Wednesday, December 13, 2017



More dubious behaviour from the SIS

The Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security has released their report into the Legality and propriety of warnings given by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service. The report is a follow-on from an early inquiry into the SIS's actions in raiding and warning members of the NZ Fijian community, in the process smearing an innocent man. The Inspector-General at the time found that that practice was illegal. The new Inspector-General has followed up by investigating past "warnings" from the SIS, and given substantial recommendations on how to ensure that future warnings respect fundamental human rights and comply with s16 of the Intelligence and security Act.

Past practice seems to have been appalling, with SIS officers at one stage explicitly instructed to exploit people's misapprehensions about their role and connections with foreign intelligence services - in other words, to let people think they were a despotic secret police able to kidnap and torture, and that they would pas son information to enable foreign human rights abuses if cooperation was not forthcoming. The Inspector-General calls this a one-off, except that this is exactly what they did in the Fijian case, explicitly threatening to inform Fijian authorities, which "could result in problems for and harm to people in [that country]". In one warning, they even appear to have specifically referred to Fijian human rights abuses.

The Inspector-General has made it clear that this isn't acceptable, and this has been accepted by the SIS (largely because its also been nailed down very clearly in statute and Ministerial Policy Statements). But the IGIS has also made recommendations about procedural fairness in such interviews, around both their context (whether there are police present), and whether people are allowed to retain a written copy so that they know exactly what they are being warned about. The SIS has rejected these recommendations, putting its own operational convenience and petty secrecy above people's fundamental rights.

This is not acceptable. It also undermines the whole oversight regime. Again, if the spies can just ignore the Inspector-General, there's simply no point in having one. But bluntly, if there's not going to be oversight, we can't have spies. If the SIS behaves like this, they need to be defunded and eliminated. Because the cost of having a lawless, criminal agency is far worse than anything they might ever prevent.