8A and 8C. Basically this agency with all these powers to intrude into our lives and to read our emails and listen to our phone calls and track our movements can now be used against New Zealanders whereas previously when it was established under the 2003 Government Communications Security Bureau Act it was very clear that it could be used only against offshore interests and people from overseas. Section 14 of the existing 2003 Act is very clear that it could not be targeted at New Zealanders.Unfortunately of course what we saw in over 80 examples is that the GCSB did target New Zealanders even though it had no lawful authority to do so. So it broke the law and illegally targeted New Zealanders. What it has done is say: “OK we broke the law so we are going to get the Government to change the law so we can keep doing what we were doing before even though it was unlawful under the old Act and no one gets prosecuted.” It is a great agency! I mean if the rest of us went and broke the law you would think that someone might be prosecuted but the GCSB gets rewarded. The Government changes the Act to suit the GCSB so that it can spy on us. So what I am proposing in my amendment in Supplementary Order Paper 317 is that we keep the existing objective of the GCSB—that is that it is externally focused. It is not meant to be spying on us. It was never designed to spy on us. The whole idea of the GCSB was that it was externally focused and it was not about that. So we think that that is an important change to make.The third amendment that I would like to talk about to try to improve this very flawed legislation is the amendment around clause 6 in Supplementary Order Paper 314. Essentially what we are doing here is saying that if new section 7 is retained then this removes the final line paragraph (c) which provides that one of the objectives of the GCSB is about the economic well-being of New Zealanders. The problem is that if we say that one of the objectives of the GCSB is about the economic well-being of New Zealand and we give the GCSB the power to target us with its surveillance and its attacks on our privacy and our freedom then it now has a very broad scope. There are all sorts of things that we would do that might threaten the economic well-being of New Zealand. For example if I were to mention that half of the rivers in New Zealand are polluted this could well be seen as threatening the economic well-being of New Zealand. In a certain sense I can understand that argument. It does not mean to say that I should not say it; it is true and it is important that we campaign to clean up our rivers. But in light of recent events clearly by my drawing attention to the fact that we have very polluted rivers in New Zealand some—and particularly those in the GCSB who are very keen on targeting people like me—would say: “Well you are threatening the economic well-being of New Zealand.” So what we are trying to say is that the GCSB should not have that ability. It should not be a rationale to attack us by threatening the economic well-being of New Zealand. We want to keep the GCSB externally focused not coming after us.The fourth amendment that I would like to talk about in this slot is about trying to restrict the ability for intelligence to be shared with any person or office holder. This is my Supplementary Order Paper 315. This amendment removes “the ability for the GCSB to report information and provide intelligence gathered to ‘any person or office holder (whether in New Zealand or overseas) authorised by the Minister’.” This is a very important amendment in light of the Snowden revelations. What we discovered from the Snowden revelations is that the GCSB which is presumably the agency is providing vast amounts of data to the National Security Agency. In the information that has been revealed by Snowden we now know that New Zealand is one of the sources of all the data that is provided to the National Security Agency about internet traffic phone traffic and all the rest of it and presumably the GCSB is providing that information which largely comes out of Waihopai to that agency.So what we are trying to do here in this amendment is say: “OK even if you do gather this information—all this data about all this information that is passing through New Zealand—we are trying to restrict the ability of the GCSB to pass it to its American masters.” If the agency says it wants all this information which obviously it does if Snowden is right—if the leaks from Snowden are right and there is no reason to think that they are not because they have been verified by the US Government in allcases where we could verify them—then what the GCSB is doing is intercepting all of this data out of New Zealand and we do not exactly know how and passing it offshore. So what we are trying to do with the amendment around Supplementary Order Paper 315 is to restrict the ability of the GCSB to pass that information offshore to any person or office holder whether New Zealand or overseas authorised by the Minister. This is to try to prevent the Minister saying: “Oh well the American agencies say that they want all the data that is coming down off the satellites and passing through Waihopai. We are going to pass all that data to them.” We are saying: “No we do not want you to become a spy for one of the global grid.”—the spying grid that the United States has now established at a global level to monitor all internet-based traffic and all of the emails that are passing around the world through the internet system. We do not want the GCSB to be performing that function.The reason is that it is incredibly damaging to New Zealand. What we have seen for example mostly recently is that Germany has now withdrawn its agreement with the United States about sharing security matters and New Zealand is now identified as one of those countries that is sharing this data on all of its allies with the United States.