Regarding
the 'countering financing of terrorism' part of this Act, a question to start
with: what was the last – and I think only - act of terrorism perpetrated in
New Zealand in our modern history, and by whom?
Answer:
ignoring Tame Iti’s farcical sideshow, it was the sinking of Greenpeace’s
Rainbow Warrior, one dead, by operatives of … hang on, of a Western government;
the French. Meaning the money financing the French terrorists was ‘legal’ taxation.
While I’m willing to call that taxing racket for
what it is, legalised, albeit disorganised, crime, and if our Minister of
Justice, Judith Collins, was so concerned about wiping that out, I’d be all for
it, I'm afraid we should be so lucky. Unfortunately, every politician in our
Fortress of Legislation is sworn only to grow the surveillance state, none of
them to champion our lives back from it.
It's so hard to fight the state on this issue: the Minister's anti-laundering money legislation is in the first instance like
every other act setting up surveillance on us; demonstrably ‘reasonable’ considered
on its own merits: who wouldn’t want to be protected from terrorism? However,
to quote Justice William Douglas (hattip @MonroeEDC on Twitter):
The privacy and dignity of our
citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken
individually each step may be of little consequence, but when viewed as a
whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen – a
society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of a person’s
life.
He’s
right in the first part, wrong in the second: of course we’ve seen this, over
and over: Fascist Germany, the Soviet
Union and its satellite Gulags, China, and on and on, all the state tyrannies
in our recent history. The shock is that even forearmed with this knowledge our
Western politicians have forged ahead, regardless, and now created the complete surveillance infrastructure of the terror
state, and for the first time, the net is comprehensive through every level
of society, from the taxes we pay to what we put on Facebook, and truly
global. Stalin would be wetting himself at how the classical liberal West has
been so broken.
To place this anti-money laundering legislation into
context, think GCSB, who after being found spying beyond the authority of their
governing legislation, simply had their governing legislation scoped wider to
cover everyone they’d been spying on, then recall the headlines you’ve
been reading since Mr Snowden blew his whistle on the NSA and its PRISM program.
The modern history of the West now proves conclusively that once the
surveillance state starts, there will always be the useful idiots in every Fortress of Legislation to tend to its every
need, explaining to us so reasonably why we need to expand the surveillance
further, for our own good. It’s not just PRISM, the UK is intruding deep into
our lives as well:
Britain's spy agency GCHQ has secretly gained
access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet
traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal
information which it is sharing with its American partner, the National
Security Agency (NSA).
The sheer scale of the agency's ambition is
reflected in the titles of its two principal components: Mastering the Internet
and Global Telecoms Exploitation, aimed at scooping up as much online and
telephone traffic as possible. This is all being carried out without any form
of public acknowledgement or debate.
One key innovation has been GCHQ's ability to tap
into and store huge volumes of data drawn from fibre-optic cables for up to 30
days so that it can be sifted and analysed. That operation, codenamed Tempora,
has been running for some 18 months.
GCHQ and the NSA are consequently able to access
and process vast quantities of communications between entirely innocent people,
as well as targeted suspects.
The
irony of the Germans now having to tell the Brits the nightmarishness of
what they're doing, is almost too much, until you think and realise Germany,
like no other country, has learned the hardest way of the concentration camps
at the end of these policies.
And
I can already forecast the next step, indeed, it has been wished for out loud
by the Israelis who don’t believe the NSA’s PRISM program goes anywhere near far enough by only mining and collecting the communications metadata of every
single person in the US, linked to a phone line or satellite.
The NSA’s PRISM scheme is already
surveilling the entire American public to an enormous level, culling massive
amounts of data from the PRISM Nine companies that have been complicit in that
policy.
So it’s no surprise that the
International Cyber Security Conference in Tel Aviv this week turned its focus
on PRISM. Here’s the scary part: they don’t think it goes far enough.
RSA’s chairman, ironically the
head of a company that used to be about protecting data from prying eyes,
argued for “full visibility into all data” as the only real path to
cybersecurity.
