"Papers, please" for the internet

Yesterday the Education and Workforce Committee released its report into online harm to young people, recommending (among other things) a ban on social media for young people. Which, in practice, means "age-verification", mandatory identification and registration of social media users, and banning VPNs to prevent evasion. Basically "papers, please" tp use the internet. There are all sorts of reasons why this is a terrible idea - not least because the companies doing it are poor custodians of our personal information, if not trojan horses doing shady shit for fascists - but I'll focus on the simple one: there are already countries where people are forced to register and be identifiable to the state to use social media, and which ban VPNs to prevent evasion. They're tyrannies like Russia and Iran. And while "making sure the state can tell who says what" is not the ostensible purpose of the policy, its a very obvious side-effect, one which needs to be seriously considered. And when you look back at its history - press licensing, government observation of public meetings - its tyranny all the way down. But apparently tyranny is the bipartiasn position of our two status quo political parties now...

Meanwhile, we have an example from right next door in Australia that none of this works, and that it drives kids to use even more dangerous technologies (ChatGPT, FFS, which sycophantically reinforces user delusions, driving them to psychosis and suicide, or Roblox, which is so notorious as a site for predators that child safety on it has its own wikipedia article). And we also have examples from the UK, where the regulatory burden of complying with moderation requirements of their Online Safety Act has forced the shutdown of small internet forums. This has a very real impact on the freedom of expression of adults, but apparently, none of that matters: any amount of collateral damage is acceptable to our parliament of tyrants.

I was lucky enough to grow up in Aotearoa when it was still free. When the state couldn't say "papers, please" to you on the street, or on the internet. Our two major political parties now seem to be colluding to eliminate that freedom. Neither of them deserve your vote. And if they pass this law, like other tyrannies, their state deserves neither your support or your loyalty.

(There are other suggestions in the report which are worth pursuing, such as adopting the EU Digital Services Act model of making platforms responsible for online harm, regulating algorithims so they can't shovel shit onto our feeds, banning non-consensual deepfake pornography, and aligning online and offline advertising restrictions. Sadly, those are the bits parliament is likely to chuck out, in favour of the stupid, simple and intrusive age ban / identification requirement, because our MPs prefer easy headlines to doing the actual work of designing good regulation...)

Drawn

A ballot for two member's bills was held today, and the following bills were drawn:

• Deepfake Digital Harm and Exploitation Bill (Laura McClure)
• Social Media (Age-Restricted Users) Bill (Catherine Wedd)

So double social media bills. Joy. While the first may be justified, the second has huge privacy risks, and just smacks of another attempt at censoring the web for young people to stop them from finding out who they are. The good news is that its unlikely to make it to a third reading vote before this dogshit zombie parliament will be dissolved for the election next year.

There were 76 bills in the ballot today.

Grooming us for identity theft

Local body elections are in October, and so like a lot of people, I received the usual pre-election enrolment confirmation from the Orange Man in the post. And I was horrified to see that it included the following:

Why horrified? After all, surely using email, rather than the failing postal system, makes elections more accessible?

Sure. But it also exposes us to scams and fraud. Think about the emails you usually receive. How many of them are real? Now think about important emails - things from your bank, or NZTA, the IRD. How many times have you seen warnings from the government or these bodies about scam emails?

Now imagine the following: you receive an email from "votе.nz", with a link (also to votе.nz) where you can confirm your details. You click it, and it presents you with a RealMe login page, asking you to enter your username and password to proceed.

This is exactly what the government would do (because DIA is desperately pushing RealMe into everything whether they want it or not). And its also how you get scammed (with or without the lookalike Cryillic letter). And in this case, the consequences of being scammed includes identity theft, someone being able to use your RealMe to get a passport in your name, and possibly having your voter details changed to deny you your right to vote.

The government should be protecting us from these risks. Instead, we have a government agency basically grooming us to be scammed, because its more administratively convenient for it to do so. Its stupid and wrong, and it would be nice if they stopped.

Will Labour take on the oligarchs?

