Legal Beagle: A rather incomplete submission on the Countering Terrorist Fighters Legislation Bill
43 Responses
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How does one even make a submission? thank's to National's cutbacks mail service from here Dunedin now spends a day in Christchurch before going anywhere
(yes I know one can probably doi it on line, but there's a whole generation or two still around for who that is largely still a foreign country)
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NSA,
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You seem to have read the actual text, which is more than I did. Having only caught the news yesterday, and seen that the online submission form was still open, I dashed off a few thoughts based on the introductory notes.
That online form is very handy for short comments. No need to worry about correct addressing or who to send it to--just scratch out a few quick thoughts.
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if I could turn back time...
Yesterday would have been the day to go here: submissions
There seems to be a mistake in their wording:This is an omnibus bill, introduced under Standing Order 263(a), that proposes amendments to the Customs and Excise Act 1996, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service Act 1969, and the Passports Act 1992.
Surely they meant ominous...
;- )Key and co are just using fear to dragoon the country into more draconian control, and I'd warrant at the instigation of others beyond our shores (or at least to curry favour with same).
One wonders what the UN Security Council would recommend?
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NSA, in reply to
Key and co are just using fear to dragoon the country into more draconian control,
Damn straight Ian, People seriously want to go fight abroad and the Government’s answer to that is confiscating their passports and what? Wait and see if they take kindly to that? Is there travel insurance cover?
Can’t wait 48 hours for a warrant to surveil who? Bob the muffler thief? Foreign Fighters? Are we going to film them packing their bags? Is this being touted as a measure to curb terrorism? If the situation is so urgent that we can’t wait 48 or even 24 hours as Palmer’s suggesting, to film suspected terrorists, then a warrant is the least of our god damned worries and a couple of video cameras is hands down the absolute most bloody shit for brains weapon one could ever conceivably fucking consider administering for the purpose of preserving the security of our country. tt’s preposterous. John Key and his team are a bunch of chronic bloodsuckers and it’s high time we turned all cameras on every one of those delusionally paranoid cunts and commence the neverending upload..
Key and his lot serve no purpose but to derail our democracy
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BenWilson, in reply to
Key and co are just using fear to dragoon the country into more draconian control, and I'd warrant at the instigation of others beyond our shores (or at least to curry favour with same).
But can one put that in a submission? Essentially my main problem with it is the whole idea of it, not the technical details of how it will be implemented. But given that it will be implemented, then I guess we squeeze out what sanity we can. I guess that's why they're called submissions. We're already beaten, so haggling over the number of strokes from the cane is all we have. I'm being facetious, of course, before someone goes looking the word up in a dictionary.
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NSA,
Tangentially stuff.co.nz was hacked last night, I began receiving these messages there and only there at about 3:07NZ time. I thought I was a target(?), but a google search revealed that they, whoever they may be, hit news sites, so I blanked my post above, assuming it would be in the news but…
Clicking on the link took me here
Tech worm on Twitter claims:
Worried about “I’ve been hacked”, its not you, 80+ website was hijacked, by Syrian Electronic Army
SEAnuX 1.0 confirms.
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I managed to submit something just before midnight. Apologies in advance to the committee for the spelling errors - give us a longer period to submit and you wont get something typed half-asleep in bed.
Submitting via the form is incredibly easy - so easy I almost expect in the future there will be requests to make it more difficult to use, to gently deter casual submitters.
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It would be nice to hear from the PM why Terrorism became so urgent, when it wasn't even on the radar as an issue for the election that we just had, and we haven't had an actual terrorist attack since the 1980s, our sole data point of evidence of any terrorist threat in this country.
There's no justification for the legislation, and certainly no justification for urgency. There's barely even been a discussion of what is quite a big change in our human rights.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
we haven’t had an actual terrorist attack since the 1980s
Assuming that you're referring to the Rainbow Warrior, I rather doubt that Key would consider that a terrorist attack. Thatcher certainly didn't. I recall her angrily cutting short questions from a journalist who had the temerity to suggest that it was.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Yes, that was what I was referring to. It's as close as we've ever got. It's an astonishing sham that we could be cramming through legislation over something for which there isn't even one single incident in our entire nation's history to justify these powers. We have never been attacked by terrorists. We've never intercepted any to foil an impending attack by them. We've got as much justification to do this as we have to start passing special laws to deal with our serial killer problem. Surely that's about as urgent, given zero incidents, zero evidence of any at work here.
Now I feel a little worried to have even suggested that, might give them ideas that we need new laws that everyone should have to give over DNA samples and fingerprints as a matter of course. There are, after all, serial killers in other countries.
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SIStemic failures...
here's a link to an older article
including the Murdoch Report into NZ Security services from 2009Threats also included "transboundary criminality, civilisational friction, resource rivalry and energy brinkmanship".
