waihopai valley dark sky chorus


Curated by tz1epPT49poWo3ACecnRMqYYiLzewya53YB7
Jun 29, 2024 at 4:45 AM

The waihopai valley in the south island of Aotearoa hosts mountains, agriculture, and for several decades, two radomes run by NZ spy agency the GCSB in conjunction with the US. These covered satellite dishes were part of the UKUSA interception of satellite communications. It was long felt that the US did not share all it's surveillance and perhaps operated outside of NZ law. In 2008, a dome was purposefully damaged by a Ploughshares group who stated that the base contributed intelligence to the illegal US invasion of Iraq and the "war on terror". Incidentally, the GCSB and international partners utterly failed its intelligence purpose with respect to the 2019 Christchurch terror attack. The radomes and dishes were deemed obsolete and disassembled in 2022, presumably because other methods of spying on communications are now more effective. The remaining structures will continue to process intelligence. Given that the Australian Pine Gap facility (with 38 radomes) near Alice Springs was recently implicated in sharing information with the US and Israel that may have been used in drone assassinations, the alliances that now share such information are potentially abetting war crimes. -------- - visuals: stu sontier + Google Earth sources - Planet.com, Maxar - audio - "waihopai deconstruction": stu sontier -------- mp4 | 2400 x 1564 px | 24fps | 89 Meg -------- Created as part of the Art Commission @artcommission - https://328photography.xyz/art-commission/
The waihopai valley in the south island of Aotearoa hosts mountains, agriculture, and for several decades, two radomes run by NZ spy agency the GCSB in conjunction with the US. These covered satellite dishes were part of the UKUSA interception of satellite communications. It was long felt that the US did not share all it's surveillance and perhaps operated outside of NZ law. In 2008, a dome was purposefully damaged by a Ploughshares group who stated that the base contributed intelligence to the illegal US invasion of Iraq and the "war on terror". Incidentally, the GCSB and international partners utterly failed its intelligence purpose with respect to the 2019 Christchurch terror attack. The radomes and dishes were deemed obsolete and disassembled in 2022, presumably because other methods of spying on communications are now more effective. The remaining structures will continue to process intelligence. Given that the Australian Pine Gap facility (with 38 radomes) near Alice Springs was recently implicated in sharing information with the US and Israel that may have been used in drone assassinations, the alliances that now share such information are potentially abetting war crimes. -------- - visuals: stu sontier + Google Earth sources - Planet.com, Maxar - audio - "waihopai deconstruction": stu sontier -------- mp4 | 2400 x 1564 px | 24fps | 89 Meg -------- Created as part of the Art Commission @artcommission - https://328photography.xyz/art-commission/
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