Spy bill submissions

Normally when a select committee hears submissions on a bill, they post them online on the Parliamentary website to inform the public. Except, apparently, for the Intelligence and Security Committee - they've refused to post submissions on John Key's spy bill. Meaning that the public can't see just how few people supported it.

Fortunately, Stuff's Andrea Vance has got hold of them, and posted them here [PDF]. I wonder if they'll try and prosecute her for it?

I'll post an analysis of submissions once I've had time to skim them all.

Update: 124 submissions, with Jim Veitch the only person in favour of the bill (and he was outnumbered by cranks talking about the bicultural constitution and the Palmerston North windfarm conspiracy). While many of the submissions were form submissions (including about 10 people who had simply copy-pasted my one - thanks guys for reducing my impact), there were a lot of people who had simply written an email to say "I object to this bill because it invades my privacy". Sadly, I suspect that Key will listen to the spies, on the basis that their information is secret and unverifiable and therefore Must Be True, rather than ordinary New Zealanders.

The Zimmerman verdict

As we all know by now, George Zimmerman has been acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. There's been a massive outpouring of disgust over this, and it seems entirely justified. Apparently in the US, if you stalk a kid around your neighbourhood then gun him down in cold blood, its not a crime if the kid is black. So much for equality under the law.

There are obvious parallels with the New Zealand case of Bruce Emery, the angry old white guy who chased a poor brown kid down and stabbed him to death for tagging his garage door. In both cases, we have people deliberately arming themselves and hunting down their victim - something which should void any claim of "self-defence" - before killing them. Our courts failed there too, but they at least managed manslaughter. The US couldn't even do that.

And the US's bias is systematic. PBS crunched the numbers on race and "justified homicide", and found the results were appalling:



("SYG" means "stand your ground", the law Zimmerman was acquitted under).

Yes, if a black person kills a white person, they are approximately four times less likely to have it ruled "self-defence" than if the killer was white. If the gun is in the other hand, however, then the killer is 2.5 times more likely to be acquitted - and 3.5 times more likely in a "stand your ground" state. Assuming you ever get to trial, of course - because as the article notes, there are multiple opportunities for authorities to excuse a killer before they even reach a courtroom (as we saw in Zimmerman's case).

The article has some caveats around this for small data sets (because most white-on-black killings never see a courtroom) and the possibility that the circumstances of the types of killings are very different (maybe blacks kill whites only in their own homes, while whites only kill blacks when stalking them through the streets?), but from this end of the world, it looks like just another example of the pervasive, structural racism in US society - and how, despite Obama, nothing has really changed.

New Fisk

Who is the US arming in Syria? President Assad rubs his hands at news of rebel split
By taking sides within sides, Rifkind risks a repeat of Balkans mistakes in Syria

Accountability and spying: NZ vs Luxembourg

Luxembourg's Service de Renseignement de l'Etat has been running amok, bugging politicians, amassing files on over 300,000 people (half the population), engaging in corrupt business deals, bribing officials and allegedly even masterminding bombings to boost its own budget. So, the Prime Minister has done the decent thing, and resigned.

Isn't it nice to see someone accepting responsibility for their failure to properly oversee and keep a leash on their spies?

Meanwhile, here in New Zealand, 88 people have illegally been spied upon, the GCSB has "reinterpreted" the law to allow it to do whatever it wants, and they're up to their necks in the NSA PRISM scandal. And no-one has accepted responsibility or been punished for it. So much for accountability, and so much for democratic control of our spies.

The Human Rights Commission on the spy bill

One of the functions of the Human Rights Commission is to monitor human rights and report to the Prime Minister on any legislation which may adversely affect human rights. While it is rarely used, it is a core function, a key part of its role as a human rights watchdog. The HRC has just exercised that function over John Key's spy bill:

The Government's controversial legislation extending the GCSB's powers to spy on New Zealanders lacks sufficient checks against abuse of power or adequate transparency and accountability, the Human Rights Commission says.

The commission has added its voice to those, including the Opposition, calling for a full and independent inquiry into New Zealand's intelligence services.

The commission this morning released a report to Prime Minister John Key on the Government Communications Security Bureau and Related Legislation Amendment Bill, the Telecommunications (Interception Capability and Security) Bill and broader human rights matters regarding surveillance.

"The Commission is concerned that the proposed Bills are wide-reaching without sufficient safeguards against abuse of power. There is inadequate oversight and inadequate provision for ensuring transparency and accountability", chief commissioner David Rutherford said.

