Snowden’s Allegations about NSA Spying on NZ May Be Right

The New Zealand’s Prime Minister, John Key, has recently acknowledged that the claim by Edward Snowden that the country’s web traffic is accessible through a NSA intelligence database “may be right”.

John Key refused to rule out that the local metadata was being intercepted by US intelligence, claiming that he didn’t run the NSA. However, he clearly denied that agents from the Kiwi spy agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, were helping feed mass country’s metadata into the database known as XKeyscore.

Snowden revealed another portion of documents saying that the NZ government has worked to implement a domestic mass surveillance program dubbed Speargun for a few years. The program involved installing equipment to monitor the Southern Cross cable, which carried most of the local web traffic to the world.

The Prime Minister has acknowledged the existence of Speargun program, but explained that the concerns were raised that it was targeted too broadly, and the program was ceased 18 months ago. John Key told that Kiwi intelligence did supply “some data” on individual “persons of interest”, but it wasn’t obtained via mass surveillance. In other words, no information about New Zealanders can be collected without a warrant.

Talking about Snowden’s allegations that NZ metadata was accessible through XKeyscore, the Prime Minister admitted that may well be right, while denying that Kiwi intelligence was contributing that metadata. John Key claimed that New Zealand has no capability for mass surveillance.

Recently, an Internet businessman Kim Dotcom, a NZ resident, held an event where Edward Snowden, Julian Assange and journalist Glenn Greenwald expanded on the Speargun revelations. Dotcom, who was illegally spied on by the Government Communications Security Bureau for a few years, has promised to remove his country from the Five Eyes’ alliance.

The journalist Glenn Greenwald announced that more important revelations about New Zealand’s foreign intelligence agency will be disclosed in the next few weeks. He promised that part of the reporting will identify the other nations on which the Kiwi agency spies – either for its own purposes or at the behest of the US.