(From www.thecommentfactory.com --  http://www.thecommentfactory.com/infiltration-of-activist-groups-in-new-zealand-is-wrong-and-detrimental-to-the-country/)



I recently wrote an article about the so-called “anti-terrorist” operation that went down in New Zealand on October 15th last year, involving coordinated raids by 300 police around the country; a level unprecedented in living memory. It was with some surprise that I learned the Save Happy Valley Coalition had been targeted as part of the raid, as they don’t exactly fit the traditional description of “terrorists”. Save Happy Valley is most commonly known for trying to save a rare breed of snails and is a nonviolent ecological protest group that hopes to stop a coal mine being developed in the Waimangaroa Valley by the state owned coal mining company Solid Energy.

So, it was with equal surprise that I learnt SHV had uncovered a spy in their group last year – an actual, for real, no shit spy – working for the private investigative firm Thomson & Clark Investigations Limited (TCIL), who are employed by non-other than… Solid Energy.

You might ask why a major state-owned company would want to spy on a small environmental group, but as the journalist Nicky Hager, who broke the story in the Sunday Star-Times back in May 2007, points-out: “Solid Energy is planning a dramatic increase in coal mining and coal exports to countries such as China, right at a time of growing world concern about climate change.” The bill rushed through parliament by the new National government last week repealing a previous ban on coal fired electricity in New Zealand, may be another clue.

The company has since instructed TCIL not to use paid informants in the work they do for the SOE, but that a government-owned business used spies to snitch on its critics — and indeed the presence of spies in environmental groups at all –-raises some serious questions about political expression in New Zealand.

Revelations this month that another spy, Rob Gilchrist, had been monitoring “organizations and individuals including Greenpeace, Iraq war protestors, animal rights and climate change campaigners” for years for the police Special Investigation Group (SIG) (established post-9/11 to focus on terrorism and national security threats) raise even more serious questions, and suggest the practice may be pretty widespread.

What’s more, Gilchrist had revealed to the Sunday Star-Times back in April that TCIL had tried to recruit him to spy on Save Happy Valley 11 months after their first informant was sprung, suggesting significant collaboration goes on between the police and private sector as well.

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The terror raids of last year showed the “post 9/11″ extent of state surveillance of activist groups and its willingness to act against them, and the existence of private security firms spying on such groups is another disturbing trend, especially if it’s focused towards protecting major commercial interests. Mussolini’s oft-quoted statement about fascism being better described as “corporatism” because it involves the “merger of state and corporate power” is worth keeping in mind –- though I’m sure even Mussolini never imagined this awesome power would be used against snail advocacy.

Save Happy Valley started in 2004 to protest Solid Energy’s proposed Cypress mine in Happy Valley, which they claim will “completely obliterate this pristine valley, and pollute local rivers with heavy metals and acid mine drainage”. The coal produced from the 96 meter deep pit, they contend, “would create as much carbon dioxide as all of New Zealand’s domestic transport”.

Happy Valley is an ecologically unique environment in terms of vegetation, and it’s home to several threatened and endangered species, including Kiwi (New Zealand’s national bird) and the now-famous rare breed of carnivorous snails; ten percent of the habitat, SHV say, will be destroyed if the proposed mine goes ahead.

Indeed, Solid Energy’s environmental record has, it is true, been pretty spectacular for “clean, green New Zealand”. The Matangi Stream was once so clean you could have thrown a baby into it and seen it sink all the way to the bottom, but according to an article in the New Zealand Listener, it runs an “opaque yellowish-brown” into the Ngakawau River and out to the sea where Solid Energy pumps run-off from its Stockton mine into it. It became so incredibly polluted from acid mine drainage that the spray from the Matangi Waterfall acted as a herbicide to surrounding vegetation, creating what a local resident described was a “deathscape”.

Bryn Somerville, of Solid Energy, says, however: “The permissions set during the resource consenting stage [for the mine] include stringent targets we must meet, in terms of the ecological state of the area both during and after.” Solid Energy has made managing the environmental impact of Cypress a top priority, and have pledged to voluntarily relocate vast expanses of wetland the mine will destroy, and also to relocate the endangered snails at a cost of millions of dollars to the company. He notes that Solid Energy “have all the required consents” and “[t]hose decisions have been challenged and found to have been properly considered and granted”.

Despite this, SHV have occupied the proposed site since January 2006, in what must be a beautiful place to camp on the two or three days sunshine it would get a year. They’ve also undertaken a multitude of protests against Solid Energy, which have included digging for coal on the company headquarter’s lawn, locking themselves onto train tracks used by coal trains, throwing pies at the CEO during public meetings, and various other shenanigans.