David Parker gave a big foreign policy speech this morning, reiterating the party's support for an independent (rather than boot-licking) foreign policy. Most of which was pretty orthodox - international law good, war bad, trade good, not interested in AUKUS, and wanting a demilitarised South Pacific (an area which presumably excludes Australia). But at the end, Parker strayed off foreign policy to talk about the world's big problems. And he identified two: gross inequality, and techbro oligarchs spreading misinformation:

The scourge of irresponsible social media, megalomaniacal tax avoiding tech barons, and irresponsible internet service providers is on my list of the important.

I have a view that we in the west have made a fundamental error in providing what is in effect an exclusion of liability for third party content.

He's not just talking about classic "misinformation" (whether state driven or not), but also defamation, threats, scams, and every other online evil. The current exclusion of liability means internet platforms face little incentive to police this (and every incentive to push them using their algorithms where it boosts "engagement"). Parker's solution is to remove that exclusion, make platforms liable, and "[l]eave it to the Courts to work out the balance between freedom of expression and the duty not to sell a harmful product."

Parker points out that we can use liability limits and safe harbours to encourage platforms to take active steps to remove harmful content. We already do this under the Films, Videos, and Publications Act to encourage platforms to remove objectionable content, and under the Harmful Digital Communications Act to encourage them to deal with complaints about harmful content. We could use similar means for scams.

All of this seems perfectly reasonable. Newspapers are liable, through the courts, Media Council, and Advertising Standards Authority, for what they choose to publish or allow to be published. There seems to be no reason why Facebook, YouTube, or XChan should be immune. Especially when they are making what are effectively editorial choices through their algorithms and moderation policies to highlight or bury, allow or deny certain content. Unlike the postal service or the phone company (which is where the exclusion originated), they're not just a dumb pipe. Treating them as one is causing definite harm, and its time the government put a stop to it.

...and while they're at it, they should put a stop to their systematic tax-cheating and lawlessness as well.

How to fight back against Trump's tariffs

In the US, the Trump regime is busy imposing tariffs on its neighbours and allies, then revoking them, then reimposing them, permanently poisoning relations with Canada and Mexico. Trump has also threatened to impose tariffs on agricultural goods, which will affect Aotearoa's exports. National's response? To grovel for an exemption, on the basis of our past good relations. As for how successful that will be, Australia has adopted a similar approach to Trump's threats to impose universal tariffs on imported aluminium and steel. And the Trump regime has told them to fuck off. Being a long-standing US ally counts for nothing. So if they're going to impose tariffs on Australia, they are absolutely going to impose them on Aotearoa.

So the question is what National is going to do about it. Beg some more? But Trump responds to weakness by doubling down on oppression. Canada and Ukraine show that the way to get policy change from the US regime is to stand up to them and force it. As for how we could do that, counter-tariffs would just disrupt supply chains and raise the cost of living here. As a small country without a lot of leverage, we need to be smart.

Fortunately, there are some smart ideas lying around. America's economic power is currently built on fascist oligarchic techbros, who are also directly backing Trump's regime. And tech (and SF) writer Cory Doctorow has suggested that countries target them directly, by repealing the US imposed IP laws which underpin their wealth and power and allow them to fuck over their customers:

Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity"

[...]

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Doctorow was talking about Canada, but Aotearoa also has such laws. Section 226C of the Copyright Act criminalises circumventing "technological protection measures", or publishing information which shows people how to do it themselves. In other words, it makes jailbreaking your devices, or blocking techbro surveilance or advertising, or telling people how to do it, a crime. There's an exception to enable lawful use - which is why we all have region-free blueray players - but that doesn't cover protecting your privacy, or using your hardware in an unapproved way, or letting you fix your own stuff. Repealing those sections would let us do all those things, and create a new export industry for jailbreaking Big Tech.

Unfortunately, due to US influence, we have similar obligations in FTAs with other countries. So any tariff-response repeal would need to target the US directly. The best way of doing this would be a simple amendment to the Copyright Act, inserting a section saying that sections 226 to 226E do not apply to technological protection measures applied by US-controlled companies. The definition of "US controlled" would need to cover the various money laundering schemes used by the tech monopolies to dodge taxes, but I think its within the wit of our drafters to do so. And that should give us open season on US techbro bullshit, while complying with our obligations to everyone else.