The full report is here [PDF]. The HRC argues that, contrary to John Key's assurances, broad and highly invasive powers are being handed to the GCSB and that these powers threaten freedom of speech, privacy, and the freedom to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. While the HRC accepts that some surveillance is necessary, these powers are grossly disproportionate and cannot be justified in a free and democratic society (in part because the government has made no serious attempt to justify them). They want the bill to be put on hold pending a full and independent inquiry into our intelligence services, aimed at finding the proper balance between human rights and security. And they want exposing the extent of metadata spying on New Zealanders, either by the GCSB or its foreign "partners", to be a key purpose of that inquiry.

The Prime Minister's response to this? Threaten the HRC's funding:

"I actually don't think it was a very good submission at all and they need to pull their socks up. If they're going to continue to be a government-funded organisation they should meet the deadline should everyone else."

Its when they're under pressure that you see what people are really like. And Key turns out to be a bully (and an ignorant one who can't distinguish between a select committee submission and a statutory reporting function) - just like Muldoon.

Another secret prisoner in Israel

Earlier in the year we learned that Israel had disappeared an Australian citizen and detained him in total secrecy until he killed himself. At the time they said he was their only secret prisoner. They lied:

Israel is holding a second unidentified security prisoner in conditions of extreme secrecy, according to court documents released this week in relation to Prisoner X, the Australian-Israeli secret agent who hanged himself in jail in 2010 and whose case caused a sensation when it was exposed earlier this year.

The existence of another top-secret prisoner was acknowledged in the Israeli parliament on Wednesday, although no details were disclosed.

But former foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman described it as "an exceptionally grave case", and the lawyer for Ben Zygier, who was dubbed Prisoner X when details of his case were revealed in February, said the second prisoner's alleged offences were "sensational".

Israel insisted it was acting within the law in regard to secret prisoners held in isolation and whose identity is concealed even from prison guards.

Israel calls itself the Middle East's only democracy. But democracies don't do this. Democracies charge people publicly and try them in open court. They do not disappear them and detain them secretly without charge or trial. But then, democracies don't have military censorship of the media either...

Microsoft: NSA spies

The latest NSA leak: Microsoft is spying for the NSA:

Microsoft has collaborated closely with US intelligence services to allow users' communications to be intercepted, including helping the National Security Agency to circumvent the company's own encryption, according to top-secret documents obtained by the Guardian.

The files provided by Edward Snowden illustrate the scale of co-operation between Silicon Valley and the intelligence agencies over the last three years. They also shed new light on the workings of the top-secret Prism program, which was disclosed by the Guardian and the Washington Post last month.

The documents show that:

• Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal;

• The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail;

• The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide...

So, if you use Outlook, Hotmail, Skydrive or Skype, the NSA gets all your stuff. Which they then share with the CIA, FBI, and anyone else they feel like.

This goes well beyond merely providing information in response to warrants. Instead, Microsoft are active collaborators in the US panopticon, invading their user's privacy on behalf of their government. This is not something we as customers should tolerate. The problem is that there's probably nowhere to go: Microsoft has an effective monopoly on domestic operating systems (no, geeks, Linux is not a credible alternative), and any major alternative will almost certainly be a collaborator as well. Corporate oligopoly gives us no means of escape, unless we want to go back to using typewriters.

Which means that if we want to tackle this problem, and get our privacy back, we need to kill it at its source: government. which means taking back control of our government from the spies, then slashing their budgets and power so they can never do this to us again.

Contracting out means fraud

One of the big trends in public services in the last twenty years has been "contracting out" - handing over core services to outside providers, who supposedly run them cheaper. We do this in New Zealand with some welfare and disability services, but the real leader in the field is the UK, where they contract out everything from helping beneficiaries to get jobs to deporting refugees. The two biggest providers of such services are G4S and Serco. And both are now being investigated by the Serious Fraud Office for massive fraud in their contracts:

Whitehall contracts running into billions of pounds are being urgently reviewed after the Government disclosed that two major firms had charged the taxpayer to monitor non-existent electronic tags, some of which had been assigned to dead offenders.

In an announcement that throws the Coalition's privatisation drive into disarray, the Serious Fraud Office was called in to investigate G4S, the world's largest security company, over contracts dating back over a decade.

Serco, one of Britain's largest companies, also faces an inquiry by auditors over its charges for operating tagging schemes.

The firms supply an array of services to the public sector from running courts, prisons and immigration removal centres to managing welfare-to-work schemes and the Atomic Weapons Establishment.

This isn't an isolated incident: last year Serco was caught falsifying its performance data on a healthcare contract. The upshot: fraud simply seems to be a standard way of doign business for these companies (though G4S does murder as well).

