Norman Russel: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeNorman Russel: General Debate[Sitting date: 12 June 2013. Volume:691;Page:11052. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green):I moveThat the House take note of miscellaneous business . We have now progressed into the world that George Orwell wrote about only fictionally. We have moved into a world of a total surveillance State. What has been revealed internationally in the last week and in the last few days is the existence of PRISM a secret software that is run by the National Security Agency in the United States which enables the US Government to spy on basically all online communications in the United States and on anything passing through the United States. We have now moved into the world of essentially the total surveillance State. Everything we say or do can and probably is being recorded by the National Security Agency and various other security agencies.It seems to be a remarkable turn of events. The internet was supposed to give us freedom—and of course it has. It was supposed to give us access to information—and of course it has. But what we have seen is that it has also become a tool that is being used by the repressive State to invade our privacy to take our personal data and to read our emails on a scale never seen before and never imagined possible.Mr SPEAKER: Order! I am sorry to interrupt the member but he is having to cope with a level of noise that is unnecessary. Would members who want to carry on conversations please do so in the lobbies. I am sorry to interrupt the member.Dr RUSSEL NORMAN: Thank you Mr Speaker. What we are now seeing is that we have a Government in New Zealand that will not come clean about its involvement with the PRISM organisation. How many reports the Government’s communications agencies have received from PRISM is something it will not tell us. We know that hundreds have gone to the UK Government from the National Security Agency. We know that the Government has entered some kind of contract with Palantir. Palantir is a data-mining company that was established in part by the CIA and by various Silicon Valley executives including Peter Thiel. Palantir has established itself in New Zealand and apparently according to its ads has people embedded in the Government. Presumably the purpose of Palantir is to replicate the data-mining capacity of PRISM at a national level. It is very difficult for us to be entirely clear because as we saw in question time today the Prime Minister refuses to give answers when very simple and straight questions are asked about Palantir.It seems to me that a Prime Minister who is doing his job of protecting our democracy doing his job of protecting our freedoms and doing his job of protecting our privacy would give very clear answers about the role of PRISM and give very clear answers about the role of Palantir. But of course the Prime Minister is not doing his job. As we have seen time and again the only democratic oversight of the Security Intelligence Service is the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister has failed miserably over and over to ensure that those agencies are operating within the law and are doing their job.We all know that you cannot have democracy and freedom without some degree of security and so we accept the need for security. You cannot go to the vote if you are fearful of the gun. But we also know that when security agencies become so overbearing and become so self-confident of their ability to interfere in all of our private lives every minute of every day reading all of our emails and watching all of our digital and online communications then we are losing something that is critical to our freedom: we are losing our privacy. Without privacy and without the ability to have a private thought or to write a private email it is impossible to develop fully as a human being. If you never have the opportunity to speak freely with other people confidentially you never have the ability to develop freely as to what you really think about the world. You never have the opportunity to be free of the State and of the Government of the day.When this Government and others think that it is acceptable to mine the data the online communications of all people around the planet including all New Zealanders I think that they have fundamentally crossed a line as to what it means to live in a democratic society and it is time to put the security agencies back in the box from whence they came. They do not have the right to read everybody’s emails or to watch all of our online communications. In doing so they are destroying the very freedom that they argue they are acting to protect. Once they cross over that line the very freedom that those who work in the system say they are acting to protect is destroyed and demolished by those kinds of breaches against privacy against democracy and against fundamentally our freedom. So it is the responsibility of the Government of the day—and in particular the Prime Minister who has oversight of these agencies—to intervene and to tell us what is going on inside the security services in New Zealand.