Speaker by Various Artists

I’ve been following the News of the World “phone hacking” story and am disgusted that a publication would stoop that low in order to work fill its pages with scandals and tattle. There’s no justification for what has happened and those who did it are not journalists, pure and simple.

The current NotW mess is eerily familiar too, from a New Zealand perspective. In May 2005 Telecom’s voice mail system for the 027 mobile phone network was found to be vulnerable so that anyone with the smallest amount of technical nous could listen in on, delete and forward messages. I broke that story for Computerworld together with the paper’s then editor, Matt Cooney.

For those who missed the story it featured powerful people, government ministers and SIS spooks having their mobile phone voice mail messages intercepted. Not deliberately by journalists and private investigators as the NotW did, but accidentally by a confused teenager and his older friend who were playing around with Voice over IP gear.

There was no hacking or phreaking taking place in other words, just horsing around that got out of hand. It was big scoop for little ole Computerworld though, one that we all felt proud over.

Since the NotW scandal, the 027 episode has popped up again in New Zealand media filling in some details that weren’t available when the whole thing played out.

For starters, I wasn’t first with it. After the story ran the teenager in the eye of the storm told me he had contacted the Herald and Peter Griffin who was the technology editor about it.

I never asked Griffin why he didn’t write the story, but see that he has now reflected on what happened then in light of the NotW scandal in a column in the Listener.

Normally, I’d let sleeping dogs lie especially after so many years but the column makes some sweeping statements about journalists and our reporting of the story that I can’t ignore. After discussing the column with Griffin I feel I have to respond to some of the points raised, and explain how we worked on the story and provide an update on what happened after.

First, was the ability to listen in on important people and celebrities’ voice mail “the stuff of journalists’ dreams” as Griffin writes? This is really important: did we listen to messages or were we ever tempted to do so for stories?

The answer to that is a categorical “no”. I believe Matt said the story was about the messages being accessible and not what was in them. That was the boundary and while I can actually imagine there being a few situations where journalists would be justified to cross it, this wasn’t one of them.

Maybe it’s because both Matt and I are both geeks and used to certain protocols when dealing with security issues but honestly, we never once considered listening in on the voice mails. Instead, we took great care not to breach people’s privacy when working on the story which was a minefield full of legal and ethical considerations at almost each turn.

And, the people hit by the vulnerability were in our minds. The responsible way to deal with security issues is that you inform the party with the vulnerability before you publish anything. This gives the organisation a chance to verify the vulnerability, patch it, and assess the damage, if any and alert those affected by it.

So, we notified Telecom about the voice mail breach and provided details of how it works, well in advance so they could sort it out and ensure that there would be no more interception of messages.

Unfortunately, this was during the Gattung era and Telecom’s head PR person was at best unhelpful to deal with when he wasn’t just plain unpleasant. He refused to believe us until we gave some supplied details of a message left for him by his wife on his voice mail (no, we didn’t listen to the message).

Playing the game in an ethical fashion with Telecom backfired on us somewhat. We didn’t get even a thank you for bringing the glaring security hole to Telecom’s attention ahead of running the story so they could sort it out.

Instead, Telecom’s PR person refused to return our calls and attempted to spike the story by issuing a press release to other media. Luckily, the story was ready to go so we published shortly after.

And boy, there were some strong reactions to the story. Paul Brislen interviewed a hugely upset Auckland mayor Dick Hubbard for Computerworld for instance and there were others who were shocked and disgusted that their private messages might have been accessed.

Other publications, TV and radio followed up on the Computerworld stories. Clearly, it was in the public interest to know that voice mails left on 027 phones could be intercepted easily. Clearly, interception of officials’ messages had taken place and the public deserved to know this. This is not stuff you can ignore.

Why would a journalist sitting on a story of that magnitude back away from it?

Griffin explains in the Listener:

The kid had potentially hit the jackpot. He could be selling info to the women’s magazines, trading commercial secrets, even manipulating the political system. Instead he wanted his name in the Herald – his real name too. That’s because Phreaker didn’t care about the consequences of his actions. He didn’t care what happened to himself as a result. I’d been to his house and seen his middle-class family – mum trying in vain to wrangle a sullen teenager who spent his life in front of a computer, hacking.