But this isn't just about the UK. Serco runs a prison for us in New Zealand. And if fraud is their normal business practice in the UK, we should assume it will be happening here as well.

Contracting out doesn't just mean we lose control. It also removes the public service ethic and replaces it with the profit motive. And in the case of these large multinationals, this seems to lead inevitably to fraud, as they try and scam more money to meet the demands of their rapacious foreign shareholders. We don't need to expose ourselves to this risk. If we have government services performed by government, then there's no incentive for this sort of fraud, so it doesn't happen. The choice is entirely up to us.

Climate change: Utterly broken

Once upon a time I supported the Emissions Trading Scheme because the theory was good. If you cap overall emissions, and allow emitters to trade their allocations among themselves, it creates an incentive for emissions reductions. The cap could then be gradually lowered, giving us a stable pathway to a low-carbon future.

Of course, it didn't work out like that. Labour packed the scheme with pork to try and buy off polluters, and then National made it even worse, turning it into a polution subsidy scheme which actively incentivised new emissions. As for an incentive to reduce, that would require that there be fewer emissions units than the amount people wanted to emit. Instead, we have the opposite: in Parliament today, the Greens Dr Kennedy Graham revealed that we have an annual supply of 85 million units - around 5 million more than our total annual emissions. Meanwhile, due to exemptions and exclusions, the total annual demand is only 15 million units. And if that wasn't bad enough, the government has just issued 30 million more...

This isn't a policy anymore - its simply a bad joke. And when fixing it means cancelling 5/6ths of the units in circulation (with all the attendant whining about property rights), I don't think its even salvageable. At this stage, regulatory controls are looking like a bloody good idea...

UK MPs look out for themselves

The UK is deep in recession. There has been a record drop in wages, and household living standards have dropped by almost 2% in the last quarter. So naturally, British MPs are giving themselves a £10,000 a year pay rise.

If you wanted to paint a picture of a greedy elite out for themselves and utterly unconcerned with the people they purport to represent, you couldn't do any better. What next? A joint press release telling people to eat cake?

UK MPs are underpaid, in that their salaries are clearly not enough to prevent them from behaving corruptly (though that said, the real problem is that they are looking at the 1% and 0.1% above them, rather than the 95% below). But a recession when people are struggling is not the time to fix that. Instead, this move will simply further delegitimise their Parliament, and politics in general.

Spying is a breach of privilege

Last week I argued that Parliamentary Services' spying on Andrea Vance and Peter Dunne was a breach of Parliamentary Privilege. It seems the Speaker agrees. This afternoon, he referred the issue to the Privileges Committee.

Unfortunately, it was done in general terms, so that the Committee can make a formal determination on the rules around such spying. Which means that heads are unlikely to roll within Parliamentary Services, and that David Henry is unlikely to be punished for his violation of privacy and privilege.

Real leaders don't beg

So, after the insanity of Tuesday nights media-created "coup", David Shearer is now reduced to begging the media for a fair go.

Yes, he's got a point: certain journalists seem to have an obsession with coupmongering with Labour, to the extent of leaping on the most insane rumours and leaving the basic journalism behind. But at the same time, real leaders don't beg - at least, not if they want to be elected. Again, I'm reminded of Machiavelli's words on weakness:

It makes him contemptible to be considered fickle, frivolous, effeminate ["weak" - I/S], mean-spirited, irresolute, from all of which a prince should guard himself as from a rock

This is just the latest in a long list of ways Shearer has made himself contemptible. Refusing to take a firm stand on asset sales. Or homophobia. Or racism (in fact, about the only thing Shearer will take a firm stance against is women). He won't promise to repeal John Key's spy bill, or even his corrupt Skycity pokie deal. And the result is that he looks weak and untrustworthy, while alienating even his own supporters.

Like his mentor Phil Goff (who shoulder-tapped him for the job), David Shearer has no virtù. And the quicker Labour is rid of him, the better.

Lowering the age of majority

While skimming the member's bills this morning I came across an interesting one: Colin King's Age of Majority (Attainment at 18 Years) Amendment Bill [PDF]. The bill does exactly what it says on the label: lowers the legal default age of majority to 18 years, reflecting what has become standard practice in all new bills. However, its a bit of a hatchet-job, in that while it lowers the default, it does nothing to correct discriminatory legislation passed since the original Age of Majority Act 1970. The list of these is long - the Adult Adoption Information Act 1985, Care of Children Act 2004 and Employment Relations Act 2000 are just three that popped up on a search. But if we're going to do this, and reduce legal age discrimination, then we should do it properly.

