Spying bill

IN REFERENCE to the GCSB bill, there is a lesson from the Great Wall of China. During the first 100 years of the wall’s existence, China was invaded three times. Not once did the enemy try to break down the wall or climb it, they simply bribed the gatekeeper and marched in, while those who built the wall relied on their wall of stone. They neglected to teach integrity to the people.

M A Wilson, Glenfield THE BROUHAHA concerning surveillance on Kiwi journalists is becoming even more ridiculous. Of course journalists have always been considered suspect by military hierarchies for good reason. Kim Philby was a journalist! So was Winston Churchill in an earlier incarnation. The line between journalism and intelligence is tenuous at best.

Cold War organisations for decades have always treated all outgoing/incoming communications across all channels as worthy of monitoring and investigating. Such is the nature of war and complex military establishments engaged in ideological struggle.

The fuss now being made over Jon Stephenson demonstrates the naivete amongst New Zealand journalists as to how the world really works.

Lorne Kuehn, Christchurch IN INDONESIA during the years of the Suharto courageous journalists published articles exposing human rights crimes committed by the military. Many paid the price of a long jail sentence for flouting the laws that said it was a crime to ‘‘spread hatred against the government’’ or to defame a government official. But without these journalists would Indonesia have achieved a transition to democracy?

We tell the world our military is democratically accountable. However, it is only thanks to the work of investigative journalists such as Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson that we know anything about many of the military operations undertaken in our name in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Now a leaked defence force manual labels investigative journalists as ‘‘subversive’’ and as threats on the same level as terrorists. Journalists and presumably also their sources will be vulnerable to surveillance and punitive sanctions. Politicians are now saying that they value freedom of expression, but to make that credible the intrusive and redundant GCSB Bill should be scrapped immediately.

Maire Leadbeater, Auckland