What if China was beating the US at its own super-power game in the Pacific and we didn’t even notice?

While Washington distracts itself with shutdown shenanigans and failed attempts to control the situation in the Middle East, president Obama’s “pivot to Asia” looks increasingly shaky. Beijing is quietly filling the gap, signing multi-billion dollar trade deals with Indonesia and calling for a regional infrastructure bank.

Meanwhile in recent years, New Zealand has been feeling some of the US's attention, and conservative prime minister John Key is more than happy to shift his country’s traditional skepticism towards Washington into a much friendlier embrace. Canberra is watching approvingly. It’s almost impossible to recall a critical comment by leaders of either country towards global US surveillance. We are like obedient school children, scared that the bully won’t like us if we dare push back and argue harder for our own national interests.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), warmly backed by Australian prime minister Tony Abbott and New Zealand, is just the latest example of US client states allowing US multinationals far too much influence in their markets in a futile attempt to challenge ever-increasing Chinese business ties in Asia. German-born, New Zealand resident and internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom tweeted this week: 

This erosion of sovereignty goes to the heart with what’s wrong with today’s secretive and unaccountable arrangements between nations desperate to remain under the US's security blanket, and New Zealand provides an intriguing case-study in how not to behave, including using US spy services to monitor the phone calls of Kiwi journalist Jon Stephenson and his colleagues while reporting the war in Afghanistan.

There’s no indication that Australia isn’t following exactly the same path, with new evidence that Australia knew about the US spying network Prism long before it was made public. We still don’t know the exact extent of intelligence sharing between Australia and the US, except it’s very close and guaranteed to continue. Frustratingly, the "Five Eyes" relationship between English-speaking democracies has only been seriously discussed publicly in the last years by Greens senator Scott Ludlam.

New Zealand is a close Australian neighbour, but news from there rarely enters our media. This is a shame because we can learn a lot from the scandal surrounding the illegal monitoring of Dotcom and the public outcry which followed, something missing in Australia after countless post-Snowden stories detailing corporate and government spying on all citizens. 

Dotcom is the founder of Megaupload (today called Mega), a file sharing website that incurred the wrath of US authorities. Washington wanted to punish him but Dotcom obtained New Zealand residency in late 2010, bringing a close US ally into the mix. Intelligence matters usually remain top-secret, leading New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager tells me, but this case was different, blowing open the illegal spying on Dotcom. His lawyers scrutinised all the police warrants after the FBI-requested raid on his house. The government communications security bureau (GCSB) has always claimed it never monitored New Zealand citizens; Dotcom soon discovered this was false. Public outrage followed, and an investigation revealed many other cases of GCSB over-reach since 2003. Prime minister Key responded by simply changing legislation to allow spying on residents.

Hager explained to me what his investigations uncovered:

With Dotcom, GCSB helped the police by monitoring Dotcom's e-mail. What this largely or entirely meant in practice was that the GCSB sent a request through to the NSA to do the monitoring for them and received the results back. This means that the NSA used either wide internet surveillance (essentially "Echelon for the Internet") or else requests to the internet companies (Gmail etc) directly, ie the Prism type operations. It's not clear which it was.

The Key government now wants to increase its monitoring capabilities even more, and New Zealanders are showing concern.

I spoke at a public meeting in Auckland's town hall before the GCSB bill was passed. It was the biggest political meeting I can remember attending, with three levels of the large town hall completely full, and hundreds of people turned away. It's been a big thing here, becoming one of those issues that is a lightning rod for general unhappiness with the government.

New Zealand journalist Martyn Bradbury has also been a vocal critic of the Dotcom case. He’s pushing for a New Zealand digital bill of rights and tells me that “the case against Dotcom is more about the US stamping their supremacy onto the Pacific by expressing US jurisdiction extends not just into New Zealand domestically, but also into cyberspace itself.”

I talked to one of Dotcom’s lawyers, Ira P Rothken, who went further:

The US government’s attack against Megaupload bears all the hallmarks of a political prosecution in favour of Hollywood copyright extremists. The US used its influence with New Zealand to unleash a military style raid on Dotcom's family, to spy on him, and to remove his data from New Zealand without authorisation – all of which has been found to be illegal. Megaupload and Kim Dotcom are today’s targets, but the US crosshairs can just as easily be trained on anybody globally who dares challenge or inconvenience a special interest that holds sway in Washington, and the US – with its notoriously insatiable appetite for demonstrating political and global power – seems all too willing to cooperate.

This brings us back to China and the US’s attempts to convince its Pacific friends to fear a belligerent and spying Beijing. The irony isn’t lost on the informed who realise Washington’s global spying network is far more pernicious and widespread than anything the Obama administration and corporate media tell us is coming from the Chinese.

