As they say, all good things take time.

A year after my 2015 Chaos Communications Camp lecture ‘Diary of a Person of Interest’ in Germany, I’ve released a new documentary based on the talk. Impressively, considering its only promotion has been a few tweets, it’s already received a couple thousand hits on the Pastebin I posted about it, a thousand plus views on Vimeo, and it can also be viewed on YouTube and on my official website Suzi3D.com.

However, some of us find words have an even greater impact than pictures and my very Kiwi accent might be strange to some also, so I’m posting the full transcript of the documentary below, for those who are interested. 🙂

DIARY OF A PERSON OF INTEREST – TRANSCRIPT

Introduction:

“Hi guys. My name is Suzie Dawson. I’m a journalist and an activist from Auckland, New Zealand. I’m a member of the Occupy Auckland and Occupy New Zealand media teams, and I am possibly one of the 88 New Zealanders that was targeted by our domestic and international spy agencies and passed on to the NSA for further targeting.”

[Title Screen & Music]

“I’m going to give a little talk now, it’s called ‘Diary of a Person of Interest’. It’s based on a talk that I gave last year in Germany at the Chaos Communications Camp.”

Part One: OCCUPY

“In 2011 I barely knew what an activist was, but when the Occupy movement started, I couldn’t help but get on board. I could see that people around the world had actually found a way to take a stand for themselves and for their communities and I got on board. My understanding of activism in New Zealand was based on what we were told by human rights lawyers at the very first march on October 15th, 2011. We were told that New Zealanders have the right to dissent, that we have the right to freedom of assembly, to freedom of association, the right to seek redress from out government and that we could not be discriminated against on the basis of political opinion. I naively took all of that at face value. I thought that would protect me and I thought that would protect the other members of my media team. We believed and had been told our whole lives – we had been propagandised – that New Zealand was the safest, most peaceful country in the world. Never in a million years did it occur to us that what would happen to us, would happen. We found out the hard way that everything I just told you about New Zealand is not true. Our entire media team and then later an ever-broadening section of society became aggressively targeted by domestic and international intelligence agencies.”

Our Purpose

“When we started the media team, we had a primary goal of amplifying the voices of everybody in our movement; to cover all of the issues related to Occupy, not just to cherry-pick which ones we personally supported, but to support all of the issues in a non-biased fashion, no matter what they were. All of the issues that were named and discussed, actually, in the first declaration, the founding declaration of Occupy Wall Street.”

[CLIP: KEITH OLBERMANN READING THE FOUNDING DECLARATION OF OCCUPY WALL STREET.]

“Our secondary aim was to bear witness to events that were happening on the ground in Auckland and to share news of that as far and wide as we could with the rest of the movement and the rest of the world. Additionally we contributed our own voices, based on our own experiences of what was going on. We really were eye-witnesses on the ground. For my personal safety I and many other members of my media team remained anonymous to the outside world. Our occupation knew who we were, our fellow media team members and occupiers knew who we were, unfortunately the police agencies and security agencies knew who we were, but we operated under pseudonyms online. That served us well to a certain extent but as the targeting of us became more and more pervasive it became dangerous to remain masked to the world and ultimately in late 2014 I came forward and told everybody ‘hey, this is who I am and this is what is happening to me.’ What drove us, other than commitment to the movement and to representing people on the ground who really needed advocacy and really needed our voices was – our motto was, ‘if not us, then who?’ If we aren’t going to tell the truth, who is going to do it? If we aren’t going to make change, who is going to do it? If we aren’t going to push back against our corrupt media and our corrupt government, who is going to do it? If not us, then who?

Part Two: WHY YOU?

“So, when I’ve had to tell people – hey look, I’m being targeted by these security agencies – the first thing that they ask me is ‘Why? Why you? Why would they care about you?’ Unfortunately I can’t give one easy answer to that because I didn’t just do one thing. There are a lot of reasons ‘why’. There is… Occupy.

Occupy

“Everyone knows now, finally, that the FBI, the DHS were involved in the suppression of Occupy. That through the PERF committee, the mayors across the entire United States were colluding for the destruction of the Occupy movement. What few people realise is that the fusion centres that were bringing all those agencies together were also operating with international agencies and in countries outside of America and unfortunately that’s precisely what happened to us.”

Anonymous

“Another reason I’ve been targeted is because during the Occupy movement we were supported by the Anonymous movement. They did a lot to try to help us and to try to protect us.”

[CLIP: CABINCREW/ANONYMOUS VIDEO FROM YOUTUBE ABOUT ASSAULTS ON AND HOSPITALISATIONS OF OCCUPIERS]

Kim Dotcom

“Additionally, us Occupiers, because of the close proximity in time between the FBI raid of Kim Dotcom’s mansion, which I believe was January 20th 2012, and the raids on Occupy Auckland of January 23rd and January 26th, which was just the other end of the weekend after the Kim Dotcom raid, we realised that some really fishy stuff was going on. That we weren’t just facing local police in Auckland, that the FBI were actually operating on the ground in New Zealand which they had no right to do whatsoever.”

