Posts by Russell Brown
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A great column by Paula Penfold, defending the decision to interview Billingsley and pinpointing yet more hypocrisy from men in the media. I actually didn't realise Gavin Ellis had made such a complete ass of himself.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Kumara Republic,
The Ruminator ventures into the whale’s den… and gets both barrels ad hominem.
The sadly predictable (if grimly amusing) part about that conversation is Slater immediately adopting the position that he's the victim.
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Hard News: A wretched editorial, in reply to Lilith __,
After I swallow my sick…the problem with WO’s batshit conspiracy theory is that even if he were right, the conspiracy would never have worked IF THE GOVERNMENT HADN’T BEEN INCOMPETENT.
Well, it was Murray McCully's department ...
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Useful points from Gordon campbell:
As things stand, the New Zealand extradition hearing will rely on what is called the “record of the case” – which is essentially just a mere summary of the US allegations. Rulings in the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court have narrowed the evidence that needs to be presented in order to validate “the record of the case.” As a consequence, our extradition process risks being just a rubber stamp. In their efforts to widen the ambit of the extradition process, it should be emphasised that the Dotcom legal team have not been engaged in a wholesale fishing expedition. During the District Court ruling by Judge David Harvey and the High Court ruling by Judge Helen Winkelman, it was made clear that the evidence being requested was specific and was focussed on acknowledged defects in the record of the case. In her dissenting minority opinion in the Supreme Court Chief Justice Sian Elias made that same point:
Since it is accepted that the record of the case on this view is incomplete, the deficiency must be remedied if the Minister wishes to proceed on it. That conclusion would be sufficient to dispose of the appeal, since the disclosure ordered in my view does not go further than to remedy the deficiency in the record of the case…..Mine is however a minority conclusion in this Court. It is therefore necessary for me to explain why I consider that the court determining eligibility for surrender has inherent power to compel disclosure for the purpose of the fair determination whether a prima facie case of commission of the offence has been established. Such powers in my view clearly extend to documents which are relied on to evidence the commission of the offence, and justify putting the person on trial…
Exactly. As things stand, the US is using the New Zealand legal system as a tool to send someone halfway round the world to face criminal charges without first being able to see the evidence against them. One does not have to like Dotcom to feel deep misgivings about this situation. The email trail is part of the skein of evidence. A non-redacted version of these emails has to be made available to the courts and to the Dotcom defence team, by one means or another. In the meantime, the Crown needs to explain why a redacted version of them wasn’t handed over to Dotcom sooner – given that they could now enable an appeal against some of the court decisions already reached.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Gary Young,
and if he is signalling well ahead of time that he plans to release it with the clear intent of damaging the legitimate government of the day and also affecting the outcome of an election then isn’t he skating perilously close to the old idea of sedition?
No.
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Okay, here we go … Whaleoil has put up a post strongly implying that Tania Billingsley’s rape complaint was a set-up engineered by her and her friends at Rape Crisis and the Green Party.
I won’t link to it from here, but Toby Manhire has capped the key paragraph here in a tweet. I've also put it in at the top of this comment. Click to embiggen.
As ever, Judith Collins’ pet pup is vile and also unfathomably stupid. Every time he says “what are the odds” it becomes clearer that he has no grasp at all on what “odds” actually mean.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Paul Campbell,
I guess the think that amazes me (an no one is talking about) is that here the SIS is the FBI’s goto boy for copyright enforcement
Why on earth is the SIS dealing with something as prosaic as copyright? surely their remit is OMG-terrorists and reds-under-the-waterbed
It was the New Zealand police with the (initially undisclosed, until it slipped out in court) assistance of the GCSB, whose remit stretches to “cybercrime” and which has access to XKeyscore (aka "Spy Google"). The SIS was tasked with issuing a security clearance on Dotcom's residency bid, which it didn't, and then did.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Actually, bob, I think the Chinese totally would cooperate with the US over IP and copyright issues. Also, remember Hong Kong is an entirely separate and mostly independent jurisdiction.
The level of cooperation is still, I think, far less replicable outside the Five Eyes network.
But otoh, yes, Hong Kong has extradited suspected criminals -- including three al-Qaeda members -- to the US in the recent past. The linked story also indicates how extradition might be more complicated than it would be from NZ.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Moderately rich, Russell. He’s not even a billionaire, never mind a multi-billionaire, and IIRC his peak worth was only measured in the low hundreds-of-millions. That’s real money, certainly, but he’s not entering the list of NZ’s wealthiest 50 any time soon.
Let's say $250m. That would have brought him in around the 40s in the 2011 NBR Rich List. I would imagine there haven't been many budding business migrants in that category.
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Hard News: Dotcom: Further news of the unlikely, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
There’s probably someone out there who knows the relevant law better than I do, but as far as I’m aware the bilateral extradition treaty between the United States and Hong Kong is still in effect. Why would anyone give the proverbial rat’s arse whether they were lawyering up in Hong Kong or New Zealand?
Possibly because this wasn’t a simple extradition case, it was an investigation employing the full apparatus of state. Would the Chinese conduct electronic surveillance on behalf of the US and share the results the way we did? Would the US allow the Chinese access to NSA tools, the way it did the GCSB? Remember as Keith Ng put it after reading the Dotcom affidavits:
What does this mean? It means that GCSB assistance is NSA assistance. It means that government agencies can tap into these powers as part of bread-and-butter law enforcement.
In how many countries is that true? Five.