 And that’s why I didn’t publish the scoop Phreaker had dropped in my lap. I knew what he was doing would get him in serious trouble with the law – which it subsequently did. Phreaker went to another technology journalist, who promptly ran the story.

 

The above implies that we didn’t care if “Phreaker” (which the teenager incidentally never called himself) got into trouble with the law. Nothing could be further from the truth. Both Matt and I have kept in touch with the boy to this day.

When the story broke the teenager was under eighteen and could not be named or identified. He was a not untypical combination of reckless obnoxiousness but was also shy and definitely not stupid and self-destructive.

Thanks to previous brushes with the law, the teenager had become something of bush lawyer. He knew that as a minor, he had automatic name suppression. He knew his name wouldn’t appear anywhere and that the slate would be wiped clean at the age of 18 and that was one reason he behaved as recklessly as he did. It wasn’t a desire to become a computer crimes celebrity or even to collect dirt by quietly listening in on others private messages in partnership with journalists.

I can also tell you that the consequences of his actions were fairly light. Roughly a week after the story broke in Computerworld, the teenager and his friend Sahil Gupta were charged with unauthorised access to a computer and were remanded on bail.

In January 2006, Gupta walked free and you can read about him, his history and the 027 case details in this Computerworld story. The teenager admitted to the charges in the 027 and another case, in the Youth Court, was fined $5,500 and put under supervision for six months.

The boy’s kept his nose clean after that. While he’s not working as an Internet security consultant roaming the globe, he seems to be doing just fine.

In hindsight I think we I handled that tricky story really well, balancing privacy, ethics and public interest with obscure technological points while battling a corporation that didn’t appear to care about the security of its paying customers.

We did a much better job than general media, which got hung up on the teenager being a “whizz kid” going on a “hacking” and “phreaking” spree when all he did was to stumble on gaping security hole left open because of… convenience.

Even so, we should’ve asked more questions around why it was so easy for a bored teenager to get into the voice mails of cabinet ministers and SIS spooks. Who was responsible for that pathetic lack of security? How many cases of intercepted messages had there been before the story broke?

As the NotW scandal has driven home, entrusting our private lives to piss-poor guardians of privacy such as telcos and faceless companies on the Internet can and will come back and bite you in a horrible fashion.

Things haven’t improved since 2005 though. Judging by for instance Lulzsec’s 50-day rampage, exposing all manners of personal, corporate and government information with consummate ease, there’s an enormous amount of sensitive stuff sloshing around due to poor security.

Due to this, I expect to write many more 027-style stories before I switch off my word processor for good while walking on that ethical tightrope. Fingers crossed, I won’t fall off.

Today, the organisation Family First convenes a national gathering at the Life mega-church in Mangere. This gathering will include a number of speakers from around New Zealand, and abroad. These include; Jim Wallace, head of the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL), Lindsay Mitchell, who will attack social welfare, Ian Grant, head of Parents Inc, a Christian organisation that seeks to shape parenting in New Zealand, and Albert Makabary, a doctor who will ‘declare war’ on ‘our binge drinking culture’.

This selection of people is mostly un-notable, and to be expected in such a context. However, headlining the organisation’s poster are pictures of the Prime Minister John Key, and Leader of the Opposition, Phil Goff, both smiling gently for the camera. They are captioned as follows:

Bob McCroskie will interview these men separately, and find out their views on a number of family policies, as well as their personal principles and values which drive their desire to lead the country

...where do they stand personally on the difficult issues of abortion, child abuse, euthanasia, marriage, the role of parents, media standards, the role of welfare, parental choice, and many others?

It is obvious that neither of these men would be attending if they did not think there was something to be gained in their presence; either an opportunity to explain themselves to a hostile audience and dull  criticism, or the opportunity to bolster support.

In the last several decades New Zealand has been considered a relatively secular nation. While politicians with strong faith and personal conviction have been elected, the role of churches in determining political positions has been relatively week, despite exhortations from the editors of the Christian broadsheet Challenge Weekly for their readers to lobby both openly and in private.