“All
data” is exactly what it sounds like, literally everything, everywhere, in the
world. Which would’ve been unthinkable just a couple of weeks ago, but now that
we know that the NSA is already spying on a solid majority of our most
important and most private data, it isn’t that surprising that they’d like to
have everything else too. I mean, why not go for broke?
See it’s no longer just enough to have access to
all your emails, they also need access to the preferences file of your email
client, because maybe the way you configured it is significant. Knowing
everyone you called is nice, but how about what custom ringtones you used?
And
so to the central theme of this blog – hoping desperately not to become a blug
on the windscreen of state, myself (read my disclaimer bottom of page) - the origin of it all, the tax
surveillance state, necessary for the state to plunder its own citizens and
fund itself, and the heart and nervous system of every modern police state. For
those who subscribe to the Left politick, and its theocracy of state, who have
been nodding your heads to this point, note you are completely compromised in this issue of citizens having a right to be left alone by the state so
long as they are harming no one, for the infrastructure of the global
surveillance state, and a large part of the philosophic justification for it,
begins in the tax surveillance state, and the shock and awe powers given
Western taxing authorities, such as in New Zealand.
GCSB surveillance, SIS surveillance, NSA surveillance, MI6
surveillance, IRS surveillance, HMRC surveillance, IRD surveillance ... all
linked via philosophy, and, I suspect, much more direct links. For example,
our new GCSB governing legislation gives our spooks authority to snoop in matters regarding ‘economic well-being’ –
I ask the minister does that give IRD access to using the spooks for
investigation of individuals and groups in furtherance of their tax mandate? More
widely, the global information sharing tax surveillance state, led ironically by
the USA, has become truly terrifying in its breadth and depth. I’ve already written several times on FATCHA, and how through that the US has conscripted the entire world banking
system into the world-wide surveillance web to victimise its citizens no matter
where they are in the world, but even that’s minor in comparison to the true reach
the police state of the US has: Switzerland, whose neutrality was
not beaten by the Nazis in WW II, has been utterly broken - think about
the import of this - by the war machine of the US tax surveillance state - in
this next quotation, note the newspeak with which ‘freedom’ is now used:
On May 29th, 2013, the Swiss government proposed
legislation that would permit banks to release certain information to the U.S.
authorities. Under current Swiss banking secrecy laws, such actions would be
prohibited. The legislation is to be rushed through the Swiss parliament in
their June summer session. The freedom would ultimately allow individual
settlements to be made with the U.S. and they are expected to require the banks
to pay fines totaling billions of dollars. The deal is to be rushed
because: “the United States is
unprepared to wait any longer with the arrangement for the past for Swiss
banks.”
That’s
not your or my freedom they’re talking about; this quotation would sit
comfortably in Orwell’s 1984, and how far have the Swiss fallen that their
politicians run in such unseemly manner as this to the destruction of their
proud independence. And every Western nation has joined the statist tax terror
network: I’ve quoted earlier the information sharing actions of the Australian
Tax Office, our own IRD and its intricate network of double tax – read
information sharing – agreements, and here UK’s HMRC:
HMRC’s powers to obtain information on UK taxpayers
with foreign bank accounts is increasing day by day, with the recent signing of
the so-called “G5 Tax Agreement” between the UK, France, Germany, Italy and
Spain. The UK Government’s attack on “tax havens” has been bolstered by
additional news that similar agreements have now been discussed with British
Overseas territories including Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands,
Gibraltar and Turks & Caicos Islands. These agreements follow the UK’s
implementation of disclosure facilities with Crown Dependencies: the Isle of
Man, Jersey and Guernsey which includes information exchange agreements.
