Friday, August 01, 2014



Is the GCSB tapping all our cables?

So, at the same time the GCSB was planning to inflict their new spy-law on us, they were being visited by an NSA technician to discuss installing undersea cable taps:

The most instrusive and powerful tools in the United States' electronic spying armoury were being lined up for installation in New Zealand last year, according to a document obtained by the Herald.

An engineer visited a GCSB base near Blenheim in February 2013 to talk about setting up a "Special Source Operations" site.

The SSO is the division of the United States' National Security Agency which carries out cable tapping and has vast resources to trawl and capture massive amounts of internet content and electronic communication.

[...]

The GCSB has refused to say whether it went ahead with plans to install the SSO site.


So, are the GCSB tapping our undersea cables and unlawfully reading all our foreign internet and phone traffic? They refuse to say. If they were obeying the law, they would simply say so, so that refusal speaks volumes.