Journalist Nicky Hager is accusing the government of spying on its Pacific neighbours on an unprecedented scale and giving the information to the United States, Radio New Zealand reports.
Basing his information on documents provided by US National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden, Hager said the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) intercepted communications from countries such as Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu and Samoa, and even nations as small as Tuvalu, Nauru and Kiribati.
“They take every single phone call, every email and they go straight off into the [US] National Security Agency databases.”
Labour Party leader Andrew Little said he was not surprised monitoring occurred but he did not know it was a wholesale sweep.
“It doesn't seem to be targeted around particular threats - whether they're security threats or commercial threats or whatever they are - it just seems to be a hoovering up of all this information and supplying it to the United States,” he said.
Prime Minister John Key yesterday said the Government does gather information from other countries, in order to keep New Zealanders safe, but he would not confirm whether Pacific nations were being spied on.
“Last time he [Nicky Hager] came out with all this stuff he was categorically wrong, he'll be wrong this time as well, because information changes, we review things all the time, different actions are taken.”
Key said he would not go into who New Zealand gathered information from or why. “But I can tell you that we do gather information, we have over successive governments, across a range of different places, but we do that for really, really good reasons.”