Image created by Lyndon Hood

It’s good to see the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) come out against lecturers being asked to spy on their students for the SIS.

Supposedly this is necessary to uncover students using our universities to do research related to “weapons of mass destruction”? But how likely is this in New Zealand? It makes one think our SIS might be operating, in this matter, as a branch office of some bigger foreign intelligence agency, maybe from a country where there is quite a bit of research on how to better produce their own weapons of mass destruction.

In New Zealand, as the TEU points out, the most likely result of the SIS edict is extra targeting of students because of their religion, nationality or ethnicity. Tough luck if you have to be a Muslim engineering student, particularly if you come from Iran or an Arab country.

Studying in a foreign country is hard enough at the best of times without worrying about your essays and assignments being scanned and sent to that country’s intelligence services.

Over the years, universities have tried to make their campuses a spy-free zone, to protect academic freedom.

Historically, in New Zealand the role of the SIS has been to spy on student dissenters and radical lecturers, not because they were breaking any laws, but because they were challenging the Government of the day.

I can testify to this from the contents of my own SIS file, which I received last late last year. In it the SIS shows concerns about my antiwar and anti-apartheid activities when I was a University of Canterbury student, and later when I lectured at Victoria University. There was absolutely no SIS concern that I would break any laws.

The TEU is right to preserve the universities as an open forum for ideas and research, without the intrusive presence of a politically motivated spy agency.

If the SIS wants a real target for investigation, why not look at the Auckland-based Rakon industries, which has had military contracts to provide shock-hardened and radiation-hardened crystal oscillators for American guided missiles, some of which may actually carry “Weapons of Mass Destruction”.

Last month the SIS released a heavily edited version of the file they kept on me from 1968 onwards.

The file is evidently in two volumes, and 330 classified reports on me have been withheld. The few lessons I take from what I have been allowed to see so far are that:

• The SIS was very active during the Cold War period in relation to anyone they judged to be subversive, even when just a teenager at school – as I was when the spooks first started keeping an eye on me.
• They had an agent right inside one organisation to which I belonged, and quite possibly within others as well. The spies weren’t quite as incompetent as some commentators made out in the Playboy and meat pie days.
• However, the information they collected on me was quite random, with rather a lot missing and some strange fabrications and suppositions.
• The way my file comes to an abrupt end in early 1999 is a little odd as I was still very involved in organising protests against the APEC meeting later that year. This sudden conclusion may have something to do with the fact that after Keith Locke’s records were released in early 2009 the SIS came under heavy pressure not to keep files on sitting MPs – even though I didn’t enter Parliament until December 1999.

I welcome the recent increase in media and public scrutiny of the SIS.

I believe we all need to know more about the agency paid for by the taxpayer and tasked with identifying, watching and analysing people who are a threat to New Zealand’s security.

While there will always be a need for a high degree of secrecy in its operations because of their very nature, I reckon more should be done to review and cull personal files that are kept on people like myself and goodness knows how many others.

Even the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Paul Neazor, said in March that he was concerned about the SIS’s ‘vacuum cleaner approach’ to collecting information on suspect individuals, and that security needs should be weighed up against peoples’ right to privacy.

Parliament has a special committee on security and intelligence which is supposed to have oversight of the SIS.

Its current members are John Key, Rodney Hide, Tariana Turia, Phil Goff and Russel Norman.

I certainly hope the committee is doing more these days than just accepting whatever the SIS Director tells them.

I trust this new generation of political party leaders are girding their loins to truly watch the watchers, a function needed in any democratic society.

While I accept that there will probably always be a need for some form of security intelligence service in our country, there must also be effective checks and balances on just what that service is up to.

And I hope that whoever the SIS is keeping an eye on these days, there is a genuine reason for doing so, and that any records being kept are both fair and accurate.