Tuesday, December 06, 2016



Even more spying

The SIS and GCSB's annual reports were released today. The bad news: the trend of the past few years of a relentless expansion of spying has continued. The GCSB was granted 15 new intelligence warrants allowing individualised spying in 2016, and the number in force rose to 22 - both records. As for the SIS, again the picture tells it all:
NZSpying2016

The reasons for all this spying? "Terrorism" and "Espionage" - you know, the same threats we've faced for that entire graph. But now we apparently need to spy on two or three times as many people to combat them. Yeah, right. Again, its hard to escape the conclusion that the "oversight" on these warrants is simply a rubberstamp and that the threshold for granting one has dropped significantly in the past few years. And if we want to change this, we're just going to have to get a new government.