By Fiona Rotherham

Sept. 15 (BusinessDesk) - Fugitive spying whistleblower Edward Snowden put in an appearance via the internet at tonight's Internet Party Moment of Truth event to back up his claims that mass surveillance of New Zealanders is already taking place despite government denials.

Snowden had earlier posted an article on The Intercept website entitled "New Zealand's Prime Minister isn't telling the truth about mass surveillance", where he said any statement that mass surveillance isn't performed in New Zealand, or that internet communications are not comprehensively intercepted and monitored, is categorically false.

"If you live in New Zealand, you are being watched," he said. He also told the event there were two US National Security Agency facilities in New Zealand - one in Auckland and one further north.

Prime Minister John Key released declassified documents just before the Moment of Truth event, where 800 people had to be turned away from the packed Auckland Town Hall while more than 22,000 viewers watched on the YouTube livestream. Key again denied the claims by Snowden and American journalist Glen Greenwald concerning the operations of the Government Communications Security Bureau.

Greenwald also released a story today on The Intercept website which said New Zealand's spy agency, the GCSB, worked in 2012 and 2013 to implement a mass metadata surveillance system as top government officials publicly insisted no such programme was being planned and would not be legally permitted.

Both he and Snowden didn't add any new revelations beyond what was in the articles they published just before the event, although they both questioned why Key could release previously classified documents simply to defend his own reputation rather than in the national interest, and whether the documents should have been classified in the first place.

Greenwald said documents provided by Snowden show that the New Zealand government worked in secret to exploit a new internet surveillance law enacted in the wake of revelations of illegal domestic spying to initiate a new metadata collection programme that appeared to be designed to collect information about New Zealanders' communications.

Snowden accused Key of misleading the public about GCSB's role in mass surveillance.

"The prime minister's claim to the public, that 'there is not and there never has been any mass surveillance', is false," the former National Security Agency analyst wrote. "The GCSB, whose operations he is responsible for, is directly involved in the untargeted, bulk interception and algorithmic analysis of private communications sent via internet, satellite, radio and phone networks."

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NSA whistleblower Snowden says kiwis are 'being watched'