My Evening with the Rebel Alliance - Assange, Snowden, Greenwald

by Mike Graham September 17, 2014

Yesterday, for a brief flash, New Zealand life turned into a Robert Ludlum novel…

It started with a cryptic email that hit my inbox around midday:‘Meet at Unite at 4.30.’

The sender was a high-up person in New Zealand’s Internet Mana party. The previous day he’d offered me one of the hottest tickets in town — a chance to get in the door at Kim Dotcom’s “Moment of Truth” at Auckland Town Hall.

A quick primer if you’ve not been following the follies in the Land of the Long White Cloud in recent months…

We have an interesting bloke in our midst called Kim Dotcom. He’s a gazillionaire and general mischief-maker who is being sought for extradition from New Zealand by America on copyright charges. They relate to his now-dead Megaupload file-storage site.

Dotcom has been causing merry hell for John Key, our Prime Minister, ever since his mansion was illegally raided by New Zealand police last year.

“The Moment of Truth” was the event where Dotcom promised he would “absolutely” prove that there was a conspiracy between Key, US President Barack Obama and Hollywood to have him extradited.

He also promised to ring in some “powerful friends” to make things even stickier for the Prime Minister. One of those was none other than Glenn Greenwald… the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who helped make NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden a household name in 2013.

According to Dotcom, he was coming to little-old-Auckland with anew suitcase of Snowden documents. These would prove the New Zealand government green-lit mass surveillance of me and my Kiwi brethren by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), New Zealand’s cute little equivalent of the NSA.

The Moment of Truth happened at 7.30pm last night.

New Zealanders choose whether or not to re-elect the National-led Government this coming Sunday.

Until now, the most exciting Monday evening in NZ involved a double-episode of
Shortland Street

But here we had not one but the promise of several very famous super-empowered individuals coming to town to try and influence this weekend’s election.

I’ll admit, on a purely personal level, I find a certain amount of satisfaction watching our Prime Minister squirm. It has nothing to do with politics. It’s like when you see a bully at school slip over in the mud when he tries to slap someone.

I don’t care much for political grandstanding either.

And I certainly have no time for Kim Dotcom. (His biggest contribution last night was a shameless plug of Mega, his new cloud storage encryption platform.)

But I DO care about privacy, liberty and open government.

And if you care about that too, here are a few observations on how “The Moment of Truth” went down…

Glenn Greenwald made the New Zealand Prime Minister look very, very silly

John Key, like him or loathe him, is a pretty cool cat.

That’s why it was quite remarkable to watch him regress into a petulant man-child over the weekend.

He called perhaps the most famous journalist in the world right now “one of Dotcom’s little henchman”.

He called him a “loser”.

He pointed out that Kim Dotcom had a “fat butt”.

And so, Greenwald got the biggest laughs from the 1,500-strong crowd from his opening remarks…

“It is not all that common to arrive in a country and, within 24 hours, literally, find oneself being publicly maligned and attacked by the nation’s head of state, using the most adolescent epithets imaginable.

“Henchman… loser… I’ve been called meaner things before. When I was 14 years old. But, today, and from a head of state? Remarkable!”

You can kind of understand why Key was pissed.

Getting accused by a gathering of the most famous whistle-blowers in the world of secretly monitoring every Internet user in New Zealand is not the ideal start to election week.

Greenwald arrived with claims of mass surveillance by the GCSB — a member of the NSA’s Five Eyes alliance — with a project called Speargun. The program involved a “cable access” tap into a deep sea cable that links the New Zealand internet to the entire world.

Key said those claims were rubbish. And that the government hadconsidered Speargun for “mass protection”, whatever that means, but had ultimately rejected the GCSB proposal.

You could hear a pin drop as Greenwald made his case with Snowden’s documents.

“The Key government has radically misled and deceived the New Zealand citizenry. I don’t make that accusation lightly… unless I have the evidence to back it up. And in this case I can categorically and with great confidence say that it is.”

