First confirmed case of PRISM surveilance was against a democracy rights activist in New Zealand

[thewayne]

PRISM is/was an NSA intelligence-gathering program. It has been widely speculated that friendly governments spy on other countries so that said country doesn't violate laws about spying on their own people. And this happened in NZ. The activist was from Fiji, and was very active in trying to get democracy for Fiji and get rid of the prime minister. So in sweeps the NSA and PRISM to try and find dirt on him, which they did not find.

First Confirmed Prism Surveillance Target Was Democracy Activist (fortune.com)

Posted by manishs on Monday August 15, 2016 @08:00AM from the truth-is-out-there dept.
A new report by Television New Zealand in collaboration with The Intercept, based on leaks of former U.S. National Security Agency worker Edward Snowden has for the first time named a target of the NSA's controversial Prism program. The target was a middle-aged civil servant and pro-democracy activist named Tony Fullman. Fullman, who is originally from Fiji but has lived in New Zealand for decades, is an advocate for democracy in Fiji and a critic of Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama, who took power in a 2006 coup.

From a Fortune report:
According to The Intercept, the NSA in 2012 monitored Fullman's communications through the Prism program and passed on information to the New Zealand intelligence services. Around the same time, the New Zealand authorities raided Fullman's home and revoked his passport. The New Zealand intelligence services were not themselves allowed to spy on Fullman, who was a New Zealand citizen. However, as Snowden has repeatedly described, the agencies of many Anglophone countries spy on each other's behalf, in order to bypass their national legal restrictions. Fullman suggested in the article that people in the group may well have said violent things about Bainimarama, but this was just venting, not a plot. According to the report, they never suspected someone was listening into their communications. The NSA was said to be helping by analyzing Fullman's Facebook and Gmail activities. The 190 pages of intercepted documentation seen by The Intercept apparently didn't reveal evidence of a plot.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/16/08/15/1341241/first-confirmed-prism-surveillance-target-was-democracy-activist

Comments

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

It's a loathsome state of affairs, and sadly, not one that any Anglophone (or indeed, any) politician seems to want to address. Understandable, I suppose - surveillance plays on the popular stage bitterly disappointingly well, to a degree writers of the mid-20th Century could scarcely have imagined or believed. And as much of a hawk as Clinton is, I certainly don't see her reining in the NSA, or doing away with their part in this "oh, well, we can't spy on X, but hey, how about you guys do it for us?" extrajudicial game they so mockingly play.