The question is whether the government will have the courage to do this, or whether they will accept bullying by America and let Trump's techbros continue to pillage us and invade our privacy.

A tyrannical move in France

The internet is how people communicate now, and social media has become a natural platform for sharing dissent and organising protests. As a result, one of the first things tyrants do when facing mass opposition is shut it down, with blocks on specific platforms, or just a system-wide blackout. We've seen such attacks on the public's right to free expression in places like Iran, Egypt, Myanmar, and India. And now, faced with widespread protests against police murder and institutional racism, Emmanuel Macron is suggesting that France follow suit:

Emmanuel Macron is facing a backlash after threatening to cut off social media networks as a means of stopping the spread of violence during periods of unrest.

Élysée officials and government ministers responded on Wednesday by insisting the president was not threatening a “general blackout” but instead the “occasional and temporary” suspension of platforms.

The president’s comments came as ministers blamed young people using social media such as Snapchat and TikTok for organising and encouraging rioting and violence after the shooting dead of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week.

“We need to think about how young people use social networks, in the family, at school, the interdictions there should be … and when things get out of hand we may have to regulate them or cut them off,” Macron told a meeting of more than 250 mayors, whose municipalities were hit by the violence, on Tuesday.

Because obviously, only "young people" - non-pensioners? - use the internet nowdays...

This is simply not what democracies do. Instead, it is the action of a tyranny. Sadly, it seems like France is following Britain towards authoritarianism. The problem for Macron is that a government which walks away from democracy forfeits its legitimacy; if he behaves like a tyrant, there's no basis for complaint if he suffers a tyrant's fate.

Keep chokepoint capitalism out of our justice system

RNZ this morning has a significnat story about the police's plans to shift all their criminal case evidence into a cloud service owned by predatory US provider Axon:

Police are looking to a hugely profitable US taser maker for new ways to capture sensitive criminal case evidence and store it overseas.

They are also considering getting new stun guns, and possibly body cameras, from the $9 billion Axon corporation.

OIA documents show Axon is in the mix for storing all sorts of crime scene footage and "very sensitive" interviews, including on sex crimes, because existing systems are on their last legs.

In a 2020 report, police said: "The expectation ... [is] that all of our electronic interviewing will transition to evidence.com over the next 18 months - two years."

There are all sorts of reasons why this is a bad idea. The one that immediately sprang to mind was mentioned briefly in a Newsroom article on police camera footage last year: at present, defence lawyers can only view taser footage (or e.g. their clients being tasered, and the interactions that led up to it) in-person at a police station - where Axon tracks everything what they do (and presumably data-mines it and sells the intel back to NZ police prosecutors). So the police are basicly proposing to extend that practice to... everything. The threats to legal privilege (and of course to the right to an effective defence, if police strategicly choose to underfund or pass on charges for access) ought to be obvious.

But there's another reason to dislike it: because Axon's business model is pure chokepoint capitalism. They use predatory pricing and freebie deals to entice police forces into using them, then once their data is migrated, use the threat of cutting off access (requiring expensive migration or total data loss) to continuously hike the price. The copyright industry uses this model to extort producers and lock-in customers; here, Axon is using it to extort and lock-in governments. The beauty (for Axon) is that as evidence storage is a requirement for successful prosecution (and criminal disclosure legally required in all civilised states), the government effectively helps enforce their lock-in. The police simply cannot risk the service interruption of dropping the service or migrating the data, because it would mean cases collapsing and/or criticism from judges. And of course it creates a risk that some billionaire will decide to collapse our court system because someone said something nasty about them on Twitter.

We should not allow this pernicious business model to infect our justice system. The New Zealand police should store digital evidence themselves, in New Zealand, under New Zealand law. It is that simple.

Facebook vs Australia

The Australian government is currently working on a law requiring major internet platforms to pay media companies for the content they use. The threat of regulation has been at lest partially successful, with Google agreeing a deal with Seven West Media. Facebook, OTOH, has decided to play hardball:

Australians are being blocked from accessing news in their Facebook feeds, in a dramatic escalation of the social media giant's stand-off with the federal government.