These shenanigans have not amused the cops or Solid Energy, however. Custard pie target, CEO Dr Don Elder labeling the group “anarchists” whose protests have “repeatedly broken the law,” with “part of their purpose [being] to intimidate staff and others associated with our company.” SHVC’s occupation, he says, has forced the company to “cancel export shipments with the potential loss of $25 million to the company”.

Indeed, Solid Energy’s operations are big business. The coal mines are a gold mine to the West Coast region: the company’s Stockton operation “directly employs about 700 people,” and Bryn of Solid Energy reckons their “overall operation [could] continue providing employment and export earnings for… approximately 20 years”. Miners and heavy machine operators apparently earn $50,000 to $60,000 a year, and can make as much as $85,000 with overtime. Bloody good money.

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However, there’s also apparently reasonably good money these days to be made in snitching.

“It’s capitalism at its worst,” says Ryan Patterson-Rouse in the article in the Star-Times, admitting he joined Save Happy Valley back in October 2006 after he was approached by Gavin Clark, the head of TCIL. If it’s the same Ryan Patterson-Rouse I’m thinking of, SHV’s spy was a few years ahead of me at Sumner Primary School, and I thought he was the coolest dude ever. I remember dropping his name in 3rd form to avoid getting into a fight with some guys from Christ’s College one time, and indeed the “uncover agents” usually are, as Frances Mountier of SHV says, “just, say, students, concerned about climate change, who perhaps do believe in ‘the cause’” (as Ryan eventually did). “Someone you’re studying with is much harder to pick out than the guy who looks and seems like a cop,” she continues.

Mr. Clark apparently said to Ryan, “I hear you’re going to Uni next year, want extra money?” and then paid him $50 a week for information on the group. Ryan visited the occupation, hosted meetings and dinners at his flat, planned protests, and participated in them. All the while reporting back to TCIL on behalf of their client, whom Ryan confirmed to be Solid Energy.

He provided them “a monthly report on meetings and group plans plus received questions the company wanted answered by email from Clark”. For example, Solid Energy had taken Frances to court over using their logo on a mock environmental report criticizing the company, and Ryan confessed that “Solid Energy requested and was provided with information about the group’s legal discussions and strategies”.

Hilariously, Save Happy Valley found out Ryan was a spy when one of them sent him a message on April 3rd 2007 and it bounced back to them with “ postmaster@tcil.co.nz” (Thompson & Clark) in the “To:” line, the email saying: “delivery to the following recipients failed:  gavin.clark@tcil.co.nz. TCIL had apparently “set up an automated system for collecting the internal emails sent between key members of SHV and the other groups”, using “a computer programme called POPCon to copy all the group’s communications straight to Clark’s computer”. That day though, Clark’s inbox was full. As one commentator said to me: “snigger”.

By looking at whom else the email was addressed to, SHV members were able to deduce who the double-agent was, also turning up another TCIL-employed snitch, Somali Young, who was involved in Wellington Animal Rights Network and Peace Action Network.

The government was quick to condemn Solid Energy; then Prime Minister Helen Clark calling the spying “unacceptable behaviour from a state owned enterprise”. Despite this, and calls for his resignation by SHV, Don Elder was defiant, saying the company “stands 100% by its use of security advisors,” calling SHV’s indignation “pathetically contrived outrage… totally without any legal, moral or ethical justification.”

Elder’s comments themselves could be considered more than a little contrived though, when you consider that the planning for SHV’s “End of the Line for Coal” train blockade, where protesters locked themselves to tracks used by trains moving coal to Lyttleton for export (for which several people were arrested) was done at Ryan’s house. Solid Energy would have known about it in advance, but let it go ahead anyway, showing, as Hager says, “that the aim of the spying is not to minimize costs but to minimize the political effect of its environmental opponents”.

Just three days before the protest, Elder had been in the news saying how protesters were costing Solid Energy millions, and after the incident said, they “don’t give a second thought about tying up the time and resources of the emergency services as well as the courts,” however, nor clearly does he.

When asked about “Ryangate,” Bryn said that Solid Energy – like “all companies” – gathers information and employs “advisors,” including TCIL, to help them “mitigate” threats to “our business and to the health and safety of our staff members”. He reiterated though that as of May 2007, they had: “instructed TCIL… not to use any paid informants in any work they do for us and they confirmed they would comply with this.”