[CLIP: OCCUPY AUCKLAND MEDIA TEAM FOOTAGE OF MULTIPLE POLICE WEARING COUNTERFEIT BADGES PRESENT AT THE RAIDS ON OCCUPY AUCKLAND.]

“So we supported Kim Dotcom and we support justice for him and we are very much against FBI overreach into our country and we are very much against our government’s collusion with the FBI in targeting and suppressing dissent in New Zealand.”

Internet Party

“When Kim Dotcom started The Internet Party we threw our full weight behind that as well, for the same reason. We need alternative political voices in our country. Both the two conventional, so-called, you know, the New Zealand versions of the Republicans and the Democrats, drastically let us down and we needed change. Internet Party was our best shot at that so we did everything we could to promote it. Unfortunately, as with every other movement, many of those people involved with Internet Party also were targeted.”

GCSB

“The GCSB movement is the movement that we started in 2012-2013 to try to combat the GCSB – they were supposed to target foreign countries but instead they had targeted New Zealand citizens. This led to huge protests all over the country in New Zealand, absolutely massive protests and widespread public support for our movement. Unfortunately the government just passed legislation – retroactive legislation – to make what they had done to us illegally, legal. They just legalised it after the fact.”

FVEY

“I, in the course of my journalism, have written about not just FBI and CIA and agencies like this, and DHS and whatnot, I’ve written pretty extensively too about the ‘Five Eyes’.”

[CLIP: PROTEST FOOTAGE OF A SIGN CALLING FOR NEW ZEALAND TO WITHDRAW FROM THE FIVE EYES INTELLIGENCE NETWORK.]

“I shared some information about the Waihopai spy base with one of my friends who happens to be the drummer of the best rock band in the history of my country. Next thing we know they released a #1 album called ‘FVEY’ which had young people all over New Zealand walking around singing lyrics about Waihopai spy base.”

[CLIP: LIVE FOOTAGE OF SHIHAD CONCERT – THE BAND SINGS THE ACRONYM “G-C-S-B”.]

Moment Of Truth

“Also I was a very early supporter of Edward Snowden and also my favourite journalist in the world is Glenn Greenwald. I’ve written about both of them pretty extensively as well. Yet another reason that I was targeted. Of course in 2014 we had Glenn Greenwald come to New Zealand for an event with Kim Dotcom and Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. The event was called ‘Moment of Truth’ – #MoT. Yet another reason that I was targeted – I was voraciously targeted in the lead-up to that event and also in the election that followed.”

[CLIP: EXCERPT OF 9PR AUSTRALIA RADIO INTERVIEW OF SUZIE PROMOTING THE EVENT]

[CLIP: SUZIE’S FOOTAGE FROM THE MOMENT OF TRUTH PRESS CONFERENCE WHERE KIM DOTCOM RIPS INTO NEW ZEALAND MEDIA FOR THEIR BIASED COVERAGE, THEN SUZIE INTERVIEWING HON. LAILA HARRE, INTERNET PARTY LEADER]

NSA

“We know thanks to The Intercept and Nicky Hager – a WikiLeaks correspondent and an amazing, awesome investigative journalist in New Zealand – that the 88 people targeted by the GCSB were referred by the GCSB to the NSA. What this means is that New Zealand citizens have had their own spy agency not only spy on them, but outsource the spying on them to a foreign government. Not only were they never supposed to spy on us in the first place but they have passed information on their own citizens to a foreign power. That should be treason.”

#TPPANOWAY

“I was also instrumental along with my media team in creating the hashtag #TPPANoWay. This is the New Zealand movement against the TPP. Dr. Jane Kelsey is the spearhead of that movement – she worked on it for years and years and years and years and together a whole bunch of us turned it into something really amazing.

[CLIP: OCCUPY NEW ZEALAND MEDIA TEAM LIVE FOOTAGE OF MASS #TPPANOWAY ACTION]

“If you get on You Tube and look up ‘OccupyNZMedia’ you can watch many videos of the movements that I’m talking about, you can see live footage and action coverage from my media team of these events.”

#NZ4GAZA

“I was, along with some of my other media team members, really instrumental in trying to stop the war in Palestine. We started the hashtag #NZ4Gaza – which became #US4Gaza, #NY4Gaza, #DC4Gaza – all around the world that spread and we got some pretty amazing footage.”

[CLIP: FOOTAGE OF SUZIE ANNOUNCING THAT PALESTINIAN FLAG HAS BEEN RAISED ABOVE U.S. EMBASSY]

#SAVEGI

“SaveGI was the Glen Innes Housing moving where amazing everyday members of the public, ordinary citizens, were trying to prevent the closure of state houses and were getting beaten by police on the street. Covering that – along with other members of my media team – yet another reason why I was targeted. I could sit here and go on all day.”

Exile

“The targeting of me led me to have to leave my country after there was attempts on my life in 2014. It went from me being spied on, to me being entrapped, to them actually trying to physically harm me. In January 2015 I relocated to Berlin in Germany.”