Australians waking up this morning found they were blocked from receiving news from publishers' pages, including news organisations like the ABC.

The social media giant said it made the move in response to the government's proposed media bargaining laws, which would force major tech giants to pay Australian news outlets for their content.

Facebook's censorship goes much wider than the news organisations they would have to pay; they're also censoring unions, NGOs, politicians, and government agencies, including vital public health-related announcements in the middle of a pandemic. Its a naked display of market power, clearly intended to coerce Australia into renouncing its policy and deter other countries from adopting it: "do what we want, or we'll gag you".

This underlines all the concerns people had about the Twitter purge (which at least had justification as a long-belated enforcement of that platforms terms of service). These platforms now control our online lives, giving them an enormous amount of power. And that power clearly needs to be regulated to prevent exactly this sort of abuse. Given their reaction today, Facebook's response to such regulation is likely to be to threaten to withdraw service. Which means that any credible regulation is going to have to be a multilateral effort, backed by enough countries to ensure that they will be destroying a huge chunk of their market if they do so.

But it also shows that when Facebook said it was "too hard" for them to regulate Nazis and terrorists off their platform, they were lying. Facebook clearly can exercise an enormous degree of control over what can be posted, when they want to. And the fact that they're currently exercise such control for their own political purposes shows that they are effectively a publisher, which publishes by discretion. And the response to that should be obvious: repeal their common carrier defence, and make them liable for everything they choose to publish.

The Twitter Purge

In the wake of Donald Trump's incitement of an assault on the US capitol, Twitter finally enforced its terms of service and suspended his account. They've since followed that up with action against prominent QAnon accounts and Trumpers, including in New Zealand. I'm not unhappy with this: Trump regularly violated Twitter's TOS, and the surprising thing is that he wasn't banned sooner. Likewise the NZ accounts highlighted are ones with long histories of violations and suspensions. At the same time, I'm a little bit uncomfortable about the amount of power a handful of US-based dotcoms now have over the global conversation. And while at the moment they're using it against violent extremists, you don't have to think too hard to see how this power could be abused to stifle criticism, interfere in elections, and undermine democracy to the advantage of these dotcoms' billionaire owners.

Many people will argue that Twitter is a private company, so can do what it likes. This isn't government censorship, after all. But private power is still power, and therefore needs to be regulated and controlled to prevent abuse. That's why we have a Human Rights Act, which prevents private bodies using their private power for discriminatory purposes. And its why our Bill of Rights Act applies to anyone performing a public function - a clause which has been regularly used to review and overturn the decisions of private broadcasters on who may participate in election debates. As for what we should be doing about this particular form of power, the Spinoff article quotes the NZ Council for Civil Liberties' Thomas Beagle as suggesting mandatory transparency and appeal processes. That would seem to be a good start.

Encryption, passwords, and self-incrimination

The University of Waikato and New Zealand Law Foundation have released a report today on the law around encryption in New Zealand. There's stuff in there about principles and values, and how proposed government policies to provide for "lawful access" by creating backdoors would destroy the trust which makes encryption work (and, given the availability of encryption, simply push people to use systems they can trust, without such backdoors). But they also find that the existing law around searches, under which people can be required to provide passwords or keys to enable government searches, on pain of imprisonment, fails to respect fundamental human rights, specifically the right against self-incrimination.

New Zealand law takes a broad view of self-incrimination, defining it as anything "reasonably likely to lead to, or increase the likelihood of, the prosecution of a person for a criminal offence". But if the police want to access your data because they think there is evidence there that you have committed a crime, then by definition assisting them increases your likelihood of prosecution and is self-incriminating. Unfortunately, the law as written does not include sufficient guidance to protect this right; there's a generalised right in the Evidence Act, but insufficient protections in the search clauses themselves. Which in turn effectively allows the government to force people to incriminate themselves, in contravention of legal norms and international human rights standards. As a result,

[t]he researchers recommend that the right or privilege against self-incrimination should be more strongly recognised in computer searches, and that persons suspected or charged with a crime should not be forced to disclose their passwords. While providers have a responsibility to assist the police in search or surveillance operations if it is within their existing technical capabilities, such assistance should not involve any act that would undermine the information security of their products and services or compromise the privacy of their clients as a whole.