All
this considered, we are in the end game for our liberty, where the
justification given for the global surveillance net, is now merely the global
surveillance net itself, which has become self-perpetuating. Back to the issue
at hand, this global network is now served to us as justification for the Anti-Money Laundering & Countering
Finance of Terrorism Act:
"New Zealand cannot afford to
be seen as a weak link in the chain of international efforts to tackle money
laundering and the financing of terrorism," Reserve Bank anti-money
laundering manager Rob Edwards told a seminar on the issue in Wellington.
Of
course it’s about the global network: yet as I started with, the only act of
terrorism perpetrated on us has been by the French government out of taxation. Have
a look at this Act: 118 pages of small print, and note well the axis on
which it turns – you can glean this from the section headings: the Act is about
surveillance and reporting on the actions of individuals, and penalties for
those institutions that don’t report the private money transactions of their
victims - which they will ironically insist on calling customers still. And
this right down to having to report on international money transfers made by
New Zealand citizens down to a mere $1,000: as I tweeted to the Minister of
Justice:
(Ahem,
well, perhaps a fortnight to get through $1,000 of booze.) Forget the absurdity
that I can get on a plane with $9,999 in cash and not have to report it, as
Judith Collins explained when interviewed last week, this measure is to stop an
individual, say, making separate transfers of $1,000 from six different banks;
okay then, but if that’s the case, if we’ve given every bit of our privacy away, why
not make it mandatory simply to have reported every international transfer? As
it is, the authorities involved will be chasing down every Pacific Island family sending cash home, as well as the frightened Muslim woman I heard ring
talkback to say she sends home cash, from working, to her poverty ridden family
in the Middle East: she’s Arab, she’s Muslim, she’s wiring hard earned money
home to her family, let’s face it, she’s going to be regular on some
bureaucrat’s desk or other, her life under scrutiny in the minutiae, probably
for the duration of her life, poor sod.
STOP:
who of you that just read that and said, good, so it should be in the case of
that Muslim woman? Well go away: you’ll never understand this piece. (At
this point both the Left and major
elements of the statist Right are now dropped from this post, and I’m probably writing
only for libertarians).
The
Minister’s anti-money laundering Act, part of the global surveillance net, may not even stand up to sane inspection in the context of our own shores, and
certainly not the National Party’s (empty) slogan as being New Zealand’s party
representing the ethic of small government. Here’s a thought for the Minster.
Judith
- and the new Minister of Taking, as well as for animal testing (torture), Todd
McClay please take note - … why not work on the other side of the ledger for
our freedom from you for once: stop creating all these laws that create the
industries that require laundering money in the first place; for example, the
big one, drugs. Portugal has shown that if you decriminalise drugs, even the
hard ones, you can half the addiction rate, as well as releasing the taxpayer from
what has been the West’s futile,
ludicrously expensive, war on drugs. In New Zealand if we even
decriminalised the harmless cannabis, the primary income of the gangs is
probably wiped out on the enactment of it, and from August we won’t have to be
torturing animals in barbaric testing labs so high school children can get a
legal high on these toxic synthetic cannabinoids. Why not just stop
government growing the state, stop spending money, stop legislating reasons for
having to track all of us. Regarding the supposed terrorism this is defending
us from, I reckon I’d rather have taken – note the past tense - my chances with
the terrorists, and even those bloody French ones, than have allowed
what has been visited on us: Big Brother State, fully grown. And might I also suggest, that the best
defence against terrorists, is simply not to become their target: to this
end, over-reaching Western governments might have looked with prudence on the
Libertarian ethic of non-initiation of force. Don't involve yourself in
un-winnable battles, because you're going to put yourself in the sights on the
fanatical backers of one side or other. At some crucial stage we in the West
went beyond defending ourselves, to something quite other; just as we over-reached internally with our cruel welfare states, so we have externally thinking we must be the police of everything.
Finally,
this post would not be complete if I didn’t deal with that bogus nonsense
peddled, seeking to excuse the
surveillance of the entire Western population by a confusing myriad of
government departments: ‘but if you’ve
done nothing wrong, there’s nothing to worry about’. The philosophical
argument for classical liberalism in itself, refutes this, but we live in the
age of the gormless, and people don’t understand these arguments anymore, so
try this from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:
I broke
the law yesterday and again today and I will probably break the law tomorrow.