[CLIP: SUZIE’S FOOTAGE OF 250,000 PEOPLE MARCHING AGAINST THE TTIP, IN BERLIN]

WikiLeaks

“So the elephant in the room, which I have not named, in my very long list of reasons why I have been targeted, is WikiLeaks. Even before I went to Occupy and before I knew what an activist was, I supported WikiLeaks ideologically. I shared their work, I told people how awesome I thought they were. All of the supporters of WikiLeaks are surveilled or monitored in some way, shape or form. Those who are actually active in advocating for the organisation, obviously more so than just viewers and really at this point don’t get scared about viewing their website either because the ‘Collect It All’ of these governments means that they are spying on you one way or another, whether or not you go look at WikiLeaks! WikiLeaks is an unbelievably valuable resource. It is a historic resource. WikiLeaks is our information vanguard and we must protect it.”

Part Three: WHO DOES IT?

“That’s always the next question. First is, ‘Why? Why are they targeting you?’ The next question is ‘Who exactly is targeting you?’ There is the state agencies and there is the private agencies. So, the state agencies – we’ve got the police, the New Zealand police, the local community police. Within the police there is the ‘Threat Assessment Unit’, there is the ‘Special Investigations Group’. These are specific teams that are set up. They’re supposed to target violent offenders. They’re supposed to target people who are a real, demonstrable risk to society. They’re not actually supposed to target – white chick from the suburbs who becomes an activist! But unfortunately that’s exactly what they’ve been doing. Then we have the spies which is the Security Intelligence Services, known as the SIS. This is like New Zealand’s FBI. Then we have the GCSB which is the Government Communications Security Bureau. They’re supposed to be spying on foreign diplomats, not like, me and my kids going to a General Assembly. Then you have the Americans, right. One of the first times that I really realised I might be in some pretty serious trouble was when an outfit called the NCTC (National Center for Terrorism Control) followed my Twitter account from their official Twitter account. They’re a counterterrorism agency based in America and they were following me on Twitter. I blocked them. Because what do you do when a terrorism agency follows your Twitter account? There’s not much you can do so really out of spite I just blocked them. Not that obviously it would do me any good in terms of preventing them from accessing my information but I just figured if they’re going to outright try to intimidate me by following me from their main account – I’d block them. Then there is the good old Department of Homeland Security and they’re all involved in the fusion centres. Fusion centres are these places that are putting all of these agencies in contact with each other and allowing them to share information in ways that historically they were never meant to be able to do. They’re supposed to perform individual functions – very specific functions – but all their data is being merged and all of their operational purposes are being merged and the end result is that you have this grand mass-scale tyranny across all of the agencies and they can actually set the whole of government against you if they decide that you’re on their target list. And of course you have the CIA – who are really awesome people who drone people with flying killer robots in half a dozen countries around the world. Then you have the private agencies.

Spying = $$$

At the very low level we have private investigators. Like, in New Zealand we have Thompson Clark Investigations Limited. This is a notorious company that has done all kinds of things like GPS tagging activist’s cars and even being caught sleeping with and having relationships with activists in New Zealand over protracted periods of time, which is about as sleazy as you can get to be honest. We have SSI Pacific which is a ‘lawful intercept’ company which basically means they can do everything, well a lot, of what the GCSB or the NSA can do. They can intercept all of your digital communications, they can bug you in a hundred different ways and they consider it to be lawful because they do it to people who are already being targeted by these other agencies and of course because they are a private company they are doing it for money. They are billing, they’re invoicing, they are having shareholders and boards and generating profit. Then we have Cubic Defence, which does asset tracking. If you follow Barrett Brown’s work, or anybody like that, or ProjectPM then you’ll know quite a bit about these companies. Asset tracking should be like ‘There’s a million dollar necklace going to this fashion show and we want to make sure that it gets back on time, or in one piece’. Unfortunately asset tracking has become putting a GPS tracker on an activist’s car and then watching the little blip on the screen as they drop their kid at school in the morning. Their assets are not just material anymore, they have made people the assets that they track and there is a lot of people so if they want to make a lot profit they just have to track more people and of course bill it back to the state so all of this is happening on public money. Then there’s Palantir – Peter Thiel’s Palantir. Palantir are involved in financial systems in the banks. They are involved in creating predictive software but also in flagging financial transactions.. it’s all embedded in the so-called money laundering legislation that has been instituted around the world but which is also being used against activists and against journalists, who are on the target lists.

Part Four: THE TARGETS

“Who do they target? Well, back in the good old days they just targeted radicals. So-called radicals. If you want the world to be a better place and you realise that you have to do something about that in order for it to happen, congratulations you’re a radical. If you think that corporations should not dominate all of the markets and resources on the planet, congratulations you’re a radical. If you think that governments should not bomb civilians in multiple countries for money, congratulations you’re a radical. You’ll probably be targeted if you try to do anything whatsoever about organising to make change for the sake of our planet. They also of course target hacktivists, anybody who supports any kind of hacktivists in any way, you get targeted. They also target NGO’s and the people who work for them. So these are the people who are in legitimate organisations, some of them quite historic organisations, just by working for those organisations can be targeted. There are so many examples of this that I’m not even going to get into it. Obviously Greenpeace, obviously many of the NGO’s operating in… even the children’s funds! The Christian children’s funds… all targeted. Then there’s the issue-based dissenters. People who are climate change activists, or people who are anti-GMO’s. Because the thing about the privatisation of spying is that profit requires growth and growth in this industry means more targets. So it was never going to be a finite thing. It was never going to be ‘we will just target the activists’. Because if you just target the activists – first of all, they try to diminish the total number of activists and that would mean less profit. So in order to have more profit they have to constantly expand the sectors of society that they spy on. So we’ve seen this in New Zealand. Surveillance cameras used to be for safety in a dark, dingy area – now they are absolutely everywhere at all times. They have to have ever-increasing saturation of spying in order to make money from it.”

