WELLINGTON, Sept. 15 -- Three international fugitives from U.S. prosecutors came together via the Internet in Auckland Monday to discuss claims of how the New Zealand government was enabling mass surveillance of its own people and contributing to the "Five Eyes" multinational spy network.

U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden and Australian Wikileaks founder Julian Assange addressed a public meeting at a packed Auckland Town Hall meeting organized by German Internet mogul, who is fighting extradition to the United States on charges of copyright piracy and money laundering.

Snowden and Assange spoke live from their safe havens in Russia and the Ecuadorean embassy in London respectively through an Internet-based encrypted video system hosted by Dotcom's Mega company.

Snowden told the meeting, which was broadcast live over the Internet, that the NSA had facilities for gathering mass communications metadata and content in New Zealand and that the NSA could read communications through a network of "sensors," including a sensor in New Zealand.

Southern Cross Cables, which operates New Zealand's only Internet cable link to the outside world and has denied their cables are tapped, would not realize their systems were tapped, said Snowden, asking why the New Zealand company thought its security was so special that it had avoided surveillance technologies that had violated other telecommunications systems around the world.

New Zealand's Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) spy agency not only used the NSA's "XKEYSCORE" mass surveillance tool, "they have expanded it, they have contributed to its development," said Snowden.

Earlier Monday, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Greenwald and Snowden both had articles posted on The Intercept news site claiming New Zealand Prime Minister John Key was being untruthful about information gathered by the GCSB and that the GCSB was sharing the information with Five Eyes spying partners in the United States, Britain, Australia and Canada.

Snowden's article stated: "Let me be clear: any statement that mass surveillance is not performed in New Zealand, or that the internet communications are not comprehensively intercepted and monitored, or that this is not intentionally and actively abetted by the GCSB, is categorically false."

Key, who has consistently denied New Zealand's spy agencies are conducting mass surveillance, said he was releasing declassified government documents to prove the claims were "simply wrong" and based on incomplete information.

However, both Greenwald, who was at the meeting, and Snowden said the documents were intended to distract and blur the facts.

Earlier, Key had admitted for the first time that the GCSB worked on a proposal for mass data collection, but it was killed before a public debate on changing New Zealand's spy laws last year.

Greenwald said Key had been "shameless" in releasing declassified documents regarding national security to protect his own reputation.

Assange told the meeting that New Zealanders had not agreed to the "radical extreme project" of mass communications surveillance.

He said GCSB officials were addicted to their relationship with powerful players in the other Five Eyes countries.