All of which has particular relevance in 2011 New Zealand. Opposition to a society that does not seek to impose religiously derived values on its citizens remains strong among a small section who fervently desire a different country.  Despite, or because of, a series of governments which have abolished and reformed laws based on these moral conceptions,

In Australia, this camp has had success. After the election of the Howard Government, morally conservative currents were taken for granted as de-facto within policy making. While major shifts that had become culturally embedded would not be rolled back (there was no question of making homosexuality illegal, for example), there was to be little or no social progress, and further reform was intended to be stymied. By the mid-2000s however, this position had become complicated. Society had continued to move, and assimilate gay, feminist, and other values (or “agendas”) and political pressure for reform had built.

In this context, the Australian Christian Lobby sought to buttress itself with political leaders, and make the cost of change greater than its benefits. During the 2007 election both John Howard and Kevin Rudd made a simultaneous visit to the Sydney mega-church Hillsong, where they explained their positions on a number of issues that were of concern to conservative Christians. The event was telecast live to over 100,000, and the results disseminated widely. It was considered the first such event of its type in Australian history and a major coup for the ACL. In their presentations both candidates presented a vision of support for the “traditional’ family, no further liberalisation of laws surrounding abortion, prevention of gay marriage, further funding for religious schools, and support for religious organisations who provide social services. Thus, although Labor won the 2007 election with a landslide, its leadership saw no impetus for change, despite an active membership who believed fervently in issues like marriage equality.

In 2010 prominent marches occurred in Australian cities, fighting for true equality. I had the privilege to participate in a number of these. The emotion was palpable, the sense that right would not be denied, and the knowledge that the Australian public was on our side, was immense.  Labor Party activists were in full presence, as were Greens and others. Yet it was acknowledged that there would be no change unless the current leadership took a break from their position – they were still in a dance with a conservative minority, for a small segment of votes. Labor felt like pro-equality voters were ‘safe’, or captured, with nowhere to go. This, in part, was responsible for a great swing to the Greens in the 2010 election, and the balance of power in the Senate is now held by this “anti-family” party.

Last month, safe sex advertisements featuring two men hugging affectionately while discreetly holding a condom were removed from Brisbane bus-shelters.  It was revealed that a director of the ACL,Wendy Francis, was responsible for organising the form letters which had caused the advertisements to be removed in the first place. Condemnation of the removal was swift, and the backlash against her interference came from across the spectrum. 

On ANZAC Day the head of the ACL Jim Wallace posted the tweet: "Just hope that as we remember Servicemen and women today we remember the Australia they fought for — wasn't gay marriage and Islamic!"

In either case, the Australian Christian Lobby was revealed to not only be on the side of intolerance and hate, but deeply out of step with the values of the Australian community. Their influence has waned, and their ability to shape politics continues to slide. It is only a matter of time before they are ignored entirely. Yet the threat they pose is real, because they purport to represent almost everybody through their claim to “families”. Politicians are by their nature conservative, and do not wish to alienate potential voters. If they misunderstand the role of organisations like the ACL, they will give them more power than they deserve.

 In New Zealand, Family First seeks to return the country to an imagined wholesome past. While a small segment of the population still considers this a worthwhile aim, most people have realised that civil unions did not see the end of marriage or civilisation. Like homosexual law reform two decades before, a small and noisy group were stymied and the rest of us got on with our lives. There is majority support for marriage equality, most people consider the current abortion situation untenable (in which a woman must declare a fetus a threat to her health before she can be granted either a surgical or medication abortion).

In this context, the presence of the head of the ACL at such an event, and the active attendance of both Key and Goff is extremely disturbing. While Family First is not considered a strong organisation, at least not one which can command the public agenda or shape the norms of the country, it does have an audience, people who will switch their votes in line with their moral convictions. They do not compose a great number, perhaps a few percentage at the most, and are unlikely to affect the outcome of most elections. However, if the percentage margin between a National coalition and a Labour coalition is small, or turnout is particularly low in the next election, their decisions might prove decisive. This is likely to play into the thoughts of both men while attending. The ACL will also be providing advice to Family First on how best to maximise their role and exact concessions against abortion reform, and other such issues.

So, we must ask: What are Goff and Key willing to trade to gain the votes of this audience? And in Goff’s case, is he willing to sell out his large activist base in Rainbow Labour and Labour Women to garner possible votes? In the case of either leader, after explaining themselves to Family First and the Australian Christian Lobby, they will have to explain themselves to us.