Part Five: HOW?

“How? How do they target us? What do they do to us? Obviously there’s surveillance. The surveillance leads to harassment. State-sanctioned, state-funded harassment. That leads to isolation of the targets as they’re more and more harassed. That includes sabotage. Sabotage of our personal effects and of our lives – of the paths of our lives, our relationships and our careers. Then it becomes entrapment – because if we’re not doing something illegal then that’s a big problem for them because they want us to be doing something illegal so that they can justify what they are doing to us. So if we’re not doing something illegal they invent illegal things for us to do and try to suck us into them. Eventually, it leads to some form of institutionalisation and if they cannot be successful at any of the aforementioned, if they cannot institutionalise you, in select cases there are assassination attempts. So, let’s break that down a bit.”

Surveillance

“There’s physical surveillance. There is the blacked-out white van parked outside your house 24 hours a day. There is the dodgy guys in the baseball caps and the hoodies who follow you absolutely everywhere you go at all times – I call them the ‘shadows’. There is your mail that looks like rats have been biting the corner of it when it arrives in your letterbox, it’s so blatantly obvious that it has been tampered with. In New Zealand, it is now legal for a whole slew of state agencies to covertly place cameras inside your domestic dwelling without a warrant.. for is it 24 or 48 hours? I think it was initially supposed to be 48 hours but they cut it down to 24. They can watch you without a warrant inside your own house. This is Orwell. This isn’t Orwell is coming, Orwell might happen. This is Orwell.  They have cameras in your house. It’s legal. They have legalised Orwell in New Zealand. They impersonate power companies. Power company staff members specifically. They tamper with your smart meter and use it for surveillance. They work in conjunction with the phone companies, with all of the utilities. They will supply you with pre-installed hardware if you order a new cellphone from your phone company it will arrive with remote access technology already installed on the device. This has been proved by WikiLeaks’ Hacking Team releases and many other places. They use GPS trackers on your car to have you tracked by someone like Cubic Defence and they even use infrared on your houses to see who is in your house, where they are, what you’re doing at any given time. They also used this on the occupations to see how many people were in the tents at the Occupys.”

Signals Surveillance

“Signals surveillance is them surveilling your web services, your applications. All of your devices. It is them compromising your router. Your Internet Service Provider. Under the TICS legislation in New Zealand they have actually deputised the workers at Internet Service Providers and involved them in the process of spying on their consumers. They can surveill en masse through a Stingray device and collect all mobile phone information, SSN’s, for any given area.

Private Surveillance

“Then there’s private surveillance. This is them targeting your social media accounts. This is them targeting your financial data and your banking. This is your medical data. This is what a really cool, awesome friend of mine from Berlin calls ‘glass masks’, which are your Big Data data profiles. So, what you bought, where you bought it from, how often you bought it, where you went, everywhere that you are tagged online, all of the information that your insurance company or that any other online company that you use collects about you and then shares with Big Data companies because they have some fine print in their Terms of Service which they think allows them to do that. All of that data is used to form a picture of you and of your spending habits and of your life. Of where you go and who you know and what you do and what you buy.”

Public Surveillance

“Then there is public surveillance. This is surveillance by the local authorities, by the Councils. This is your rubbish being separated because you’re on the target list, by the rubbish company, so that someone can trawl through and see whether or not you did your recycling. This is public surveillance at events, this is facial recognition software being used at a sports stadium to collect facial profiles of people who go to watch a football game. This is public safety. In New Zealand, specifically at Occupy Auckland, we had the head of the Public Safety Board, who is also a City Councillor, a guy called George Wood, relentlessly trolling our Facebook page, telling us that we should have Alsatians set on us and water cannons – that they should bring out the water cannons to use against us. He’s Chairman of the Public Safety Board! The Public Safety Board are the people who have access to and control and say over a lot of these surveillance systems. They are also the people who are voraciously targeting activists and they are also the point of contact between a lot of the security agencies and the civic infrastructure, as are also the transport agencies. Because the transport systems are where the biggest flow of people are moving through. It’s usually where the surveillance enters the civic infrastructure first. For example in Berlin there is a big pushback against surveillance and there are not pervasive security cameras everywhere like there are in New Zealand and like there are in many other countries – most other countries. But where you do see them in Berlin is in the train stations, in the metro, in the subway system, in the transport systems and so the spy agencies tend to integrate with the transport systems and then to integrate with the Public Safety Boards. Which would be great if they were using it for rapists and murderers but unfortunately they’re using it to see where Joe Bloggs activist goes, before or after writing a blogpost that the government does not like. Then there’s TrapWire. So, TrapWire… TrapWire isn’t just facial recognition. TrapWire is networked surveillance. So, it’s where the security cameras are not just, like, owned by the shop that they’re mounted in, where the shop owner can look if there’s a robbery… they’re networked across countries. So now when there’s an action at Auckland University in Auckland and there’s 2,000 university students protesting, they can sit in Washington D.C. at a data center and watch that event live through the security cameras so these networked surveillance systems like TrapWire are bridging borders. It’s like a borderless world, a borderless surveillance world… and this is where the law is not really caught up with the Orwellian, dystopian infrastructure that has been built, because we’re not supposed to be surveilled – legally surveilled – by foreign countries. That is completely a no-no. Yet that is precisely what is happening. You’ll find that dozens if not the majority of countries on this earth can be surveilled by a data center in Washington D.C. and that is not by the consent of those citizens of those countries, at all.”

