Waihopai Spybase's New Dome To "Protect Dish From Weather". Yeah, Right

“It (the Waihopai spybase’s new dome, being installed today) is inflated to two PSI (pounds per square inch) above atmospheric pressure and designed to protect the satellite (sic – dish) from the weather not hide the direction that the satellite (sic – dish) is pointed, as has been popularly believed”. Full story at http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/2663681/Spy-base-ready-for-new-dome

Yeah ,right.



In which case, why isn’t Telecom’s big satellite dish at Warkworth under a dome to “protect it from the weather”? Or the big satellite dishes on the roofs at TV1 and TV3 in Auckland? Or. Come to think, the hundreds of thousands of satellite TV dishes on buildings and houses up and down the country?



Of course the purpose of the domes at Waihopai is to conceal the direction in which the dishes are being pointed, in order to conceal which international civilian telecommunications satellites they are spying on. Actually the Stuff report quoted above has a Freudian slip in that it uses the word “satellite” instead of “dish”. That’s it in a nutshell – the domes are to conceal what satellites are being spied on.



Please turn the question around and ask the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau if they, and their masters in the US National Security Agency, don’t mind at all if anyone can see which way their spy dishes are pointing and can therefore work out who and what they’re spying on? Do a quick Google search of other spybases – Pine Gap in Australia or Menwith Hill in the UK, for example – and tell us how many uncovered dishes you can see as opposed to ones concealed by domes.



Please stop falling for the GCSB line that, uniquely, Waihopai’s satellite dishes have to be covered by domes to stop them getting wet or blowing away.