About one dollar out of every hundred you pay in tax ends up going to the New Zealand Government aid programme. It’s not a lot of money but, given well, it can make a real difference to the lives of people living in poverty.

Globally, aid has played a role in the elimination (or near elimination) of illnesses like Small Pox and Polio, and has almost certainly contributed to more general improvements in health in developing countries. Aid has helped with access to education. And in some countries at least, it has probably made a modest but discernible contribution to economic growth.

Aid’s success isn’t guaranteed though. Development is a difficult business, and the impact of aid depends on how it’s given. The history of aid is festooned with examples of aid given for all the wrong reasons producing all the wrong results.

To help, aid needs to be given well.

Up until 2008 New Zealand had a decent government aid programme. It was small but the aid we gave was pretty good. Aid agency staff were skilled at building relationships with counterparts in recipient countries and their considered approach was appreciated in the Pacific where it compared favourably to that of other donors. The programme wasn’t perfect but, had you inquired in 2008, you’d have struggled to find anyone who knew anything about aid who though it needed a drastic overhaul.

Unfortunately, as the last two and a half years have shown, Murray McCully clearly doesn’t know anything about aid.

Right from the moment he inherited it as part of the Foreign Affairs portfolio he’s set about pulling the old aid programme apart, intent, it seems, on rebuilding it in his own image.

The first two changes to the aid programme – reintegrating NZAID, the semi-autonomous agency formerly in charge of the programme, back into MFAT and shifting the core focus of our aid to economic development – received a reasonable amount of attention but other less-visible changes have been equally concerning.

Minister McCully has made it clear he has little respect for people who work in development, decrying them as “so-called development experts” and “desk jockeys”. And rather than listen to their advice he has increasingly opted to follow his own gut instinct or the counsel of a select group of associates.

Following his gut presumably explains his current grand tour of the New Zealand countryside in search of agricultural solutions for Afghanistan. A tour which, according to the Herald, he’s bypassed his own aid staff to undertake.

It’s a nice thought that, somewhere amongst our farmer groups and agricultural institutes, there’s someone with a bright idea capable of transforming the lives of Afghan farmers, and maybe there is. But, when one considers the climatic, geological, cultural, political, technological and military differences between farming in New Zealand and farming in Bamyan, the odds of this aren’t high. Talking with aid programme staff might not be as exciting as meeting the public, but when you’re dealing with a context as complicated as Afghanistan, aid workers really do have something to offer.

Then there’s his mates: John Hayes – infamous among the development community for once having sent a warehouse worth of left-footed gumboots to aid flood-stricken Bangladesh – is now on a board overseeing NGO funding, Allan Peachy is being sent to the Pacific on education fact-finding missions, and Mark Blumsky was awarded a $78,500 contract (paid from aid money) to provide tourism advice on Niue. Hayes, Peachy and Blumsky may all be good at their day jobs in New Zealand, but their advice is still no substitute for that of people with actual aid expertise.

The Blumsky case (which preceded his appointment as High Commissioner to Niue) is particularly egregious when one considers that the contract was awarded to him in the absence of anything resembling competitive tendering. This isn’t how aid money is normally disbursed. Indeed, it sounds an awful lot like advice from the mates spilling over into nepotism

Sometime during the last couple of decades a quick-witted Australian coined the term Boomerang Aid to describe the less than optimal delivery of parts of their government aid programme. With Boomerang Aid the main benefits aren’t felt overseas at all, but instead come right back to the donor country. Boomerang Aid is a perennial problem – the classic case being the United States buying surplus grain off its farmers and then ‘gifting’ it to developing countries, in the process swamping their markets. It’s also a problem that New Zealand has largely avoided over the last decade. As far as possible, New Zealand aid related goods and services have been sourced globally, or from recipient countries. Which helps with value for money and in avoiding unintended consequences.

This is starting to change. When the governments of several Polynesian countries requested that aid money be used to subsidise air services between their capitals and the United States, the subsidy was, on the say-so of the Minister, awarded to Air New Zealand. It could have been tendered out to ensure value but it wasn’t. Rather, our aid money was given to our national airline. Analysis wasn’t even undertaken to see whether it was actually an effective spend of aid money.

