Serious allegations were made at a meeting at the Auckland Town Hall on Monday night regarding mass surveillance of New Zealand citizens.
Speakers at the meeting included Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, journalist Glen Greenwald and former NSA system analyst Edward Snowden.
Snowden claimed that while working at the NSA he routinely came across the communications of New Zealanders through a mass surveillance tool shared with GCSB, called X-Keyscore. The tool allowed access to a database of communications collected through mass surveillance and was not used for the purposes of cybersecurity, but instead to read private emails, text messages, and internet traffic, Snowden claims.
Prime Minister John Key has denied the claims and released a series of documents which he says show that no such surveillance has taken place.
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