Meanwhile, if the government ever asks you for your passwords, I recommend refusing. They'll threaten you with jail or a fine, but if the alternative is incriminating yourself (and by definition they are asking you to do so), then you should refuse to do so.

You can read the full report here.

Petty fools with fragile egos

Local body politicians are concerned that the hostile online environment might deter people from running, and want British-style laws to prevent "online attacks". So what sorts of attacks are they concerned about? Death threats (illegal under the Crimes Act)? Sustained online harassment campaigns(illegal under the Harmful Digital Communications Act)? Defamation (a simple tort)? None of the above:

Mr Cull said criticism was part and parcel of public life, but there should be limits.

"If you didn't allow it you wouldn't have a functioning democracy, but I think that too often it's playing the man and not the ball.

"We need to stick to issues."

Marlborough District councillor Cynthia Brooks, who was stepping down this year after two terms, said a lot of criticism stemmed from a lack of awareness.

It was especially noticeable every time there was a story on councillor attendances at meetings.

"Criticism". "Playing the man and not the ball". "A lack of awareness". And they call us "snowflakes". The first are simply a basic part of public life. The other has a very obvious recourse of more transparency about the job and what it entails. Neither seems to remotely reach the threshold required to justify any regulation of speech.

(RNZ also quotes a younger candidate, one used to social media, about curation. Which seems to be a much more mature attitude than that of the older, experienced politicians. Its the internet, you don't have to see anything you don't want to, and you'll almost certainly be much happier if you don't.)

There are real problems online with hate speech, threats, and serious online bullying. That's why we have the (flawed) HDCA. That's why we're having a conversation about hate speech. These petty fools and their fragile little egos aren't helping that. And no doubt, they'd use this post as an example of the "abuse" they face online.

What a muppet show

So, it turns out that the Budget "hack" was performed using that nefarious, illegal hacking technique called "using the search engine". Police have concluded that it wasn't illegal and they will be taking no further action (because its using the fucking search engine). I'm surprised they didn't charge Treasury with wasting police time.

Meanwhile, Treasury secretary Gabriel Makhlouf has presided over incompetence and smeared the opposition. We pay public sector CEOs the big bucks supposedly to take responsibility. We pay Makhlouf over $600,000 a year on that basis. So how about we get what we paid for? By running a muppet show, Makhlouf has fucked up his agency's biggest event of the year, and the centrepiece of the government's policies. It would be hard to imagine a more public screwup. But I forget: he's fucking off to Ireland. So I guess he's in DNGAF mode now. While SSC is looking into it, there's nothing they can really do to him now, so we'll get no accountability at all. I guess NeoLiberal public sector management theory didn't really think about that...

And then there's the next obvious question: how long has this flaw been lurking in Treasury's web servers? How many budgets have been googled in advance that way? Was market-sensitive information revealed, and did someone make money from it? Because that actually would be important.

Treasury, "hacking", and incentives

Overnight National's budget leak story exploded, with Treasury calling in police over allegations of computer crime. This morning Treasury doubled down on that, saying they had detected over 2000 attempts to access budget information in the last 48 hours. The implication is that this was 2000 hacking attempts (shock! panic!), but it could just as well be 2000 attempts to find budget documents at their usual URLs (like we all did last night after noticing that a cached version of Treasury's publication search showed 2019 budget documents).

National leader Simon Bridges is refusing to say how he got the documents, and quite sensibly too given the allegations that are being thrown around. The most likely scenario is that Treasury fucked up and left them lying around on their web-server for anyone to read, and National or one of its proxies noticed this and exploited it. Accessing unprotected data on a public web-server isn't "hacking" in any sense of the word - its just browsing. But unless some low-level Treasury IT prole directly admitted that they fucked up and resigned immediately, the bureaucratic incentive towards arse-covering and blame-avoidance pushes that to be reclassified as nefarious "hacking", and that incentive gets stronger the higher up the chain (and the further away from IT knowledge) you get. And so "obscurity still isn't security" transforms into "our security was hacked" in the same way that "a crock of shit which stinks" becomes "a powerful growth-promoting plan".

