Grant Bayldon.
IT’S my first time in Berlin, so high on my list is a visit to the foreboding former Stasi headquarters. It’s easy now to laugh at the surveillance equipment on display. But just 25 years ago this was pure James Bond.
The Stasi – the Communist-era East German secret police – were infamous not just for their brutality, but also for the wholesale spying that they carried out. Reporting directly to the party elite, they put cameras into tie pins, built rubbish bins with recording equipment, and operated mass mail and phone interceptions.
Were the Stasi still around, their job would be much easier, because pretty much all electronic communications can be easily gathered en masse. The laborious individual listening and watching that required an estimated 180,000 Stasi staff and informers to run could largely be replaced by data mining and scanning today.
I need to be clear: New Zealand is not Communist-era East Germany, and the GCSB is not the Stasi. But perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Germany, a country that has such a recent and painful experience of the effects of state surveillance, has been one of the most outspoken critics following the Snowden revelations of mass surveillance by the United States National Security Agency and others.
Compared to countries that have overcome widespread human rights abuses in their recent past, New Zealand has been relatively blase about protecting human rights standards.
Three pieces of legislation passed in the past few months alone have breached our own Bill of Rights, according to the New Zealand Human Rights Commission. But in the case of the GCSB bill, which has now passed into legislation, people have sat up and paid attention. Perhaps that’s partly because its timing couldn’t have been worse for the Government.
While Prime Minister John Key is adamant that the Snowden revelations of mass spying by Western governments on their people don’t relate to the GCSB legislation, in an important way they do.
They remind us of both the incredible technical abilities now available to keep a population under watch, and also the lengths to which even democratic governments can go to stop their people from knowing.
Working for Amnesty International, I see daily the often terrible consequences when the balance between state control and individual freedom goes wrong.
Human rights freedoms are hard-won and easily trampled, and as a country that has had a comparatively good human rights record, we would do well to heed the lessons from what has gone wrong in so many other places.
Since the time of the Stasi, strong human rights principles have been built up to guide us all on when governments are justified in secretly monitoring their people. There are times when authorities will need to use surveillance powers. The trick is