About a year and a half ago, one of the biggest criminal raids in the history of New Zealand took place as helicopters, SWAT-type cops, and others raided the compound belonging to Kim Dotcom, owner of MegaUpload, an Internet cloud storage service. MegaUpload was accused of copyright violation -- its customers often uploaded music and videos to it. And while Dotcom (a German national whose real name was Kim Schmitz) always cooperated with take-down notices, the copyright lobby in the US couldn't tolerate his Hong Kong-incorporated service. So they got the New Zealand authorities to treat it as a criminal operation, and turned the portly geek into their own imaginary cartel lord, arresting him with maximum force.
Things haven't gone so well for the NZ authorities since then. Unable to prove their case, Dotcom was released and has reopened Mega, a privacy-centered cloud storage company where everything is encrypted and only the users have the keys.
Now, it turns out that the original charges against him didn't just come from the usual MAFIAA. They had the help of the NSA's PRISM program too. So much for its being used only for terrorists.
A blog postby New Zealand-based Keith Ng spills the beans. New Zealand's intelligence agency is the GCSB, the Government Communications Security Bureau. Ng reports, based on a redacted government document, how GCSB worked with NSA's PRISM program.
Once the GCSB's lawyer had a look at it, the Police provided a list of "selectors" to the GCSB (we now know from the PRISM documents that "selectors" is the term used to describe the search terms used to make PRISM requests):
The selectors were entered into [five characters blacked out in Ng's document], in an email classified as "SECRET/COMINT/REL TO NZL, AUS, CAN, GBR, USA". In other words, the selectors were entered into a secret communications intelligence system, and this secret system was considered related to Five Eyes:
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The email from the GCSB then described "traffic volume from these selectors": i.e. This secret system was capturing live traffic.
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What does this mean? It means that GCSB assistance is NSA assistance. It means that government agencies can tap into these powers as part of bread-and-butter law enforcement.
So the PRISM program is not only collecting information on terrorists, it's collecting information used in a criminal investigation of copyright violation. True, it was "overseas", but it was a US long-arm operation against a business not located in the US with the help of a compliant government.
Was this illegal in New Zealand? Maybe, but that country's government just forced through a new bill giving GCSB the power to spy on New Zealanders. Big Brotherism is now legal in kiwi-land. But more important to us here, we see how the NSA's claims that they are only hunting "terrorists" are a blatant lie.