Resign now John Key | The Jackal

23 Aug 2013

Resign now John Key

Today, itnews reported:

Police affidavits related to the raid on Kim Dotcom's Mega mansion appear to show that New Zealand police and spy agencies are able to tap directly into United States surveillance systems such as PRISM to capture email and other traffic.

The discovery was made by blogger Keith Ng who wrote on his On Point blog that the Organised and Financial Crime Agency New Zealand (OFCANZ) requested assistance from the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), the country's signals intelligence unit, which is charge of surveilling the Pacific region under the Five-Eyes agreement.

A list of so-called selectors or search terms were provided to GCSB by the police [PDF, redacted] for the surveillance of emails and other data traffic generated by Dotcom and his Megaupload associates.

'Selectors' is the term used for the National Security Agency (NSA) XKEYSCORE categorisation system that Australia and New Zealand contribute to and which was leaked by Edward Snowden as part of his series of PRISM revelations.

Very interesting indeed, especially so because only three days ago the NZ Herald reported:

Prime Minister John Key says he and the head of GCSB would resign if the spy agency were found to have conducted mass surveillance.

XKEYSCORE is a mass surveillance tool that captures all data communications. This is how Wikipedia describes it:

A detailed commentary on an NSA presentation published in The Guardian in July 2013 states that the XKeyscore system is continuously collecting so much Internet data that it can be stored only for short periods of time. Content remains on the system for only three to five days, while metadata is stored for 30 days. The commentary also cites a document published in 2008 declaring that "At some sites, the amount of data we receive per day (20+ terabytes) can only be stored for as little as 24 hours."

The Guardian's article is entitled: XKeyscore: NSA tool collects 'nearly everything a user does on the internet'.

By using a mass surveillance tool to gain access to Kim Dotcom and his associates communications, isn't the GCSB in effect conducting mass surveillance? They clearly have access to the mass surveillance undertaken by the NSA on New Zealanders.

If John Key was a man of his word he would resign.