Case highlights SIS shortcomings
Secrecy will always be an essential part of what the security agencies do at an operational level. Yet such needs cannot be construed as a licence for them to do whatever they deem necessary.
As we learned last week, the SIS had used its powers illegally when it accessed journalist
Nicky Hager’s cell phone records in an attempt to identify one of the sources for Hager’s 2011 book Other People’s Wars.
In that book, Hager had revealed hitherto unknown aspects of New Zealand’s military roles in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq during the 2000s.
Last week, Hager was issued an apology, and awarded $66,000 in compensation, with $24,000 of that sum being earmarked to help meet the legal costs that Hager incurred in the course of bringing the SIS to justice.
At this point though, the other $66,000 question is … what rules are the SIS now willing to observe when it is investigating journalists and their sources ? Surely, there’s a need to ensure the same sort of thing never happens again.
Essentially, the security agencies exist to keep the public safe.
Keeping state secrets safe is only secondary to that goal, and cannot be allowed to become an end in itself.
Clearly, the SIS should not have used its powers to try and hunt down Hager’s sources, so that the whistle blowers could be exposed and punished. That’s more the sort of thing we would expect from the likes of Vladimir Putin.
In passing, this episode has provided a disappointing footnote to Rebecca Kitteridge’s term as SIS Director.
In 2013, Kitteridge had come into the job promising to be a new broom, and someone who seemed to be intent on ushering in an age of candour befitting a modern security organisation faced with 21 st century expectations of transparency.
Yet on her watch, the SIS was authorised in the Hager case to revert to the same behaviours that had proved so controversial in the past.
For example: the SIS burglary of the Czech embassy in 1986 had been a violation of the Vienna Convention on diplomatic privilege.
Similarly, the burglary of the home of the free trade activist Aziz Choudry in the late 1990s was also deemed to be without due legal cause.
Reportedly, the SIS had never sought legal advice beforehand as to whether their activities with respect to Hager’s phone fell within the ambit of the law.
Once legal questions arose, the SIS then tried to justify its actions by stretching the meaning of ‘‘espionage’’ contained in its governing legislation. That effort failed, and deservedly so.
After all, Other People’s Wars had cited evidence that indicated the gaps between the official versions of our military deployments, and the realities on the ground.
These revelations hardly qualified as ‘‘espionage’’ as normally defined, which involve a hostile subversion of national security.
Civil liberties are always at risk of being sacrificed on the altars of law and order, or of national security.
For that reason it would enhance public faith if the SIS would publicly indicate what ground rules the agency aims to observe in future, should similar encounters occur between the Deep State and the Fourth Estate.