No. I don’t even see what distinction you could draw between them.

But these two things are not the same: search engines are extremely well known to pretty much everyone; far fewer people would be aware of services like MyIPNeighbours, and how many would even be inclined to use them? Who, aside from the site maintainers, would routinely be checking Labour party IP addresses for legitimate reasons?

What I'm getting at is that just because something could be found on the internet does not necessarily make that access authorised. It's one thing to have found this content accidentally via a Google search or even following an old bookmark, another to have gone looking for it.

Google doesn’t provide a reverse IP lookup, although they presumably have the data to do so.

What I meant was whether a simple Google search for "healthy homes for healthy kiwis" or similar would have led to the site. That would certainly have looked even worse.

I bring up the Google thing because I read an article from back when this happened where Cameron Slater claimed that Google had indexed the whole site.

So if the site could not be found via Google but could by a service like MyIPNeighbours, does this allow us to draw inferences about whether or not said access is authorised?

I believe the opposite is true: there had been a site in place for that domain in the past, since decommissioned once the relevant campaign was over. Highly likely therefore that it was being indexed by Google.

So it was for a previous campaign; I had wondered where in the timeline the website existed. Still, it makes you wonder why he didn't just use Google to find the website if it was all there - that is why I questioned whether it had been indexed.

For me, this subsection means that Cameron, who was, like the rest of us, authorised to go to Labour’s server to look at Labour’s website, was not committing a crime by looking at the other files that Labour had left open to view on their server.

Watching that Youtube video makes this argument difficult to sustain. In it, the healthyhomeshealthykiwis.org.nz domain was found via a tool that identifies other domains on the same IP address. It’s hard to be sure, but this suggests that the domain in question was, at that time, not yet indexed by any search engines and therefore was not intended to be publicly available.

If that is so, it then becomes very difficult to assert that access to the above website was authorised.

Further, I’m not sure I agree with the wording of the following:

…authorised to go to Labour’s server to look at Labour’s website

Firstly, this was a Labour website, not the Labour website (keep in mind that the website in question was ostensibly not public at the time).

Secondly, I think a more reasonable interpretation would be the other way around, where there was authorisation to access a Labour website which was hosted on Labour’s server.