Don’t mistake me, I have done nothing wrong. I don’t even know what laws I have
broken. Nevertheless, I am reasonably confident that I have broken some laws,
rules, or regulations recently because it’s hard for anyone to live today
without breaking the law. Doubt me? Have you ever thrown out some junk mail
that came to your house but was addressed to someone else? That’s a violation
of federal law punishable by up to 5 years in prison.
(Snip.)
If someone tracked you for a year are you confident
that they would find no evidence of a crime? Remember, under the common law,
mens rea, criminal intent, was a standard requirement for criminal prosecution
but today that is typically no longer the case especially under federal
criminal law .
Faced with the evidence of a non-intentional crime,
most prosecutors, of course, would use their discretion and not threaten
imprisonment. Evidence and discretion, however, are precisely the point. Today,
no one is innocent and thus our freedom is maintained only by the high cost of
evidence and the prosecutor’s discretion.
One of the responses to the revelations about the
mass spying on Americans by the NSA and other agencies is “I have nothing to
hide. What me worry?” I tweeted in response “If you have nothing to hide, you
live a boring life.” More fundamentally,
the NSA spying machine has reduced the cost of evidence so that today our
freedom – or our independence – is to a large extent at the discretion of
those in control of the panopticon.
Given
my argument above, I can think of no better way to sign off this post, than
with a quotation from the inimitable economist at Café Hayek, Donald Boudreaux:
Repeat
after me: Government is power. Government is not to be trusted.
Ever. Even if you believe that some government is and will always
be necessary, that ‘necessary’ piece of government should always be regarded as
a prudent lion tamer regards the big carnivorous cats that are ‘necessary’ for
him to make a living. To imagine that seemingly subdued purring lions can
be trusted to be dealt with in any ways that do not include the use of strong
cages, leashes, ceaseless and deep suspicion, and escape hatches is the height
of romantic absurdity – wishful thinking of the most extreme and inexcusable
sort. Government is by its very nature a dangerous,
untrustworthy, dishonest, arrogant, slippery entity – characteristics that are
by no means reduced anywhere near to insignificance by a wide franchise,
regular elections, and sturdy ink-on-parchment documents called
“constitutions.”
Unless
you are a high-ranking government official, government - no government
– is ever “Us.” It is always “Them.” And They are not to be
trusted. Ever.
In
line with this, the government that says don’t worry about what we’re doing,
trust us, is the government that must be removed, because if a government has
so much power it can rely on merely this to silence our dissent, without
feeling it has to provide reasons, or debate, then our liberty has already been
lost.
Tailpiece:
Some libertarian/Objectivists won’t be best pleased
with one aspect of above, indeed, in some integral ways I’m veering toward
anarcho-capitalism; though that will never be wholly. For now, all I will say
to that, is this blog is my thinking, as it develops, sometimes changes, over
time. It’s the brain of Mark Hubbard, as it grows and learns how important it
is that governments should learn to shrink. Despite I think it’s all gone too
far now, we’re way past the need for a Western Spring, but our minds are
largely stillborn in the state education system which preaches the state as our
false messiah in all things. Liberty is lost; most people don’t even understand
what is meant by it anymore.
Update 1.
New Zealand Law Society (rightly) Slams Spy Agency Bill.
Update 2.
United Police States find it troubling Hong Kong failed to arrest Snowden; not strange that it spies on every one of its own citizens, and most of every other country.
Update 3.
Coincidentally, I'm filling in the form for my professional indemnity insurance. Question 11.
'What policies and processes has your organisation put in place to comply with the Anti-Money Laundering and Counter Financing of Terrorism Act. Please provide details.'
Really! WTF
Answer: small, farming client base; practice just my wife and I; I watch her very, very closely.
Bugger off. See how things just go nuclear with bullshit surveillance state nonsense like this?