Increasingly, aid programme documents are speaking of directing aid to areas of New Zealand’s “comparative advantage”, meaning focusing our aid in areas where New Zealand CRIs, SOEs, and private firms are thought to be world-class and then paying them to do work in developing countries. This ethos underpins McCully’s tour of the countryside mentioned above, and even if it sounds appealing at first, it is mistaken. To give aid well, you need to be guided by two things above all others: what’s needed; and what aid might realistically achieve. Anything else – including what your own industries are good at – is a distraction. Find out what’s needed and then pay for it, sourcing the good or service from wherever in the world it can be obtained reliably and cost effectively. Comparative advantage really isn’t an advantage at all, except for those New Zealand entities that might benefit from the return voyage of the boomerang.

If things are looking up for New Zealand firms and crown entities, they’re less cheery for New Zealand development NGOs. In 2010 McCully dismantled KOHA-PICD, a fund through which government aid augmented money raised from donations for work undertaken by NZ NGOs’ partners in developing countries. There was an efficient and transparent selection system, good quality control, and the fund had just been reviewed favourably by an independent reviewer. Yet none of this stopped McCully from dismantling it on the flimsiest of pretexts and replacing it with a fund (the SDF), which has presided over baffling decisions and which has struggled to allocate the money available to it. McCully’s solution to these new problems has been to set up an ‘external selection panel’ to oversee who SDF money is given to. Sitting on the panel are: John Hayes, Peter Kiely (a National Party lawyer) and Therese Walshe (currently Chief Operating Officer for Rugby New Zealand 2011 Ltd.)

With a panel like this it’s hard to shake the fear that the new fund will end up being a tool for rewarding NGOs which keep quiet and don’t criticise the government.

Amongst the changes there is still some good news: education funding to Pacific governments has continued unabated and a new business mentoring scheme looks promising. But there are also a range of other concerns I’ve not had time to touch on: quality Pacific NGOs defunded without reason; the Minister’s aversion to gender related aid; his counterproductive fixation on low overheads…

The New Zealand government aid programme – your aid programme – is being broken. This may be good news for McCully and his mates but it’s bad news for the poor.

Terence Wood is a former employee of the New Zealand government aid programme, and is currently a PhD student. He is on the Steering Committee of New Zealand Aid and Development Dialogues (NZADDs) an organisation set up to foster critical comment on development issues. The opinions here are his personal opinions, not necessarily those of NZADDs.

The Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement attracted little attention when it was forged in 2005. That changed with negotiations to admit five new countries, most notably the US. And now, says Rick Shera, things are getting seriously weird. Yes, it's a copyright thread …

It's one way of negotiating, I guess: leak a document containing multiple extreme positions and then gracefully back down in the face of inevitable objection from other parties fuelled by local community uproar - arriving at terms that are at least as good if not better than what you were really after.  And the US is playing that game like a master if its latest leaked the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) chapter is anything to go by.  Mind you, it had some ground to make up after its embarrassing stumble with ACTA.

Positions as extreme as the latest US IP chapter surely cannot be anything other than blatant negotiation bullying. Even the RIAA (who must have had a large input into the paper given its focus on phonograms) could not in its wettest dreams expect to have New Zealand and other parties take such a large axe to our IP laws ... could they?

But, without further ado, here are the lowlights in terms of the main changes which we would need to make to New Zealand law:

• Rights holders would be allowed to prevent parallel imports (which are currently allowed under New Zealand trademark law). We know how important it is to many old school rights holders to divide the world into artificial zones so that they can maintain archaic differential pricing and release dates.  I don't imagine therefore that they will be consenting to parallel imports - so this is effectively a ban.

• Strengthened geographical indications - the champagne producers have managed to stop us describing our bubbly as champagne - expect the same thing to happen to brie, parmagiano reggiano, Gouda, Edam and the like.  Even Yorkshire pud and American hot dogs might not be safe.

• Massive extension of copyright terms, from life of author plus 50 years, to 70 years.  Works with unknown or no human author to 95 years. In some cases even extensions out to 120 years.  We've come a long way since the Statute of Anne and then the American Constitution set basic copyright terms at 14 years, just because the US wants to continue to extract monopoly pricing on Mickey Mouse (who would have been in the public domain years ago if it were not for these extensions in the US).  And remember, we're pretty much on our own on this one as far as Common law countries go - Australia, another party to the proposed TPPA, has already succumbed to some of these longer copyright terms so will be looking to even the playing field.  I say that because the Australian Government Productivity Commission has just concluded that its Free Trade Agreement extension of copyright terms has been negative (PDF) for Australia, but then goes on to say that Australia should look at redressing the deficit by having its other trading partners cave in as well.

