NZ Intelligence alleged of monitoring former Green MP for involvement in Tamil question
[TamilNet, Thursday, 11 April 2013, 16:50 GMT]New Zealand's Security Intelligence Service (SIS), which is part of
the so-called Five Eyes intelligence network, comprising the
intelligence agencies of Australia, Canada, Britain and the USA, was
alleged of monitoring former Green party politician Keith Locke, who has
been sympathetic to the Tamil cause. Mr Locke believes the SIS began
covert operations on him in 2003, when he travelled to Sri Lanka,
reports The Dominion Post. The former Green Party politician has
demanded apology for illegal spying and that all 88 New Zealanders who
were being spied on should be notified if the Government Communications
Security Bureau (GCSB) has illegally snooped on them.
In 2003, following the ceasefire agreement between the LTTE and the
GoSL, Mr Keith Locke, travelled to the country of Eezham Tamils and met
the political leadership of the LTTE.
Mr.
Keith Locke, MP, Green Party, New Zealand meeting LTTE Political Head
Mr S. P. Thamilchelvan in 2003 at Ki'linochchi [TamilNet File photo]
Blaming the international
community for its failure, Mr Keith Locke, in June 2009 said the
following at the New Zealand parliament:
Mr Keith Locke
“While I was in the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam capital of Kilinochi, a Tamil proposal for an
interim self-governing authority was presented to the Norwegian peace
negotiators and was covered by the international media, but substantive
discussions on an autonomy solution never eventuated.
“There was
probably blame on both sides for that, but most damaging was the failure
of the international community to keep the pressure on the Sri Lankan
Government to go down the negotiating track and to not resort to war
again. To do this, the international community should have consciously
taken the conflict out of the context of the Government on one side and
the terrorists on the other.”
“During the 2002-2005 ceasefire,
the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam was made a legal organisation by
the Government of Sri Lanka and could freely operate anywhere in that
country, yet the US, British, and Australian Governments kept their
designations of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam as a terrorist
organisation and the European Union added the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam to its terrorist list. Of course, it is true that the Tamil
Tigers have engaged in terrorist actions in the past, including
political assassinations, and so has the Sri Lankan Government on an
even larger scale according to the statistics of civilian deaths in the
reports of human rights monitors like Amnesty International.”
* * *
The
GCSB operates wiretaps, intercepts email traffic and monitors other
interactions such as internet message boards, another report by The
Dominion Post said.
Security analyst and former US spy Paul
Buchanan told the paper that the information of any significance would
be passed to the other partners in the Five Eyes intelligence network.
Waihopai Spy Base
New Zealand houses a spy base,
named Waihopai Spy Base, which is said to be part of a US-led worldwide
network of spy stations, known as Echelon.
The government had
promised the New Zealanders in 1989 during the launch of the Waihopai
Spy Base that this secretive station would not be used to spy on New
Zealanders.
The Echelon spy system is said to be capable of
capturing and analysing ‘virtually every phone call, fax, email and
telex message sent anywhere in the world’, according to Patrick S.
Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannockburn College in
Franklin, Tennessee, USA, who previously served as deputy director of
the Center for Technology Policy in Washington, DC.
It remains
to be seen whether this network was deployed by an intelligence network
of the International Community of Establishments (ICE) in crushing the
armed struggle of the Eezham Tamils.
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