Wednesday, September 19, 2012
I completely agree that money received as taxes is to be apportioned responsibly to the community and country as a whole — which is why I don’t think tens of millions of New Zealand tax dollars should be spent on a military installation serving the United States of America.
The Waihopai station is part of a network of similar bases set up at US-prompting by allies around the world. The same equipment, manuals, codewords and communication systems are found in each station.
This US intelligence system, codenamed “Echelon” in the 1990s, was the subject of a 2000-2001 European Parliament inquiry that confirmed and added extra detail to the descriptions of Echelon provided by GCSB staff for Nicky Hager’s 1996 book about the agency.
Echelon uses computers codenamed Dictionaries to sift intelligence from the millions of satellite communications intercepted at the various facilities. Waihopai, like the others, has separate US, British and Australian search lists (keywords, email addresses etc) that are used to identify and collect intelligence for the US, British and Australian electronic spying agencies.
The intercepted messages collected for the New Zealand agency go by an encrypted link across Cook Strait to the GCSB headquarters in Wellington. They are stored in a database inside a large vault room until processed by the intelligence analysts. But the messages collected at Waihopai for the other allies, which mostly means the United States, are routed straight from the GCSB information centre to the NSA and allied agencies.
GCSB staff themselves have expressed concerns about how Waihopai is used to support US intervention around the world.
A criminal case was taken by the Government against the three men who broke into the spy base and the accused were subsequently found not guilty. As I said, I wouldn’t have done what they did, but I am always willing to try and shed more light on the serious issues at stake.
MANU CADDIE