At this point there may have been a few audience members still worried whether this was worth missing Shortland Street for. Those worries were allayed when none other than Edward Snowden appeared via Skype on a massive video screen…

“This decision doesn’t belong to John Key or officials in the GCSB making these decisions behind closed doors.”

Earlier that day Snowden said he had proof the GCSB used a program called, ironically, XKeyscore to mass-collect metadata on New Zealand citizens.

Key then denied this, but said that line we’ve heard from several national security officials round the world over the last 18 months:“We don’t discuss the specific programs the GCSB may or may not use.”

Speaking from Russia, Snowden — the former NSA systems analyst turned leaker — begged to differ with Key.

He said he had proof the NSA has set up a facility right here in Auckland to use the XKeyscore program to harvest all kinds of mass surveillance data on New Zealanders.

“There are actually NSA facilities in New Zealand that the GCSB is aware of, and that means the Prime Minister is aware of. And one of them is in Auckland. To this day, he’s said ‘I won’t talk about this. I won’t talk about this because it’s related to foreign intelligence.’

“But is it related to foreign intelligence if it’s collecting the communications of every man, woman and child in the country of New Zealand?”

“Maybe the people of New Zealand think that’s appropriate.

“Maybe they think that they want to sacrifice a certain measure of their liberty… That’s what democracy is about; that’s what self-government is about. But that decision doesn’t belong to John Key or officials in the GCSB making these decisions behind closed doors.”

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better, another bloke with white hair and a bushy beard appeared onscreen. And I swear you could hear several nerds swooning…

“Your country has been effectively annexed by the United States of America…”

The first thing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange did was say sorry for the “mysterious tunneling” going on in the flat below his London embassy compound.

His presentation wasn’t as slick and forceful as Greenwald’s and Snowden’s. And throughout, he had to compete with the incessant jack-hammering. He was visually annoyed by this. But he made a more thoughtful case — where he laid out the “wider context” of these Machiavellian goings-on in our little country.

Do you know what older, tougher prisoners do to younger, newer prisoners in jail? According to Assange, that is what America is doing to New Zealand right now when it comes to national security.

“When you control the surveillance systems of another country… you have in fact proceeded with annexing that country and that is what in fact is happening in New Zealand,” he pointed out to 1,500 nodding heads.

So, what came out of this extraordinary — if slightly surreal — meeting of the Rebel Alliance?

It’s hard to say. As I type this, talk radio is going ballistic trying to figure out what, if anything, has changed in the lead-up to Sunday’s vote.

I’d say… not enough.

John Key has been made to look like a complete tool at best… and an outright liar at worst. But I don’t think that will make any difference. And that is the real worry, I guess. Not enough people care about such things.

I found Dotcom annoying, as usual. His peeling laughter. His product plug that had Julian Assange, onscreen throughout, visually cringing from the Ecuadorian embassy in London. His comment: “You are heroes and I thank you very much for letting humanity know what is going on.”

Most importantly, his so called ‘killer blow’ email, proving a New Zealand/Hollywood conspiracy to nab him, never materialised!

You got the feeling the whole thing would have been much more effective if he’d stayed at home with a few buckets of KFC.

I found the political showboating a bit of a drag, too. The topic was more important — and the stakes are far, far higher — than who wins the next New Zealand election.

But what did happen last night is the curtains were well and truly lifted on the covert war on our liberties…for those of us who care about such things.

“Let me be clear: any statement that mass surveillance is not performed in New Zealand, or that the internet communications are not comprehensively intercepted and monitored, or that this is not intentionally and actively abetted by the GCSB, is categorically false,”said Snowden.

“If you live in New Zealand, you are being watched.”

And if you’re being watched in New Zealand of all places, for crying out loud, you’re being watched everywhere…

What are some practical things you can do to stop yourself being watched?

Watch out for those next week…

Sincerely,

Mike Graham

Read the rest of this article at The Escapologist