Field on spying in the Pacific

Michael Field at Stuff writes:

It is not paradise out there in the South Pacific and while our friendly neighbourhood might be democratic and understand rugby’s off-side rule, corruption, self-interest and idiocy stalks their capitals. 

And dangerously surprising things like coups, civil war and mutinies happen, and they have a real and direct impact on New Zealand. 

The Snowden Papers suggest spying in the South Pacific is something new, but the reality is that we have been spying on Pacific countries for decades.

Back in 1914 London asked New Zealand soldiers to invade German Samoa. We said yes, but asked if they could give us some details of German defences. London replied we would look it up in an encyclopaedia.

These days acting like that is not on.

Time-shift to today and pick a Pacific country that suddenly finds itself with people being killed, buildings on fire and assorted bad people breaking into police armouries – as happened in the Solomon Islands. 

New Zealand’s Special Air Service was on the way to save lives – what are they expected to do for useful intelligence, Google it? 

Field makes the case that we need to do more than just collect metadata.

In the late-90s the Solomons was still known as the “happy isles” but some astute people were picking up whispers about dangerous people, one in particular, the little known Harold Keke. No one was spying on him but later he became a murderous warlord. 

So was Francis Ona, an obscure farmer who closed down the world’s biggest copper mine and sparked a decade-long Bougainville civil war. Much later into that civil war, New Zealand did a lot of spying there. 

We should have, because we were putting unarmed New Zealand soldiers on the ground.

The Snowden papers suggest we are massively collecting metadata across the South Pacific and sending it to the US. 

If this is the extent of the spying, then New Zealand’s tragedy is that we are not really listening at all to the Pacific.  

So often we have been taken by surprise. 

Foreign intelligence takes two forms. That you get by intercepts, and that you get through working networks, having conversations etc. We need both kinds.