Green MP right to query logic of surveillance
massey-university
Fri Feb 13 2009 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Green MP right to query logic of surveillance
Friday, 13 February 2009, 9:51 am
Press Release: Massey University
Friday, February 13, 2009
Green MP right to query logic of surveillance
Green MP Keith Locke has misread the nature of security intelligence work in his calls for the Security Intelligence Service to be made more legally accountable, says a Massey sociologist.
The ability of security intelligence services to sometimes work “obliquely” in relation to the law in order to maintain social stability is commonly accepted in the criminological study of political policing, says Dr Warwick Tie, sociology lecturer at Massey’s School of Social and Cultural Studies in Albany.
However, he says Mr Locke’s call has highlighted the need for publically defensible reasons for so-called government “spooks” to monitor perceived security threats.
Mr Locke, a former peace activist and son of prominent enviromentalists and Communist Party members Jack and Elsie Locke, applied under the Privacy Act to have his top-secret file released. He is demanding a guarantee the monitoring – which dates back to when he was 11 years old – not continue, and is calling for tighter Government control and public accountability of security services.
Mr Locke is right to publicly draw attention to the file kept on him “in light of the covert nature and extra-legal potential of security intelligence work”, says Dr Tie, who has written widely on human rights, policing, restorative justice and conflict resolution.
“He is also right to personally challenge the NZSIS regarding the logic they use to decide what information to gather on him.“
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But Dr Tie says that the kind of legal accountability that Mr Locke seeks, which has been supported by Prime Minister Key in his inauguration of an official review of SIS procedures, is incompatible with security operations because “security intelligence work – by definition – must retain a capacity to operate askew to the authority of the law.
“That said, operations that traverse the authority of the law can never be officially recognised. To do so would subvert the idea of a single rule of law that covers the whole of society. Security intelligence agents thus sometimes find themselves in no-one's land, of both acting in the name of the law but obliquely to the rules laid down in law. Such is the unique character of security intelligence work.
“On the occasions that security intelligence workers get caught running beyond the law, they stand to get prosecuted, such as in the case of Aziz Choudry’s successful legal action against the NZSIS in the 1990s for the burglary of his home by its operatives.”
But, Dr Tie says, what is more important than a call for legal accountability is “a public requirement for ordinary reasonableness in the conspiracy narratives which security intelligence agencies weave about citizens. No legal grounds exist for those narratives and no legal grounds are needed to challenge them. The act of challenging the conspiracy theories comes down to a matter of doing it, in the manner begun by Mr Locke."
ENDS
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