Harassment

“Now that we’ve dealt with how they surveill you, how do they harass you? What do they actually do to journalists and activists to try and stop them from being activists, and journalists to try to stop them from writing things that they don’t like? They do what I call surprise visits. Surprise visits are the ones you either know about or the ones you don’t know about. There is the obvious – there is the break-ins. In December 2011, early December, for the first time ever my house was broken into. The bathroom window was smashed from the inside of the house. So nobody broke in noticeably from the outside. But they broke a window from the inside to make it look as if they had broken in from the outside. That break-in was the first in a long series of disturbances inside my home. It was the most overt and it was the first, that I’m aware of, but there were many, many others that followed. Then there is the private investigators. These wonderful private investigators would show up at my house and be like ‘oh, we’ve heard that you have had some harassment as a result of your journalism and we’re investigating those people. We’re not investigating you but we happen to be investigating the people who you are at odds with so please give us all of this information about these totally unrelated things that we’d like to know about’. They covertly film you. You’ll notice they will hold folders and inside those folders they have little cameras that are actually filming you as you talk to them on your doorstep. So definitely don’t talk to them if you’re an activist or a journalist and strange ‘investigators’ show up wanting to talk to you. Then there is what’s known online as gang stalking. I personally don’t see it as gang stalking. I see it as people who are involved with these agencies who work in a coordinated fashion to harass you. They harass you in and with vehicles, they harass you in teams on the street, they will just do whatever they can to get in your face and to push you off balance and to make you have a really shitty day. Then there is the random photographers – you get these photographers with these great big telephoto lens taking photos of you when you walk out of your driveway, taking photos of you when you go to a concert at your kids school, taking photos of you in a parking lot in the middle of the city when you’re minding your own business. They seem to do it for harassment, I guess they also do it for, so that they’ve got something to put in their little files about you but most of all, I think the reason that they actually visibly do it to you is just to try to do it is just to keep you on guard and keep you off-balance and never knowing what is going to happen next. Then there’s actual interference in your life. It’s harassment around you, in your social groups that is to harm you but not directly – you don’t necessarily always know that it’s happening. So they’ll go to every neighbour in your street and they’ll say ‘your neighbour is under investigation. If you see anything strange you call us. You tell us what you know about them and they’ll try and pump the neighbours for information. You tend to have some – if you’re lucky, like me, you’ll have some really good neighbours that say ‘Who are you? What grounds do you have for this? Get out’ and send them packing. Then you will probably have some really gullible neighbours who will go ‘oh my God! Oh my God, they’re under investigation? Of course I will help you!’ Even though there’s no grounds for that investigation whatsoever and those are the people that these guys really rely on. There are other cases – and I can’t prove this in mine – but there are many other cases where people, neighbours, friends have been told that the person is under investigation for child molestation, for drug trafficking… and these are activists and journalists! It’s got nothing to do with child molestation or drug trafficking, but these investigators and even the police agencies have to find some way to scare the people in your social circle into a) silence, so that they don’t tell you that they’ve had this interaction and b) submission – so that they will participate, so they will do what these agencies want, specifically so that the agency can put the pressure on you in a way that is palatable to that member of the public. Because I mean, who likes child molesters, right? Of course you would want to help catch child molesters but unfortunately that’s not what its actually about, its just being used as an excuse. They will interfere in your romantic relationships. They will literally hit on you in bars. I cannot even count how many guys in polo neck t-shirts, just absolutely screaming off-duty cop I had hitting on me in bars and it’s not just because they think I’m pretty. It’s because of my work and it’s because of my activism. They will do this to your partners. They will sow disinformation with your partners, they will set up entrapment efforts with your partners. If they do not like your relationship they will do whatever they can to destroy it. If they can, they will institute undercover investigators if its a private agency or even police – look at the cases in the U.K. where women – activists – have ended up having children with undercover agents who were sleeping with them to get information from them about their movements. So I promise you I’m not making this up. This is well documented. They will interfere in your romantic relationships and if they decide that they want to have one with you they will try very hard to do that as well. They will harass you at events. So they would know that I was going to cover some really big action, I would be on the ground doing my job and they would just come and push me over. Even one time I even had, on camera, on film you can actually see me flying sideways through a crowd because a cop has come and just shoved me as hard as he can, when I’m filming, to try to stop me filming. But they’ll do this through the investigative agencies, they use their agents as well to try to disrupt your footage, to try to throw you off balance at critical moments. Or they’ll go to a major event that you’re at covering and they will run around telling everyone that will listen that you, you are the police, that you are the undercover agent, that you are there to sabotage the event when you are there just trying to tell the truth and to spread the truth to the public of what is really going on. Then there is digital harassment. Harassment on social media can be death threats, it can be rape threats. But it can also be targeted messages. Targeted messages that are based off intimate knowledge about your life that has been gained through surveillance. So if they know who was in your bedroom last night, or that they know that someone was in your bedroom last night, or if they know that you popped a pimple in the bathroom mirror this morning, because they have covert cameras in your bathroom, they will actually send you messages from sock puppet accounts to let you know that they know these silly little things about your life, which no one should care about because its not their business, but they do it so that you are aware that you’re being watched because they want you off-balance, they want you to make mistakes, they want you to act out and this is how they do it, this is how they put that pressure on you. By letting you know that they know everything, even what you did in the bathroom mirror. They will harass you through other forms of communication. They will make crank calls to your house over and over again, or at different times, or asking for different people, or just hang up on you and not actually talk at all. They will harass you via email. If you’re really in a bad position in terms of how far up the list you are, they will harass you electronically. We have seen in many instances at activism events things like the LRAD. The sound cannons. There is versions of those weapons that they use in residential settings. Especially the audio weapons. So they will do that, just to harm and to scare you in your own space. Even though it is completely and utterly immoral.”