• Circumventing a Technological Protection Measure (TPM) will to be a criminal offence even if the work it protects is in the public domain or you want to exercise fair dealing rights like educational use or current affairs reporting.  We'll also need to make sure that we change our curent regime so that region coding and zone access controls are protected (we decided to specifically state that such artificial measures were NOT protected when we changed our TPM law in 2008).

• The return of s92A guilt on accusation, repeat infringer, termination of internet accounts - 3 strikes or whatever you want to call it.  So, the US wants us to effectively scrap the last 3 years of consultation around the replacement of section 92A and the reasonably balanced (but still not perfect) approach we are working towards in the Copyright (Infringing File Sharing) Amendment Bill due to be passed in the next couple of months.  Imagine you're an ISP who has to bear the cost of gearing up for that regime only to be told later in the year that its Ground Hog Day and we're all going back to the section 92A debacle.

• Forcing us to reverse the decison recently taken to exclude software patents per se.

• Introducing statutory damages (which give rights holders windfall damages up to 3 times their actual losses).  No doubt the copyright trolls will like that.  Add to that full recovery of lawyers' fees plus presumptions in favour of rights holders (so they don't need to first prove they there is any copyright or that they own it). All of this will effectively give anyone wanting to claim IP rights a huge advantage.  We know that many IP claims are in fact made by companies wanting to shut down competition or by those wanting to stifle criticsm. IP law should not be used for these sort of ulterior motives.

• ISP policing of IP rights incuding a requirement for ISPs to give up their customers' identities when they receive a mere allegation from a rights holder.

• Criminal liability even where the infringement has no commercial value at all.

• Pushing Courts to impose imprisonment as the default sentence for infringement even where no monetary benefit is obtained.

These last two are particularly well hidden - the provisions actually refer to criminal liability for infringements on a commercial scale.  But, when you read the fineprint, commercial scale includes significant wilful ... infringements that have no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain.

And, as if the US version of the TPPA itself wasn't bad enough, if we sign up to this, we'd also be agreeing to enter into 7 other international IP treaties.  These include ones, like the two WIPO internet treaties, that we have already debated and decided NOT to accede to. Plus others that we have decided are not of pressing concern.  All this by the end of this year.

That's why I say that these suggestions from the US, if we agreed to them, overall would represent huge changes to our IP laws not seen in the last 20 years.

The galling thing about all of this too is that we have been debating these issues for many years in a rational, multistakeholder, consultative manner not in the secretive manner in which TPPA is being railroaded through. In the copyright arena for example, we started to look at how our law should deal with digital creativity 10 years ago with MED's publication of two comprehensive papers on IP in the digital age.  Since then we've debated specific proposals in various legislation - Patents Act, Trade Marks Act, Copyright Act, plant varieties etc - they've all been revised to take account of these issues.  Parliament and successive Governments have repeatedly approved the fine balances that we have arrived at. This would run a coach and horses through much of that but at least our officials are not having a bar of it (PDF). They need our support.

It's somewhat patronising to now be told that we effectively got it all wrong and need to make fundamental changes ... but, oh, wait a minute, we're not going to tell you what those changes are.

(See also the podcast of my TPPA interview with Kathryn Ryan, Nine to Noon, 16 March 2011.)

Rick Shera is an Auckland intellectual property lawyer and @lawgeeknz on Twitter. This post is re-published from the original on Rick's blog.

They look too big to carry comfortably in your pocket. And your ear bumps the screen and before you know it you’re messing up a call. They’re basically for wankers, aren’t they?

Or those tragics who absolutely live on Facebook and tweet every bit of nonsense that comes out of their mouths. Do I really need my friends to see my GPS location at any given moment? Do I need to see theirs?

They’re more a fashion accessory. A flash toy. They’re way too expensive for a phone. And the data charges, it’ll cost you a fortune. And all those functions and transmitters drain the battery flat in no time.

