Snowden files: Inside Waihopai's Spy domes in New Zealand
Source: stuff.co.nz
The Waihopai intelligence base looks oddly alien and out of place: huge white "golf ball" radomes like a moon station and silent buildings within two fences of razor wire, all dropped in the midst of vineyards and dry hills in New Zealand's Marlborough landscape.
Documents about the Waihopai station leaked by US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden show that the facility is as alien as is seems.
Everything inside the top secret station except the staff is foreign.
The electronic eavesdropping systems, the computer programmes that automatically index and search the captured communications, and the databases where details of a whole region's communications are stored: they are all standardised parts of the global surveillance system run by the NSA.
The Waihopai base functions as a cog in that spying machine, the alliance's main eye on the South Pacific region.
The Sunday Star-Times analysed the documents in collaboration with US news website firstlook.org The Intercept, which obtained them from Snowden. The leaked files reveal in unprecedented detail the New Zealand-based station's targets, inner workings and links to the international network of spy facilities run by the Five Eyes.
Source: stuff.co.nz
