So, according to the Dominion Post, New Zealand spies “have won access to a United States Government terrorist database in a deal the Security Intelligence Service says will significantly enhance national security.”

Utter tosh. Which competition on the back of a corn flakes packet did the SIS win to lumber us with this new restriction on personal freedom?

This is the Big Brother database that resulted in former pop star Cat Stevens being unceremoniously dumped off a London to Washington flight. Stevens, a reclusive and totally innocent pacifist Englishman and author of the song Peace Train, had apparently committed the sins of becoming a Moslem and changing his name to Yusuf Islam. This, to US spooks, was concrete evidence that he was a fundamentalist terrorist.

It’s also the database that has been responsible for such endless delays in transit through the paranoid immigration service at US airports that millions of people go thousands of miles out of their way to avoid the place – which is why Air New Zealand now offers a service between the UK and New Zealand that flies in the opposite direction.

According to confused DomPost reporter Hank Schouten, this database “could potentially save the SIS a repeat of the embarrassment it faced in the case of Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui. Until it relented last month, the agency had maintained for four years that Mr Zaoui was a security risk… The first alert system could enable the SIS to identify somebody like Mr Zaoui as soon as he checked in for a flight to New Zealand.”

What?

How on earth could the US database have anything other than a seriously bad effect on “somebody like Ahmed Zaoui” as well as the rest of us?

Zaoui, as the security service now grudgingly concedes, was a legitimate asylum seeker who posed no threat whatsoever to anyone. The security service wasted hundreds of thousands of tax dollars in persecuting and imprisoning him. For this, they and their boss Helen Clark bear full responsibility. In four years, they produced not one shred of evidence that Zaoui was linked to terrorism.

This database will do nothing to enhance national security. Instead, it will introduce the climate of fear that bedevils America, Britain and Australia.

No doubt the new SIS recruits whose jobs require “database support, basic data and trend analysis and the ability to handle telephone enquiries in a confident manner” will shortly be adding a few members of the Urewera Liberation Army to the global database of airline passengers non grata…