Isolation

“Then there is the things that they do to isolate you. They will intercept your communications especially if they’re not encrypted specifically, or most easily, so that things you send, you never know if they actually make it to the person that you’re sending it to. Then you think that you’ve had conversations that you haven’t actually had and you end up never really knowing where you stand with people or what has or hasn’t been said or what has or hasn’t been received. There is gaslighting. Gaslighting is the best way to isolate someone. It’s really horrible and brutal and it is something that happened to me a lot when I was in New Zealand. So, I would get home and I would walk into my lounge and sitting open on my coffee table would be a newspaper that I did not buy and that no one else bought because there was no one else to buy it at that time – and it would be open to a specific article that I would understand the significance of. So it would relate to something I’d been writing about or something that had happened in my life. They would do this expressly to let me know two things. One: they had been inside my home, in my personal space. So, if they’d left that newspaper on the table, what else had they done? It would be up to my imagination to work out what else they had done in that time. But also because it’s something that I could not prove. It’s something that I could not explain to people, that this is happening. I could not go to a police station and say ‘somebody left a newspaper on my coffee table. I want you to do something about that.’ There’s absolutely no way that I could prove that. I had another incident where I had bought a 3-pack of brand new white sport socks and I left them on top of my dresser in my bedroom. As you do. You buy some new socks, you stick them on your dresser. You go out of your house. You come home and, not only are they gone, this isn’t just a case of missing socks, but a dirty filthy sweaty pair of men’s socks – and there was no man in my house at this time – men’s socks, is sitting on my dresser in the exact position where the unopened package of brand new white sport’s socks was. So someone has been in my house, they have stolen my socks, my unused sport socks and they have left a disgusting dirty pair of men’s socks in its place. Purely to let me know, they have been there. They have been in my house, they have been in my bedroom. They’ve been in my dresser. They have stolen $5 worth of socks from me. What can I do about it? Can I go to the cops and say ‘hey – $5 worth of socks has been stolen from me and somebody’s left some dirty socks on my dresser’, no I can’t. So these are the ways that they terrorise you. Ways that you can’t do anything about. There’s no redress for them and this is precisely why they do it and this is why they get away with it as well. They do things to you that you would sound completely nuts trying to tell anyone about and they know that when they do it. It’s deliberate. Then there’s misinformation. This happened to my media team over and over again. We would be sent like, Nazi propaganda that would be dressed up as left-wing rhetoric of social movements. You see it in what happened with the WikiLeaks Party actually, same thing. You see it with the Anonymous movement being told that they’re a Neo-Nazi movement when they have been doing anti-KKK actions for years. This accusation of Neo-Nazism is a common thread across all of the activist movements that have been targeted. They try to associate us with Neo-Nazis even though its completely baseless and there is no founding for it.”