However, as Bryn also mentioned, the issue came up for them again in April when TCIL was exposed in another article in the Star-Times by Nicky Hager as trying to con long-time police informant Rob Gilchrist into monitoring SHV for them again. In tape-recordings Gilchrist made of their meetings Gavin Clark offers him money for information on and access to Save Happy Valley.

“I wanted to see whether, you know, there’s any way I can help you out, and you can help me out,” begins Clark as they sit on a bench in Hagley Park. “If you could give me your log-on,” he says later, “I’ll give you a couple of hundred bucks… so I can go and have a look every now and then, that sort of thing.”

Hager describes the tapes as “painful listening,” with Clark trying to butter up his prospective rat, calling him “mate,” professing to have respect for activist’s intelligence: “It’s almost part and parcel of being an activist, being intelligent”, and having what Hager describes as a “strange, disingenuous laugh” throughout. Clark offered Gilchrist $200 just for talking to him, and they met again on two more occasions. He offered to pay Gilchrist $500 a week, plus travel and accommodation costs and bonuses for valuable information, and thought he’d got himself trustworthy rat. Instead, Gilchrist sung like a bellbird.

Again, there’s no concrete evidence to tie the attempted solicitation of this particular narc to Solid Energy, and Gilchrist initially claimed he had no idea why he was targeted. However, it was revealed earlier this month that Gilchrist was a career rat, and had been snitching on all manner of groups for the police for years. He was sprung when his girlfriend, Rochelle Rees, stumbled across some emails from two SIG officers, Detective Peter Gilroy and Detective Senior Sergeant John Sjoberg, of the Christchurch Central Police Station (codenames “Uncle Pete” and “Uncle John”).

Rees was fixing Gilchrist’s computer, and snooping on his emails she noticed hundreds with blank “sender” and “subject” lines. She found that they were all private political emails, being forwarded to the same address. Looking through them she found documents with titles like “Intel Request,” asking Gilchrist about activist groups. The embedded properties of the documents apparently revealed that some “came from “New Zealand Police” and the author was “PG4369″ (possibly Gilroy’s internal police number).

Police had apparently approached the ex-army man in the late 1990’s after he joined a beneficiary rights group in Christchurch and his decade of snitchery allows us to see what the highly secretive SIG unit’s anti-terrorism work actually involves: basically wasting tax-payer’s money spying on hippies.

For example, an email from October 10th last year “enclosed a photo, for Gilchrist to identify a young man on a bicycle” in front of a house on Sullivan Ave. in Christchurch, rented by some SHV university students. Even Gilchrist himself says that the people he was paid $600 a week to spy on are not national security threats, but “good people trying to make a better world” . Gilchrist (who runs a dodgy-looking website you can see here) claims that he felt “conflicted” for years, but as one blogger points-out, his “ethical dilemma arose only after he was busted” and the “‘difficulty’ Rob refers to is now compounded: he’ll have to find a real job.”

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Finding a real job is often advice given to SHV members by the public, which has remained largely indifferent to the issue as far as I can tell, despite the ridiculousness of what has been going on. In October last year some SHV campers found “several thousand dollars worth of spying equipment… camouflaged near the start of the track into their occupation… which included a camera with 27x optical zoom, over one hundred metres of cable, a hard drive and four dry cell batteries,” all hidden in bush which “would have been able to identify — in detail –every single person who joined and left the legal occupation”.

“Lynley” on the SHV blog recounts a bizarre encounter with a “Mr. Moustache” and associate while on a walk in the valley, that reminded me of the scene from Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” with two guys in a tiger suit in the jungle.

“Pete spotted a couple of guys wandering into the bushes up ahead. We peered into the bushes and saw a guy in camo gear crouched down… The conversation then went something like this: “Hey there. What are you guys up to?” “Oh, just camping” “How many of you are there?” “Oh, just me.” “No, there’s not. I can see another guy through there!” Silence….

They bumped into the other guy, “with an outlandish moustache, in matching camo gear” (who had told them he was in the army) later:

When Mr Moustache saw another group of us, he tried to evade us. We had a chat anyway. When Kristen said that he didn’t believe they were in the army Mr Moustache changed his story. He told us they were working, but wouldn’t tell us who for. He insisted he did not work for Gibson Security [Solid Energy's former security providers], but had heard of them. Then he changed his story again and said they were there on holiday and hid from us because he thought we might be DOC [Department of Conservation] rangers. He said they had snuck in through the mine, despite us seeing obvious recent vehicle tracks on the road. He said he was wandering around trying to get cellphone coverage, even though our coverage was fine and he had an Iridium Satellite phone. He kept trying to convince us he wasn’t spying on us and saying “Don’t be hard on us.”

