More details have been revealed by Wikileaks on the governments of Australia and New Zealand spying on Fiji and other countries.
Prime Minister, Voreqe Bainimarama has maintained over the years that New Zealand and Australia have been spying on Fiji.
According to the NZ Herald, New Zealand's electronic surveillance agency has dramatically expanded its spying operations during the years of John Key's National Government and is automatically funnelling vast amounts of intelligence to the US National Security Agency.
It has also been revealed that Australia and New Zealand collaborate closely on South Pacific spying operations.
A July 2009 report said GCSB staff had provided all their information on Fijian communications to the Australian DSD's Military Support Unit that year.
This was "to provide a Target Systems Analysis on the Command, Control and Communications of the Fiji Government.
It also said that up until now, GCSB's major targets in the Fijian Government and the Fijian military have kept a preference for Vodafone services but they were increasingly shifting to Digicel cellphones.
The report said this strongly suggests there was a listening post in the New Zealand or Australian high commission in Suva targeting local mobile calls.
Since 2009, NZ’s Government Communications Security Bureau intelligence base at Waihopai has moved to "full‑take collection", indiscriminately intercepting Asia‑Pacific communications and providing them en masse to the NSA through the controversial NSA intelligence system XKeyscore, which is used to monitor emails and internet browsing habits.
The documents, provided by US whistleblower Edward Snowden, reveal that most of the targets are not security threats to New Zealand, as has been suggested by the Government.
Instead, the Government Communications Security Bureau directs its spying against a surprising array of New Zealand's friends, trading partners and close Pacific neighbours.
These countries' communications are supplied directly to the NSA and other Five Eyes agencies with little New Zealand oversight or decision‑making, as a contribution to US worldwide surveillance.
The New Zealand revelations mirror what the Snowden documents showed in Europe, where the US and Britain were found to be spying on supposedly close and friendly neighbouring nations in the European Union.
The documents identify nearly two dozen countries that are intensively spied on by the GCSB.
On the target list are most of New Zealand's Pacific neighbours including Fiji, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Tonga, French Polynesia, Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati and Samoa.
The spy agency intercepts the flows of communications between these countries and then breaks them down into individual emails, phone calls, social media messages and other types of communications.
All this intelligence is immediately made available to the NSA, which is based in Maryland, near Washington DC.
The South Pacific targeting was confirmed by a New Zealand intelligence source, who said the GCSB monitoring included Pacific government ministers and senior officials, government agencies, international organisations and non‑government organisations.
Key, who is also the Minister of National Security and Intelligence, has argued that the GCSB is needed to protect New Zealand from terrorism threats such as those emanating from Islamic State (ISIS).
We will have more on this later today.
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