Sabotage

“Sabotage is really horrible. You really can’t get around this. So, either you own your own home like I did, or you rent a home. If you rent a home they will come at you through your landlords. It’s back to the telling people you’re a child molester thing. They will go to your landlords and they will say ‘this person is under investigation. You need to cooperate with us. You need to let us put cameras in their home. You need to tell us everything about them. You need to do whatever we say. Because they’re terrible child molesters or drug traffickers or something. Please cooperate.’ But if you own your own home and it makes it a little bit more difficult for them, not much, but a little bit more difficult for them to surveill you, they will actively destroy your home piece by piece. They will destroy your belongings as well. It is repetitive damage that they do. So they’ll do it over and over and over again. They will steal things and they will break things. So a really good example of this is, in my home, I would have a leak spring out of nowhere in my roof. I would get someone in to patch my roof and it would cost me a couple of hundred bucks or whatever, and they would patch the roof and then two weeks later the roof would leak again. I would call the roof guy back and he would get up on the roof and he would say ‘why did you remove the patch?’ and I’d say ‘of course I didn’t remove the patch. I haven’t been on my roof. Why would I remove the patch?’ and he’d put another patch on and I’d pay another couple of hundred dollars. Then two weeks later the roof would leak again and he’d come back and say ‘why is the patch removed again?’ This is the perfect example of what they do. They will smash water pipes. They will put holes in your roof. They will just do things that, again, you can’t prove it. You can’t go to the cops and say ‘my patch came off my roof.’ But when your patch comes off your roof three or four times back to back and its not you who’s doing it, somebody is and that somebody is probably associated with all the other weird things that have been happening to you that I’ve just been discussing. Especially in the context of you being an activist or you being a journalist and covering controversial topics that the governments don’t like you doing. They will take things that they know are precious to you and destroy them, just to do the emotional damage. Like a precious antique watch that my grandmother got me, that I used to wear. I left it inside my jewelery box, I come home, I open my jewelery box, everything is still there, everything is fine, except the precise item has had its face smashed with a hammer. They will sabotage your employment. They will do the same thing with your boss or with your co-workers that they will do with your landlord. They will sabotage your relationships and your opportunities. So, it’s really like The Matrix. In The Matrix they think there’s a window and they try to go out it and they open the curtains and there’s a brick wall. That is exactly what these guys do with the information that they gather from the surveillance. They create a brick wall wherever there is an opportunity.”

Entrapment

“Moving along, there is entrapment. They will try to entrap you, especially if you’re an activist, at public events through trying to coerce you into doing illegal acts. They will entrap you by speech. They will get you to have conversations, they will record those conversations, then they will go and play them to affected parties to try to turn those parties against you. There is digital entrapment which is one I experienced early on when – I’m not a hacker, at all – but someone tried to convince me to hack something. Then there’s the most horrible of the horrible types of entrapment. This happened to me in 2013 in the wake of the Snowden disclosures, between June, July and end of August I was entrapped into having an online relationship with Hector (Sabu) Monsegur. Mario Fernandes, he called himself. He pretended to be a friend that I had had online for about seven years or eight years. I’ve actually published the full story of everything that happened, back in 2015. You can go and read the whole story if you’re really that interested, but he actually committed identity fraud so that he could convince me that he was someone that I’d always known so that he could convince me to get into a relationship with him so that he could pump me for information about my writing, what blogposts I had done… its this really insipid flavour of social engineering. Again, it comes back to these police informants that have relationships with activists and even have children with activists. This is like a digital version of the same thing. It’s these disgusting creeps that will use sex to try and get information out of you about your activism and your journalism. It’s the JTRIG program, right? They call it honeypots. They set up honeypots. What they’re actually doing is committing identity fraud to coerce unsuspecting people into having completely false relationships with them – relationships based on false premises. It is a form of rape because it is sexual activity procured or obtained by deception. The deception of you is how they obtain the sexual activity and they do this for a whole variety of reasons, primarily for information gathering, also for control, also so that they can handle you and get you to do things that they want you to do and also so that they can collect this material and so that they can have it to use against you, or to wield against you. In which case I highly recommend just telling the truth like I did, that this has happened to you, because it’s the only way that you can combat it. Don’t sit around feeling bad about what they’ve done – it’s on them. They are the disgusting people doing this, they are the ones who should feel the shame. Not the people who have been good-hearted enough to believe them. So if this has happened to you, speak out and tell people about it. The shame is on the perpetrator not on you.”

Institutionalisation

“What’s the end game? The end game is to institutionalise you one way or another. It can take many forms. It can just be reformist instituionalisation which means they push you into the conventional political process because they know that that’s a have – they know that game is rigged and they’re gonna win, whether the red candidate or the blue candidate gets in they’re gonna get their way. So they’ll try and push you into the political system, they’ll try and play on your ego, they want you to speak at events and get a profile so that you start worrying about your image and your reputation more than you do about, actually, the message that you’re putting out there and the action that you’re taking on behalf of people. They want you to feel that you have something to lose and they’ll play on that. If you have something to lose in your reputation, so they’ll use that to tailor your behaviour and your decision-making. They will try to reform you via institutionalisation with some complicit NGO’s. They would rather have you working for an NGO where they’re surveilling that whole NGO anyway and where you’re working on set projects and where its budgeted and where there’s a structure where you receive promotions or demotions and again… they’re trying to attack your ideology and your motivation. They can control your motivation through employment. They would rather have you working at a call centre for $10 an hour, than changing the world. They would much rather have that. So if they can get you to do that, they will get you to do that. In the most severe cases where none of their efforts have paid off, they haven’t been able to stop you doing what you’re doing, especially if you’re sufficiently isolated and you don’t have good support, they can actually attack you to the point where you start to lose the plot. Not of your own volition, or not of natural causes, but purely because of what they’re doing to you. There have been cases where activists are in fact sectioned under the Mental Health Act and are forced into mental hospitals and they’re drugged – once they’re in the mental hospitals they are drugged against their will and they are discredited by those means. They are prevented from continuing their activism or their journalism and they are discredited by their mental health record. Not to mention the horrendous effects on their bodies of the drugs that they’re given and the experiences that they undergo. The other form of institutionalisation is imprisonment. So you see that with Barrett Brown, you see that with Jeremy Hammond, you see that with Chelsea Manning, you see that with many of our most beautiful and amazing whistle-blowers and journalists and activists. They will find a way to put you in prison. Look at the guy that – was it the guy that filmed Eric Garner’s death? Many of those guys actually, the citizen journalists who filmed various people being hurt by the police – they’re targeted and they’re put in jail. Purely because they recorded the truth of what was happening.”

