Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
There’s always the chance that Slater made it a habit to screenshot his FB conversations (he’d certainly posted screenshots from there in the past).
Good point. Wouldn't be the first time someone's been caught out with a hidden images directory.
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From the bullet points in the initial release on the Dirty Politics website:
During the 2011 election campaign Slater obtained a database of the Labour Party’s members, e-mails and donations, and gleefully attacked the party. What no one knew is that Key’s dirty tricks person, Ede, had helped throughout, including searching inside the Labour Party computers and helping Slater plan the subsequent attacks on Labour. Ede’s office was just two doors from John Key’s and presumably he was using his Ministerial Services computer (Chapter 2).
Yeah, so Slater totally lied about that one. He was coached.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Dylan Reeve,
Hacked or not, it seems inappropriate at the very least for the PM’s office to be trawling through that stuff and point Slater at the bits they thought were the juiciest (which is the claim from the book as I understand it)
Yeah, I think that's the point.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Labour's security was deficient, clearly. But the correspondence shows active collaboration between Slater and a very senior aide to the Prime Minister in pillaging what they could get.
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More from Danyl, who has his nose in the book:
Tobacco lobbyist Carrick Graham pays Slater $6500 a month to publish tobacco industry PR without attribution
That's how you make it in the news media environment, folks.
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The book also says that Kiwiblog posts have been written by National Party staffers.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
It’s the big takeaway, and it’s the one thing everyone better be hoping actually turns out to be true.
I’m guessing it’s related to this brag by Slater, which wasn’t a secret at the time:
National has not been involved in this release, like I would trust them to keep this information quiet for as long as I have been in Labour’s backend.
But if he got more than he revealed in the post and the PM’s office was involved, it’s not a good look.
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The Facebook route is made more plausible by the inclusion in the book of Facebook messages from Slater.
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Danyl nominates the hacking of Labour's computers and abuse of of SIS information as the two big takeaways so far.
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Nick Kearney,
I’ve been tweeted by someone who said he wasn’t surprised because “some of us have the site”.
Same person says the reason that Peter Dunne wasn’t sacked for leaking the GCSB report is that Key already knew he’d done it. And says he hasn't read the book.