Meanwhile the UK Govt blames Facebook for their own inadequacies...
John Key must have had extra tutoring at the G20...
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Paul Campbell, in reply to
Tangentially stuff.co.nz was hacked last night,
The Indedendent was showing that an hour ago – maybe they got to some common hosting resource, or maybe the underlying caching infrastructure
EDIT: seems still to be broken
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[stuff] seems still to be broken
You mean all the news has been substituted for dubious partisan propaganda? It's always like that...
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
partisan hacks...
You mean all the news has been substituted for dubious partisan propaganda? It’s always like that…
nice...
I see that APN (NZ Herald) seemingly escaped being hacked - probably as it is so lacking in influence, and is seen as helping the hackers aims rater than hindering them perhaps?
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For the record: Stuff, per se, was not hacked.
Stuff, like many other sites, uses a service called Gigya to do so-called social login and provide commenting services. Gigya’s DNS records were compromised last night – not sure how that happened – and that enabled someone to make gigya.com point to the wrong servers. Therefore when sites that used Gigya loaded, they served up some Javascript from the SEA.
The (tech security) moral of the story is that securing your site is not enough: if you include code from 3rd parties, you are vulnerable to their problems, whatever they are.
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FletcherB, in reply to
Yes, that was what I was referring to. It’s as close as we’ve ever got.
Somewhat off-topic, but the 1984 Wellington Trades-Hall bombing might also have been terrorist-ic in nature? (presumably a lone attacker rather than group?)
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BenWilson, in reply to
Yes, I think I'm wrong about there never being any terrorist stuff, depending what you mean. There was also a suicide bombing of the Whanganui police computer in '82, and a bridge blown up in 1951, probably over industrial dispute. But it's been 30 years since any of those things.
ETA: And apart from the Rainbow Warrior, none of them involved foreign powers or organizations, which is what all the current bollocks is trying to make us all scared of.
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NSA, in reply to
For the record: Stuff, per se, was not hacked.
Thanks for that Stephen, though I’m unsure of your professional affiliations here, so I raise an eyebrow at the strictness of interpretation of the term ‘hacked’ that you’re employing. For users, the site was compromised and unviewable for about fifteen minutes. Your description explains how it was carried out. It’s no secret that SEA target News sites:
The SEA claims responsibility for defacing or otherwise compromising hundreds of websites that it contends spread news hostile to the Syrian government. These include news websites such as BBC News, the Associated Press, National Public Radio, CBC News, Al Jazeera, Financial Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post
Fudging motives and scale is appropriate delivery for this thread:
Gigya, a third-party United States company which provides commenting and sharing services, had its domain registrar breached, which resulted in several websites [emphasis mine] pointing to a new website,
80 websites were compromised last night, and Stuff are listed by name.
What is topically missing from that stuff.co.nz article, is a brief mention, for the uninitiated i.e. the MSM’s target market; that the SEA are allegedly with us; enemies of ISIS.
Happy thanks giving, hope you didn’t miss us! The press: Please don’t pretend #ISIS are civilians. #SEA
I wasn’t poisoned per se, the cake was.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
I do raise an eyebrow at the strictness of interpretation of the term ‘hacked’ that you’re employing.
Mea culpa:
'twas I that introduced the loose terminology 'hacked' and I believe Stephen was responding to my looseness-of-concept-without-proof.
I also believe him to be someone who knows-of-what-he-speaks and whose clarification and insights I'm grateful for. -
NSA, in reply to
Mea culpa
– The websites of British and North American media organisations and retailer Wal-Mart’s Canadian unit were hacked on Thursday in a suspected attack by the Syrian Electronic Army,
it’s common enough, depends on the choice of hat.
I also believe him to be someone who knows-of-what-he-speaks and whose clarification and insights I’m grateful for.
I feel likewise, but I do recall Stephen previously mentioned being employed by stuff.co.nz, which would, if its still the case, naturally inform my reading of his response.
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Trevor Nicholls, in reply to
We have never been attacked by terrorists. We've never intercepted any to foil an impending attack by them.
Just wait for civil unrest and peaceful protest to be reclassified as domestic terrorism. It won't take long.
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NSA, in reply to
Sorry I was at the murder house getting a crown. I'm aware my response above may have seemed abrupt Stephen, it's certainly nothing personal, and an explanation is in order. Please note that my reply is expressly contingent on this layperson's assumption that you may still be affiliated/ employed by or in some way accountable to Stuff.co.nz, quite possibly in a capacity related to IT. My response was made as (1) a consumer of (2) a news and information provider.
Stuff published the article linked to above entitled Why Stuff comments and log ins are missing. This article presented a similar account to that in your post, the onus was likewise on Gigya:
Gigya chief executive Patrick Salyer said at no point was any user data compromised.
