Spying revelations are our Watergate moment
The State Services Commission’s shock report into government department use of spy agencies has left us with one stark truth: That the state has been assisting in systematic and oppressive Stasi-like surveillance for years.
On Tuesday, State Services Commissioner Peter Hughes released the results of a months-long investigation, after state insurer Southern Response was found to have used spy agency Thompson & Clark (TCIL) to undertake covert surveillance on Christchurch earthquake victims.
Soon more and more victims of this kind of government-assisted or supported spying came forward, and the investigation was expanded to include all government departments.
Seven government departments have been discovered to be not acting in accordance with the State Services Code of Conduct while engaging with a spy agency that acted unlawfully, at the expense of ordinary citizens. So far, it’s led to a Serious Fraud Office inquiry, a police complaint, and the resignation of the Southern Response boss.
But the impact of these revelations will reach far further. The effect of being under constant and intrusive surveillance, for simply campaigning on important social issues, fundamentally corrodes what it means to live in a free and democratic society.
We’ve learnt that, under the previous government, no-one was safe from being spied on if they disagreed with government policy.
The State Services Commission (SSC) investigation may well be one of the most important examinations into the inner workings of the state that New Zealand has seen. I’d go as far as to call it our Watergate moment.
Other victims of these covert operations include state abuse survivors, iwi, animal rights and climate activists, and even opposition MPs and political parties.
I’ve seen first hand the effects this sort of Stasi-like infiltration can have. In 2017, Greenpeace received information that suggested TCIL had been watching our staff and volunteers almost daily for years. We learnt that oil companies we opposed, including Anadarko and Equinor (formerly Statoil), had paid the spy agency to gather information on us.
Material we subsequently gathered revealed evidence of an extensive, indiscriminate operation on Greenpeace. It showed people had been followed home, tailed in their personal time, unlawfully had their car registration plates checked, and had their privacy breached in unacceptable ways. What’s worse, we learned the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) was party to some of these dealings.
At the time, people in the Greenpeace family were frightened. Staff felt nervous walking to and from work, and, two years on, some still feel like they have to check over their shoulders. I can’t imagine the impact that this sort of rotten operation has on those people who are dipping a toe into social activism for the first time.
In the report, Hughes said his biggest concern was that Thompson & Clark treated what it called ‘‘issue motivated groups’’ – democratic groups such as quake victims – as a security threat, and this went unchallenged by government officials. What this means is that for years, the government agenda has been led by a discredited spy agency.
In the case of Greenpeace, the SSC investigation concluded that MBIE’s conduct with TCIL breached the State Services Code of Conduct by failing to maintain objectivity. It showed that TCIL worked with MBIE on a covert project called Operation Exploration, a project that continues, and a project that we still know almost nothing about.
This report will have an impact on every person who has fallen victim to this affront to democracy over the past decade.
We now need to ask ourselves two things: How did we allow this to happen, and how do we ensure it never happens again?