Assassination Attempts

“Big deep sigh because now we come to the most depressing part of all ad that is the assassination attempts. So, if you’re an exceptional circumstance where they cannot institutionalise you, where they’ve tried every other thing on you and none of it has worked, then it is possible that they will actually try to just kill you or to really hurt you or injure you. In my case, on Mother’s Day no less, they tried to drive me off a cliff. They had a car pull out in front of me, at a township in a rural area, and a car pull out behind me, and then those two cars were used to box us in and to control our speed so that we couldn’t drop back and we couldn’t go forward and we couldn’t get around, because we were in this windy clifftop area in this rural part of Northland in New Zealand. Then once they controlled our movement and our speed they started using what I later found out are called ‘Dazzlers’. They’re these really high-powered lights, coloured lights, and they shine them into the rear-view mirrors – from the vehicle behind – to dazzle the driver, so that the driver loses their vision. In a situation when you’re on a one-lane-each-way windy cliff-top road at night, losing your vision is really not a good thing. There were other incidents where the oil cap on our car was removed, again in a rural area, where it’s a high-speed zone and as soon as the vehicle is traveling at speed when the oil cap has been removed the oil splashes all over the engine and then catches on fire. So next thing you know you’re driving at speed in a car that is on fire. It’s a particularly awesome experience. Then there’s medical assassination attempts as well. So there’s situations where they can give you the wrong drugs, or an overdose of drugs, or… I received  a really horrible, nasty message in 2011… it was a threat. It said, ‘if you mess with us, we will kill you and no one will know that it was murder/nobody will know that we have done this to you’. So they’re basically bragging that they have methods of getting rid of people that are untraceable.”

Part Six: WHAT DO THEY WANT?

“They want you to give up. They want you to run. They want you to run because if you run from them… for example, one guy, who was really severely targeted, his house was repeatedly broken into, his pets were stolen, his belongings were destroyed, he was prevented from getting a job, they just ruined his life. He ran out of the city, just took off, because what else do you do when you’re being stalked 24 hours a day? He thought that was a good idea, to try to get out of town. They picked him up, booked him into a mental hospital, incarcerated him, drugged him and the works. So they want you to run, because if you run they can pass it off as unstable behaviour. They want you to lash out, they want you to freak out, they want you to hurt people. As sick as it sounds, that’s what they want you to do because that gives them the perfect excuse to pick you up and the perfect excuse to put you away. So do not hurt people. Do not run, do not lash out. Hold your ground. They want you to break down. They want you to fall to pieces. They want you to not be able to cope with what is happening to you, in a way that is visible to others that you can’t cope. For exactly that same reason. Do not do that. Find some community. There are people out there who can help you but step one is getting in touch with people who understand that this is happening to you, because it’s happening to thousands of people all over the world.”

What You Learn To Do

“What you learn to do is to use their surveillance systems against them. Get in public if they’re hurting you. Go on their surveillance systems, their public surveillance systems. At least then there is a record of what is happening to you. You’re better getting in amongst a lot of people than you are going into an isolated situation. Be visible. Do what you do visibly. Let people know – ‘Hey. This is me, this is my name, this is what I do, check out what I do, see that I’m legit and please keep an eye on me because this is risky. Document what you do. Make sure that you have documentation to show ‘this is what I do and this is what has been happening to me.’ Document that responsibly; don’t go running off after the attackers trying to track them down and end up in more trouble. Just document what they’re doing to you, hold onto those records, keep them in a safe place and distribute them amongst people that you trust.”

Conclusion

“There is a lot more to my story than what I’ve just been able to tell you about in this video. But for now, this is a really good start on what it means to be a Person of Interest – what you face, who does it to you and how they do it – and how you should respond. I hope that this is helpful to you and if I do get confirmation that I am one of the 88 New Zealanders that was targeted by the NSA on behalf of the New Zealand government – you can be sure that you’ll be hearing more from me.”

WATCH THE FULL DOCUMENTARY: vimeo.com/181517859

*** Please note: there is a number of screenshots, photographs and other supporting evidence shown in the documentary that is not referenced in this transcript.