Which is all well and good for those technically literate enough to parse that content, but in certain respects it sounds like the defensive mitigation one might expect from an entity intent on dodging accountability. Patrick Crewdson was clear enough in assuring the public that Stuff's data protection was intact:
"We treat any breach of services we use very seriously. We have no reason to believe any user information was compromised, and we're working with Gigya to make sure such a breach doesn't happen again."
But this doesn't really address the key concern some might have, that being; the message (screen capped above) received by users attempting to access stuff.co.nz at that time.
On receiving that message, this user's worry was not about the distinction of either stuff.co.nz or some 3rd party being hacked. or for that matter about whether our largely trivial user data kept by stuff.co.nz was compromised. The paramount concern on reading that was that it broadly implies that our own devices have been hacked. For the technically literate the truth soon outs itself, but for someone like my dad, this may result in him sending his computer to a shop who are only to happy to take his money, and as for my 91 year old grandma on her fresh iPad, well that could be a real cause for panic. So I hope you can understand why I'd feel that
Stuff, per se, was not hacked.
is not an ideal response by someone who may be employed by Stuff.co.nz, when there are users who have received the message:
"You've been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)"
I' couldn't care if it were the whole internet that had been hacked to bring up that message on stuff.co.nz, as long as there were at least some effort to provide reassurance either on their site or by their employees in their capacity as private individuals to us users that:
"you have not personally actually been hacked"
Stuff's relationship with 3rd parties is its own business and while some of the background is appreciated, the users' relationship remains with the website itself, the characteristics and the user experience were clearly affected to the extent that an insinuation that stuff.co.nz was not hacked, dependent on a more advanced understanding of how these platforms operate, would do little to enhance user confidence.
If, on the other hand, you are in no way affiliated with the stuff.co.nz then yes Stephen, the specific mechanisms of the attacks had already been outlined in the (then) first entry (The Guardian) of that Google link I provided in my initial post:The SEA is claiming to have hacked a number of sites, but evidence points to an ad network at the heart of the attacks
For whatever it's worth =)
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NSA, in reply to
the Rainbow Warrior
This telling piece by Jane Kelsey paints a remarkably different picture of NZSIS’s priorities compared to say the brief presented by the PM or any of the other propaganda folk are likely to run into. In running such a misguided and chaotic operation, it’s not difficult to glean how four of the six member Rainbow Warrior cell managed to completely elude even the NZSIS and escape the country. That Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart were only captured with the assistance of a Neighbourhood Watch group is damning evidence that the SIS were well out of their depth when it comes to that which they’re mandated to actually handle.
Taking into account more recent slip ups by the espionage sector, vis a vis Dotcom, the escapes of Ze’ev Barkan and David Reznic, the allegations against Rob Gilchrist, The Kitteridge report, the Gwyn report, the SIS’s requests that university staff tell tales on their colleagues in 2009, in this light, any assumption that the NZSIS are ethically endowed enough to handle the power they already hold is highly dubious.
This is an organisation that has clearly devolved, through lack of meaningful oversight by successive Governments, to a point where it’s now basically writing its own ticket. The fact that the New Zealand’s MPs are being put to work on legislation related to passport suspension within a hairs breadth of Kris Willoughby skipping the country, convicted murderer/pedophile Phillip John Smith skipping the country on a passport obtained under an alternate name, Paul Bennett and Simone Wright, wanted on fraud and sex charges, escaping the country using allegedly false passports (tracked down by a private investigator) makes an absolute mockery of the task ahead of the Government. This last case in particular exposes the absolute futility of the proposed rejigging of the legislation related to passport suspension before the Select Committee.
The charade is somewhat up, the New Zealand population have now received unequivocal evidence that we can, any one of us, either by acquiring fake passports that are convincing enough or by other methods get the hell out of dodge regardless. Very few could formulate a satire so brilliant, or a task so woefully futile as that which 121 Kiwis will turn up on Monday at the Hive to churn into honey.
In a professional context, greater competence is generally accorded greater responsibility. Traditionally or at least ideally, there is also the expectation that those granted the greatest responsibility are held to the highest of standards. The case of the NZSIS, an organization whose flagrant ineptitude and misplaced meddling has been clear to see for anyone who’s dared to look, more or less since its inception, somehow acquiring more responsibility and power, just a week out from the Gwyn report’s indictment of the SIS’s political neutrality, is ruefully ludicrous.
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I've never been employed by Fairfax. I have run the team that does the tech side of Stuff for Fairfax, working for Catalyst. Hasn't been my gig for about three years though. Of course I am a bit sensitive to the implication that my colleagues have fallen down on the job. And I hope it was useful to lay out what actually happened -- maybe your grandma isn't reading this, but clearly you are and could pass it on.
I do love the irony of being accused of "insinuations" in a comment dripping with speculation about my motives.
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