Neither China nor the US are benign in the spying stakes. Both are guilty of aggressively pursuing their interests without informing their citizens of their rights and actions. Australia and New Zealand are weak players in an increasingly hostile battle between two super-powers, and many other nations in our region are being seduced by the soft power of Beijing (including Papua New Guinea, partly due to its vast resource wealth).

A lack of transparency abounds. What is desperately needed is an adversarial press determined to demand answers about Australia’s intelligence relationship with the US – and whether all citizens should now presume they’re being monitored on a daily basis.

Mass Spying: How The US Stamps Its Supremacy On The Pacific Region

closer to home …..

from today’s Crikey ….

Don't trust governments on national security until they accept scrutiny

Polling by Essential Research this week showed only 9% of Australians have a lot of trust in the Australian government to protect their privacy, compared to 22% who have no trust at all. More Australians disagreed that governments are justified in collecting information on all people regardless of whether there is any suspicion of wrongdoing than agreed with it, 45%-42%.

That second result is significant because it goes to the heart of governments’ shift from case-based surveillance to mass surveillance over the last decade, driven by the War on Terror, the rise of a cyber military-industrial complex and the development of software and hardware able to handle vast amounts of data.

This shift was only suspected until recently; indeed, the idea of total internet surveillance by governments was dismissed as tinfoil-hat stuff by some until NSA-leaker Edward Snowden documented it. But it’s a critical shift: traditionally in western societies, the state only got to place you under surveillance if, for whatever reason, you were suspected of criminal activities; security agencies like ASIO, MI5 and the FBI and various state "special branches" went further and spied on people for ideological reasons, but that was still informed by the logic that the state only got to spy on citizens if it had a reason.

Now governments prefer to spy on all citizens, permanently. But different governments have moved at different speeds. The US government, particularly under President Barack Obama, secretly constructed a surveillance state straight from the work of George Orwell. The UK government was already far down the road of surveillance with its obsession with CCTV, before embracing the opportunities for internet and telecommunications surveillance developed by the US.

But while both major parties have a history of rapidly expanding intelligence agencies’ surveillance powers, to its credit the Gillard government elected to have a public debate about mass surveillance. And data retention is mass surveillance. It is not, as claimed by governments, a mere extension of traditional analogue case-based surveillance into the digital realm. Retention, even of metadata alone enables 24-hour physical tracking of users via mobile phone location. And retention of all data enables the establishment of patterns of interaction among users, even those not targeted for operational purposes, that traditional wiretaps could never provide; in some ways, the content of communications is less important than the metadata agencies want to retain.

But while the Gillard government declined to go as far down the path of other governments on data retention, it was every bit as enthusiastic, if not more so, about using national security and "operational reasons" to withhold information. All attempts to learn what the government knew about the NSA’s surveillance programs in relation to Australian citizens, what information it had obtained from those programs and what measures it had taken to protect its own secrets have been rejected on the basis that such information relates to "operational matters" or would otherwise impinge on national security. Despite being a key player and recipient in the NSA’s mass surveillance, the Australian government has been able to avoid all scrutiny of its role with its stonewalling tactics.

Obtaining government documents under freedom of information laws with vast slabs redacted under the blithe assertion of "national security" isn’t merely the ABC’s experience; documents obtained by Crikey on data retention had been even more densely deleted based on a combination of Cabinet, commercial confidence and operational reasons.

And new Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has gone further in invoking "operational reasons" to withhold information about asylum seeker issues that was readily available under the previous government.

As with the Gillard government's refusal to comment on the Snowden revelations, even this blatant dodging of transparency has attracted little media criticism. In fact, some in the media actually support it. In July, Australian journalist and former spy Cameron Stewart launched a disgusting attack on Edward Snowden, calling him a "hypocrite" and suggesting he was a traitor who acted "illegally and immorally". Stewart went on to claim that Snowden had revealed no illegality or "scandalous behaviour", a claim shortly rendered laughable by evidence from the NSA itself that it had broken US law on many thousands of occasions, that it spied on US economic rivals and that its agents used NSA surveillance apparatus to stalk women. Curiously, Stewart has been silent on Snowden’s revelations in the months since then.

This reflexive reliance on national security to avoid scrutiny is deeply corrosive of whatever remaining trust voters have for governments. To reject transparency and scrutiny for "operational reasons" when it might affect actual, ongoing operations in relation to individual targets is one thing, but under mass surveillance, whether that of the NSA, or that sought by our own government, now everyone is the operation. Government has changed the rules on national security to spy on all of us, but still rejects transparency based on rules and exceptions developed in the analogue world. There’s been no trade-off between governments and citizens -- they can now know everything about us, but are actively reducing the amount we can learn about them.

In that environment, the only means by which we can find out what governments are up to is, contra the apologists for the surveillance state, to rely on whistleblowers to reveal national security information and to fight every extension of intelligence agencies’ powers every step of the way, until governments accept they need to be open about mass surveillance.