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While examples like this — and the emails from Gavin Clark bouncing back to the people he’s spying on — show that it would indeed be cruel to be too hard on the New Zealand intelligence gathering community, when they are for the most part (as one commentator describes them) “laughably inept”, their effect on political freedom in New Zealand is potentially severe.

One of the most troubling developments in this spy story was the decision by the Registrar of Private Investigators and Security Guards on March 5th this year in an unsuccessful court case by SHV and the two groups Somali Young was spying on. The Registrar basically ruled that “if you are under surveillance,” as the members of these groups were, “you have less rights than other people.” As Frances Mountier points-out: “This would seem a circular argument, given that there are no restrictions placed on who can be surveilled.” The Registrar seems to have had a kind of flimsy grasp on the law and, facing his first court case of this nature, basically seems to have taken his lead from the defense lawyer. Not only did he not mind that the key witness for the prosecution, Somali Young, had skipped the country, he concluded that spying of this kind was quite common and acceptable industry practice.

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The only legislation that covers private investigation in New Zealand is the Private Investigators and Security Guards Act, hopelessly out-of-date, having been drafted in the 1970’s, mainly to establish how someone could follow their husband or wife. This act creates the position of the Registrar, who is “also the person charged with administering the industry, including the approval of licences on the receipt of $80 / year,” which has some obvious conflicts of interest.

Indeed, spying on “political dissenters,” (however tame their dissent may be) is potentially a serious issue for political expression and association in New Zealand. SHV, Greenpeace, and other similar groups being monitored as part of post 9/11 anti-terrorism measures, could just be for want of actual terrorists in the country. However, when you consider this in connection with the October 15th raids of last year — especially keeping in mind that people like Frances Mountier were targeted as part of it — it starts to seem like the state is sending a message to people considering taking political action in the country.

The practice seems to be increasing internationally in other Western “democratic” countries too. The Heathrow airport protest group “Plane Stupid” uncovered a mole in their organization in April this year. In October, various protest groups in Victoria, Australia discovered police had infiltrated them, and the United States has a long history of spying-on, infiltrating, and disrupting domestic protest. Sadly, New Zealand too seems to be going the same way.

While TCIL’s profit motivation makes it perfect sense for them to, as Frances says, “infiltrate community and activist groups, whilst painting them as a threat to continue to receive payment”, I fail to comprehend why the police need to be doing the same thing.

The best explanation I’ve come across is Nicky Hager’s observation that, post-9/11, we have a new “anti-terrorism bureaucracy in New Zealand, closely tied into US and British thinking” and have to find terrorists as a result. Surely though, groups like Greenpeace and Save Happy Valley serve to improve our society, rather than be detrimental to it? The only thing they are potentially detrimental to is corporate profit, and if the government is spying on these groups to protect such interests, then the country is in serious trouble.

As Save Happy Valley spokesman and three-times Australasian bare-knuckle cage fighting champion Graham Jury says: “Functioning democracy requires a society to be able to correct problems from the ground up.” He rightly maintains that “sometimes there are problems that will not and cannot be solved” by the state, and that, “accordingly, members of the public need to be able to nonviolently resist elite dodginess if they have to,” which is obviously hampered if “elite forces” are allowed to pay spies to rat on these very people.

New Zealand is a very beautiful, largely unspoiled country, and it’s important we preserve this. Solid Energy clearly care about this too, voluntarily spending millions and millions of dollars to better manage their environmental impact.

But a coal mining company that professes to care about an obscure type of snails out of the goodness of their own heart are about as sincere as a pedophile running a daycare centre. Solid Energy has an environmental record that appalled even my girlfriend, who is from Belarus and grew-up downwind from Chernobyl (though I’m pleased to say, suffered no apparent side effects, other than extreme hotness), and as my father put it: “They want the coal and will do anything to get it.” It’s only because of pressure from groups exactly like Save Happy Valley that Solid Energy have to make environmental concessions at all.

Steve Price of Victoria University in Wellington puts it that protesters serve as “the conscience of society,” but as Graham says: “Today ‘activists,’ people who are friends with ‘activists,’ and indeed anyone brave enough to openly criticize authority must live in a culture of suspicion.” This security paranoia is, of course, in conflict with the need of social movements to be open and inclusive: “A constant conundrum,” says Graham, “that has no easy answer.”