Why would you want to become an iPhoney?. That’s what I used to think. Then I saw the light. I saw it coming from an iPhone, in the darkness, as the owner steered us through the twisted streets of Tokyo.

We were hunting for a petrol station still selling gas in a crowded city in a land where none of us could speak the language or read the road signs, a land reeling from a cascading catastrophe of tremor, flood and nuclear terror.

iPhone in hand our driver navigated by virtual map from bowser to bowser, chasing the little screen icons like Pacman going for the power-up. In the end it took a mistake though, a lag in the processing time or delay refreshing the map and a wrong turn that dumped us off the toll way at Saitomo, and right outside the only place still filling tanks.

Our tank was practically full but two hundred kilometres up the line, our driver’s brother had maybe a quarter before he hit empty. The brother was 70km from a nuclear power plant now venting radioactive caesium and iodine. The latter gets into the water and the milk I’m told, but can be blocked if you’re taking a saturated solution of potassium iodide. The caesium though is light. It floats around or comes down with the rain. It washes off but don’t dare inhale or swallow the tiniest speck.

Cradling his iPhone, steering with one and a half hand and looking a little sleepy now, our escort was texting as he drove. The replies from up north were getting a little anxious - just come even if you can’t get the gas and we’ll work it out - siphon tanks or something like that, I suppose.

We ignored that advice and luckily so. None of us might have made it back.

Rolling south at last, now with a carload of anxious evacuees in train, we were doing better than retracing our unbelievably circuitous steps. We were looking afresh at the GPS and working out an even better route, quicker, one that might pass a fuel stop that was open and trading.

Finding one that would sell more than six litres of petrol per vehicle proved impossible and as we pushed on, queues grew outside even the empty stations as others lined up for the chance to be first when a truck finally delivered.

I looked across at the woman sitting next to me, three of us wedged into a back seat made in Japan. She had her iPhone out. On Facebook.

Now, as a former knocker and only occasional Facebooker, I’d have scorned her. At a time like this, you’re giving status updates, checking who has a birthday, who’s just broken up with their girlfriend? Just how funny is “Charlie bit my finger”, really?

But I watched my fellow passenger as she filed a stream of updates to friends still stuck, or stubbornly sitting tight, back in Iwaki, the city closest to the Fukushima Daiichi power plant and its six nuclear reactors in various stages of distress.

Route 4’s good. Get off Route 11 here. Big boulder over the road here so just turn off early back here. No petrol yet. This one’s rationing, so bring a can, drop someone off with it just before you queue up and maybe they can score an extra six litres.

 I had a lump in my throat. The technology behind us was failing catastrophically. The technology in her hand was striking a blow against cruel fate and indifferent nature. This was so far from “who’s still good for yum char?” or “lol what a hangover”. This digital trail of breadcrumbs could be leading others out of harm’s way.

It really hit home as we pulled over to quickly assemble a live broadcast for the 6pm news back in New Zealand. Just a few years ago this would have been nigh impossible without several suitcases full of tech, a guy with a Leatherman and years of experience and perhaps an hour to assemble and point a satellite dish.

We had a single case with a BGAN device, to hook us up to the Broadband Global Area Network. With a dish the size of a small chilly bin lid, a laptop and some cables we were live from the roadside in roughly twelve minutes, and I was a slightly blocky Legoman on screens back in Johnsonville and Geraldine.

And in the Far North, where no doubt my parents found it immensely reassuring to see their eldest son looking ok and moving away from the big nuclear emergency.

When BGAN arrived, I thought it was fantastic and I still do. The ability to do what we do from almost anywhere on the face of the planet is opening up so many possibilities for broadcast news.

But all I could think was, if we’re supposed to be fleeing, albeit calmly, why oh why have we had to pull over and stop to talk about it?

The Facebook Angel was by now taking photos of all this action. She’d already used her iPhone to Skype back to her family in Rotorua, to give them what we’d label an exclusive first look at our convoy, to show and tell those (and only those) to whom she matters most that she is safer and closer to home.

Broadcasting is far from dead, but it is changing. It has to. And I’m buying an iPhone.

Garth Bray is a journalist with TVNZ's ONE News. He has been reporting from Tokyo and Fukushima on the cascading effects of the disastrous earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency there.