Obviously, I'd like the bill amended to actually cover those newer discriminatory Acts. But because there's so many of them, its inevitable that some will slip through the net. While correcting those omissions when they are discovered is what Statutes Amendment Bills are designed for, it would be useful to have a safeguard. And on that front, the Ministry of Youth Development has already helpfully done the policy work: back in 2010 they wrote an Adult Rights and Responsibilities (Age of Majority) Bill for the 2010 Youth Parliament, which included a statutory review by MYD and Ministry of Justice of age limits in legislation, with an eye towards aligning them. Stealing that clause and adding it to the bill would significantly improve it.

Transmission Gully: A $2 billion scam

Last year, the government announced that doing Transmission Gully using a Public-Private partnership would cost $300 million more than if the government built it. That's bad enough, but it's worse than that. Today, the Minister admitted that the private-sector markup would be $2 billion:

Transport Minister Gerry Brownlee’s pig-headedness was on full display today when he wrote off $2 billion of taxpayer money as being 'irrelevant', Labour’s Transport spokesperson Iain Lees-Galloway says.

“Answering questions at select committee today Mr Brownlee said Transmission Gully will be built by public private partnership (PPP) even if doing so is more expensive than usual public sector contracting.

“The extra $2 billion that would add to the lifetime cost of the road was ‘irrelevant’.

This is a scam, pure and simple. That $2 billion is money we could be spending on schools, hospitals, and public transport. Instead, its going to go straight into the pockets of National's road-building cronies. And why? So they can hide debt and pretend the government books are in better shape than they really are. And then of course, they'll cry about "a decade of waste" from when labour was in government (you know, when they ran surpluses all the time and unemployment was at record lows).

This is economic mismanagement, it is waste, and it is outright corrupt. And any future government should unilaterally cancel the PPP contract rather than let it stand.

More corrupt than we think

Transparency International's Global Corruption Barometer has some bad news for New Zealand: 3% of us paid a bribe for public services in the last year:

The New Zealand component of the survey involved 1000 New Zealanders and was undertaken by Colmar Brunton in January and February this year and found:
• 3% of New Zealanders surveyed reported paying a bribe
• Of those who reported paying a bribe their reasons for doing so were because:
o It was the only way to obtain a service (35%)
o To get a cheaper service (29%)
o To speed things up (21%)
o As a gift/gratitude (15%)
• 65% of those surveyed thought the level of corruption in New Zealand has increased over the past two years

This is absolutely appalling, and an indictment on our society and our public institutions. We are supposed to be a corruption-free country, where public servants do their jobs because it is their job, not to steal from the public on the side. But clearly some of them are breaking the rules (and some people are willing to take advantage of that, rather than immediately reporting them to their managers). The lesson is that if we want to stay corruption-free, we need to actually do something about it. Those who demand bribes, and those who offer them to corruptly gain an advantage, need to be rooted out and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Good news on the spy bill

Labour and NZ First hardening their stance against John Key's spy bill:

While Prime Minister John Key is still scrambling to get enough support to pass his GCSB spy bill by one vote, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said his concerns about the bill had widened beyond the four he specified in his first reading.

And Labour leader David Shearer scoffed at Mr Key's offer to review the new law in 18 months and provide for a mandatory review every five years after that.

[...]

At the first reading, Mr Peters suggested he could support the bill if his concerns were addressed.

But yesterday he said having sat through part of the committee hearings on the bill last week, those concerns had broadened to include at least the issue of metadata.

The latter in particular is very good news - it means that Winston actually paid attention to submitters and their concerns about privacy. Submitting actually made a difference!

And meanwhile, Peter Dunne isn't exactly keen either. So as it stands, this bill will fail unless it is given major amendments.

My outer cynic says one of these politicians - most likely Shearer - will inevitably betray us, and sell out our privacy for an image of "responsibility" and a pat on the head from John Key. But there is a tiny glimmer of hope there that they'll actually stand up for something and refuse to turn us into a totalitarian surveillance state. I guess we'll find out at the end of the month.

Member's day

After being delayed by urgency last week, today is a Member's day - and one that promises a few fireworks. After the committee stage of Mark Mitchell's petty Prohibition of Gang Insignia in Government Premises Bill we have the second reading of Te Ururoa Flavell's Gambling (Gambling Harm Reduction) Amendment Bill. This was recently gutted and turned into a pro-pokies bill by a National dominated select committee, and I expect Flavell to come in for a fair amount of criticism for rolling over and selling out on it. Following that there's Sue Moroney's Employment Relations (Statutory Minimum Redundancy Entitlements) Amendment Bill (which will be voted down, but has provided a platform for Labour to state its policies), and then the House may be able to make a start on Moana Mackey's Electricity (Renewable Preference) Amendment Bill. If they get that far, there will be a ballot for two bills tomorrow.

