NZ Government Joins the Paranoids

I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded” ~ Edward Snowden

In my last post I wrote about the death of free speech and privacy in America.  This post is about the same thing happening in New Zealand.

New Zealand has always been a relatively free country, at least in terms of political and social liberties.  We were one of the first countries to give women the vote, we treated our conscientious objectors reasonably during the world wars, we decriminalised homosexuality before most other Western nations and from time to time we have tolerated a fair amount of political dissent with equanimity.  We have been relatively immune to the paranoia about national security that has infected America and other major Western nations since 9/11, an infection that has led to an unparalleled and unconstitutional expansion of government powers and made every petty bureaucrat and policeman believe he has a mandate to act like a school yard bully. Unfortunately the New Zealand Government finally has been infected with this craziness and is set to expand the powers of its Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) to include surveillance of New Zealand citizens.

The GCSB Amendment Bill is being enacted because the Bureau was found to have acted illegally in monitoring the communications of Kim Dotcom, a New Zealand resident.  The Government's response to this crime was not to prosecute those responsible in the GCSB but rather to make what they were doing legal.  The new Bill allows the GCSB to spy on New Zealanders not only for matters of national security but also for the "international relations and well-being of New Zealand" and the "economic well-being of New Zealand." Furthermore, it allows the GCSB to do so on behalf of any other NZ Government agency or any "public authority (whether in New Zealand or overseas)" or "any other entity authorised by the Minister [in charge of the agency]". This is a hugely broad mandate and, given that the GCSB has already proven it will interpret the law to the point of breaking it, I think it is safe to assume it will be following the Americans' practice of monitoring all domestic and international communications that passes through any NZ telecommunications network. The only other person involved in reviewing such warrants (and only in the case of domestic surveillance) is the Commissioner of Security Warrants, a bureaucrat appointed by the Government.

I have heard commentators from both the political left and right say that if you have nothing to fear if you are innocent, but that misses the whole point.   The fact that some people commit crimes is not a reason to assume everyone does and that all of us should be watched and listened upon by the government.  Such is the culture of the former Soviet Union and Communist East Germany and that prevails in North Korea today.  As US historian and political commentator Dan Carlin said in a recent podcast on the subject, the reason we have our toilets in the bathroom rather than the living room is because we expect privacy when we go to the toilet.  It is not just a personal freedom but requisite of self-respect to go to the bathroom in private. Prisoners are often denied this right for the very reasons that it emphasises their loss of freedom and destroys their self-respect.

We shouldn't have to justify our right to privacy, whether it is the privacy of going to the toilet or the privacy of our communications.  The government derives its just powers from the people, not the reverse.  It is not the legitimate role of the state to know our every move, conversation, opinion or whether we are having an affair with our best friend's wife.  Until and unless the state has probable cause that we have committed, or will imminently commit, a serious crime, it has no business invading our privacy.  And to have any meaning, 'probable cause' must be assessed by an independent judicial authority, not the bureaucrat carrying out the invasion of privacy or the prime minister authorising it.  The process of issuing such warrants and ultimately the warrants themselves should be open to public scrutiny.

The GCSB Amendment Bill is an unnecessary and imprudent expansion of the surveillance powers of the state in this country.  Like Edward Snowden, I do not want to live in a world where everything I say or do is recorded by government bureaucrats.  I thought New Zealand was relatively immune to the madness that has infected the rest of the world.  I'm ashamed and a little frightened to discover I was wrong.

Americans Voted for Oblivion

The 2012 US elections were more than just a choice of candidates for President, Congress and state houses, they were a referendum on America's future. They were like the last fork in the road, with one sign pointing to "Oblivion" and the other one saying "Long Road Back". The American people chose to follow the first sign. Of course, the sign didn't say "Oblivion", it actually said "More Hope and Change". It was a seductive slogan when it was first seen four years ago, but this time no one should have been fooled. The past four years have seen the Obama administration borrow an additional six trillion dollars to fund spending that resulted in $905 billion in economic growth. The federal debt increased by around 15% per year during Obama's first term and the Democratic Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has already announced plans to extend the federal debt ceiling by another $2.4 trillion before Christmas. At this rate the US federal government debt will reach $30 trillion before Obama leaves office. If that doesn't strike you as a rather excessive amount, consider that the entire world's GDP is only about $70 trillion.

