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Snowden: New Zealands Prime Minister Isnt Telling the Truth About Mass Surveillance
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of The Intercept


The Intercept, September 15, 2014
Posted: September 23rd, 2014
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/09/15/snowden-new-ze...

Prime Minister John Key ... has denied that New Zealands spy agency GCSB engages in mass surveillance, mostly as a means of convincing the country to enact a new law vesting the agency with greater powers. Let me be clear: any statement that mass surveillance is not performed in New Zealand, or that the internet communications are not comprehensively intercepted and monitored, or that this is not intentionally and actively abetted by the GCSB, is categorically false. If you live in New Zealand, you are being watched. At the NSA I routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders in my work with a mass surveillance tool we share with GCSB, called XKEYSCORE. It allows total, granular access to the database of communications collected in the course of mass surveillance. It is not limited to or even used largely for the purposes of cybersecurity, as has been claimed, but is instead used primarily for reading individuals private email, text messages, and internet traffic. I know this because it was my full-time job in Hawaii, where I worked every day in an NSA facility with a top secret clearance. The prime ministers claim to the public, that there is no and there never has been any mass surveillance is false. The GCSB, whose operations he is responsible for, is directly involved in the untargeted, bulk interception and algorithmic analysis of private communications sent via internet, satellite, radio, and phone networks. It means they have the ability see every website you visit, every text message you send, every call you make, every ticket you purchase, every donation you make, and every book you order online. From Im headed to church to I hate my boss to Shes in the hospital, the GCSB is there. Your words are intercepted, stored, and analyzed by algorithms long before theyre ever read by your intended recipient.

Note: New Zealand's prime minister has acknowledged that Snowden may be right, as reported in this article. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government surveillance news articles from reliable major media sources.


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