A personal vote is not a conscience vote

The Greens are celebrating because the Speaker has granted their request for a "conscience vote" on the enabling legislation for John Key's corrupt Sky City gambling deal. They shouldn't be. Why? Because he hasn't given them what they think he has. They requested, and were granted, a "personal vote on [a] conscience issue" under Standing Order 139. But a personal vote is just a procedure, in which MPs vote old-style through the lobbies rather than having the votes called out by the party whips. Most "conscience votes" are taken in this manner, but in and of itself, a personal vote gives no particular freedom to MPs in casting their votes - that's, as always, between them and their parties. And the National Party is perfectly free to tell its MPs to go to the appropriate lobby and vote the party line, on pain of suspension from caucus or other consequences, just as they implicitly do for the more usual party votes.

And the Greens know this. They've been effectively party-voting in personal votes for years, being one of the few parties which is brave enough to have policy (and therefore be able to be held collectively accountable by the public) on traditional "conscience issues", such as marriage equality and child-beating.

The tactic is obvious: a personal vote gives them a greater chance of peeling off the one or two conservative, anti-gambling (or alternatively, pro Auckland) MPs needed for the bill to fail. But their framing of it to the public is either stunningly naive, or downright deceitful. And with Key's reputation as a wheeler-dealer on the line, I don't think it will work (in which case they'll what? Accuse National of party voting in a conscience vote? That would be hugely hypocritical).

(Meanwhile, its worth noting: the idea of a "conscience vote" appears nowhere in our constitution, and nor should it. The freedom parties grant to their MPs is up to them. If we think a party is too restrictive or too lax in that balance then we can vote accordingly).

Challenging the panopticon in the UK

Last month we learned that Britain's GCHQ was tapping fibre-optic cables into and out of the UK and recording all international phone and internet traffic. Their legal justification was a tenuous interpretation of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. Now, that interpretation is being challenged in the UK courts:

The British and US spy programmes that allow intelligence agencies to gather, store and share data on millions of people have been challenged in a legal claim brought by privacy campaigners.

Papers filed on Monday call for an immediate suspension of Britain's use of material from the Prism programme, which is run by America's National Security Agency.

They also demand a temporary injunction to the Tempora programme, which allows Britain's spy centre GCHQ to harvest millions of emails, phone calls and Skype conversations from the undersea cables that carry internet traffic in and out of the country.

Lawyers acting for the UK charity Privacy International say the programme is not necessary or proportionate. They say the laws being used to justify mass data trawling are being abused by intelligence officials and ministers, and need to be urgently reviewed.

Sadly, the UK recently passed a law allowing them to use secret evidence in civil claims where "national security" is affected. While primarily aimed at shutting down embarrassing torture compensation claims from their victims in Iraq and Afghanistan, they will no doubt use it here. But the result will be that we can have no faith whatsoever in the outcome. If its not done openly, in open court, with the evidence available to and assessable by all, then we have no reason to believe any resulting decision is based on the merits, rather than merely a corrupt government's desire to brush its embarrassment under the carpet.

Protecting the press gallery?

Parliament's press gallery have made it clear to the speaker that they will not tolerate surveillance of their journalism:

Representatives from the parliamentary press gallery have raised concerns with Speaker David Carter over Parliamentary Service releasing the swipe card information of a political reporter.

Press gallery chairwoman Jessica Mutch said the press gallery was worried that journalists could be monitored while working in Parliament.

"We can't operate in an environment where our every move is tracked and that information is made public - that would make our job around the precinct difficult,'' she said.

And they can't. But what will they do if Carter doesn't outlaw spying on the gallery? Refuse to report on Parliament? Carter would probably regard that as a win, not a loss.

Meanwhile, this has been niggling at me for the past few days:

Parliamentary Service will not say who authorised the release of the swipe card information, or whether it had tracked journalists' movements in the past.

The only way to interpret this is as a sign of a guilty conscience. If parliamentary Services had nothing to hide, they'd be telling us that this was a one-off, that the staff-member had been disciplined / fired, and that it wouldn't happen again except on the Speaker's directive. Instead, they're clamming up. Which invites the question: what are they hiding? Who are they protecting? And how often have they done this in the past?

Of course, if Parliamentary Services was subject to the OIA, we'd have answers to these questions by now. And their malfeasance here simply makes the case for such scrutiny stronger.