The President appeared on Letterman during the election campaign and claimed he couldn't remember how much he'd borrowed during his first term, which made him look either very stupid or very dishonest, but that didn't seem to matter to the American voters. They wanted more of the good stuff and, like the Greeks, they didn't care who pays for it.

The problem with comparing the United States to Greece is that the similarities extend only to the nature of the problem, not the scale of it. Greece has an economy not much bigger than New Zealand's and that means it can be bailed out by its larger neighbours like Germany (should the German taxpayers choose to do so). No one can bail out America. Forget China - that country has already stopped lending to America at the levels it had previously. In fact, the biggest lender to the US Government today is...the US Government! Over 60% of US Treasury bonds last year were bought by the US Federal Reserve.  Where does the Federal Reserve get the money from? It creates it at the stroke of a computer keyboard. This is what they used to call printing money.

When a government prints money at the rates the US Government is now doing so, sooner or later it starts to significantly devalue its own currency - that's why the US Dollar has fallen against other currencies like the New Zealand Dollar. And sooner or later that translates into inflation, which pushes up interest rates, and that means the government has to print even more money to repay its loans. The end game of all this is the sort of hyperinflation they had in Germany in the 1920s and in Zimbabwe today.

This cannot end well for the United States, but Americans have made their choice - they have chosen to ignore reality and carry on snorting the fiscal crystal - and they will have to live with the consequences.  Those consequences can be seen again and again throughout history - from the fall of the Roman Empire through to Britain's decline in the first half of the 20th Century.  Great nations are sustained by great economies and are destroyed by economic decline.  I greatly admire the idea of America - a republic of the people where individual aspirations and liberty are enshrined in its founding documents - and I am saddened by its decline.  Perhaps the American people still have time to change course and avoid oblivion, but I suspect that after another four years of the Obama administration it will be too late.

Reflections on America

I have recently returned from three weeks in the United States of America, the longest continuous visit I have made to that country, and it has proved to be most enlightening.

America is both wonderful and awful, delightful and maddening, beautiful and ugly, full of charm and full of rudeness, wonderfully efficient and stupidly incompetent. It is, in short, the best and worst of all the world in one country.

We saw the most spectacular scenery of national parks that rivalled anything in New Zealand and glimpsed the back ends of the big cities that were worse than anything in South Auckland or Porirua East. We stayed in spacious accommodation with everything a traveller could need and in hotels where the service was worse than Basil Fawlty's. We enjoyed superb food and wine in great restaurants and found places where we could eat nothing but sugery doughnuts and greasy fries. We enjoyed the company of some of the most charming people we have met in our travels and were shouted at by arrogant officials who were incapable of understanding that their jobs were to serve the public.

And yet America was comfortably familiar, even to those of our group who had not been there before. At heart we share similar values and traditions, founded in a common European colonial history that has given us human rights, the rule of law and our democratic form of government. We are, of course, exposed to so much American culture every day.

But there are pronouced differences between us that have grown in recent years. Americans have always had a more defined sense of nationhood than we in New Zealand. They have always been very patriotic, although in the decades following World War 2 this was a proud, expansive form of patriotism - "look at us, haven't we done well!" Recently it has become a neurotic, defensive patriotism that manifests as jingoism and xenophobia.

America has turned into a nation of fear. People everywhere are scared and none more so than those who exercise authority. You can see it in the faces of the policemen, security guards and officials you encounter at the checkpoints and searches that greet you at the entrance to every public building or place where people congregate - we even had our bags scanned entering a food court in a Washington DC shopping mall. The fear and stress expresses itself in a complete lack of respect and courtesy by officials in their dealings with the public. This is a noticable change for people that were once renown for their courtesy and respect. There is none of the relaxed competence that you encounter from New Zealand public officials and service staff. The contrast was most noticeable when we re-entered New Zealand and passed through the friendly and efficient Customs and Biosecurity checks. In the United States, we encountered no one in a position of authority who went about their job with this relaxed confidence.

Americans we spoke to were bewildered by what their country has become. Certainly they do not like it, but they can see no way out of the locked cell they have created for themselves. As one local said, "Osama Bin Laden has won. If he set out to turn America into a nation of fear, he has achieved that." What is the point of being the most powerful nation on earth if its people cannot have lunch in a shopping mall without having to go through onerous security checks?

For the first time in a number of visits to America, I was glad I did not have to live there.