Nicky Hager and Anthony Hubbard have revealed that police officers from the Special Investigation Group (SIG), which was set up to identify terrorism threats and risks to national security, have carried out surveillance and used a paid informer to gather information on activist groups, including Greenpeace, animal rights organizations and the anti-war movement.

The information gathered was not just about planned protests and the like but also about the personal lives and sexual relationships of activists. Over the past ten years the New Zealand police have spent tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of dollars paying Christchurch man Rob Gilchrist to infiltrate activist groups and report on their activities to police. His current partner, 22-year-old animal rights activist Rochelle Rees stumbled across evidence of his spying while fixing his computer. The NoRightTurn blog commented that with no real terrorism in New Zealand;

The police did what bureaucracies do, and turned their attention to the closest thing they could find in order to justify their budget: protesters. (sic) And finding no evidence of crime, let alone terrorism, they then started collecting personal dirt instead - anything rather than admit that their task was basically pointless.

It would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sinister. People’s lives and relationships have been ruined because of this, and it will impose a significant chilling effect which may prevent people from speaking out on issues that matter to them. But its quite clear that the police don’t care about freedom of expression or the right to protest; they don’t care about the Bill of Rights they supposedly exist to protect.

Auckland human rights lawyer Tim McBride told the Sunday Star Times that the long-term police surveillance “seems to me to be outrageous in a country that goes off to the United Nations and prattles on about our proud human rights record”. Gilchrist admitted that none of the people he spyed on for the past decade were security threats, they were “good people trying to make a better world.”