Unfortunately the natural instincts of power in New Zealand are to double down rather than admit a mistake, and to call in the police when embarrassed - just look at the tea tape, or Dirty Politics. With those, we saw police raiding newsrooms and journalist's homes. I'm wondering if we're going to see police raiding the opposition this time. Which would be highly damaging to our democracy. To point out the obvious, that's the sort of shit done in Australia, and worse places. Its not something we should tolerate here, and I would hope that the Speaker would resist any attempt to do so.

(Meanwhile, Steven Price has some interesting thoughts on the ethics and legality of National using the information, which is a completely different question to how it was acquired. Personally, I take an expansive view of public interest around accountability, and I would be loath to see the courts deciding whether politics is in the public interest because that way lies China. If people are unhappy with National's ethics over this, we have a ballot box and should use it accordingly).

Hoist by her own petard

Sarah Dowie is a National MP. Back in 2015, she voted for National's Harmful Digital Communications Act, an overly-broad law which criminalised exposing corrupt politicians on the internet. Now, she's being investigated for possible prosecution under that law:

Police are investigating a text message, allegedly sent from the phone of National Party MP Sarah Dowie, to her former colleague and ex lover Jami-Lee Ross.

The police investigation is said to focus on whether the text message - which came after the break-up of their extra-marital relationship - constituted an incitement to self-harm, which is punishable by up to three years in prison.

Ross, 33, has previously named Invercargill MP Dowie, 43, as one of the women with whom he had an extra-marital relationship while National MP for Botany.

The text message included the words: "You deserve to die."

Which seems like a pretty clear-cut violation of s179(2) Crimes Act, which the HDCA amended in one of the few non-controversial parts of the law. But it may simply be causing harm by posting digital communication.

A lot depends on what exactly the police decide to charge her with. Because the "inciting suicide" offence carries a maximum penalty of three years, meaning that if Dowie is convicted, she would automatically lose her seat in Parliament. And if the Police don't charge her with that, its going to look like another case of them going soft on politicians, just as they have done in the past.

Meanwhile, I'm wondering: in this post, I've advocated that an MP be prosecuted for their apparent criminal activity, and should face the legal consequences of their actions if convicted. Which is the sort of thing which would cause anguish, anxiety, or feelings of insecurity to an ordinary reasonable person in their position. And I want it to cause that harm: I am relishing the irony of Dowie having voted for the law she may be convicted under, and I want MPs to think about that when voting for such laws in the future. But by doing so, have I committed a crime? If so, I think it would prove the point perfectly: that while cyber-bullying is a serious problem, this over-broad law goes too far in trying to prevent it.

A win for democracy

For the past few elections, local authorities have been obsessed with online voting as a way to cut costs. They were planning a trial at next year's local body elections. But now its been cancelled:

The proposed trial of online voting in next year’s local body elections will not proceed after the working party comprised of nine councils made the reluctant decision to halt the trial. Although the working party had recently selected a provider that satisfied all of the security and delivery requirements, the cost burden for the councils involved ultimately forced the decision.

This is the second election in a row this has happened, but its still good riddance. Online voting is fundamentally insecure, and no election conducted online can be trusted. We need our democracy to be more reliable than Microsoft Windows, and that means keeping it offline, where it can't be fucked with by two-bit script kiddies, political parties, and foreign governments. The bad news is that rather than accepting this, the local government working party still wants to press one and try again in three year's time. It would be better if they simply buried the idea for good.

Australia: racism beats "national security"

Today the Australian house of representatives is debating the government's super-important encryption backdoor legislation, which would require services like Signal to put a government backdoor in their software. Meanwhile, the Senate is debating an amendment which would require the government to approve medical transfers of refugees held in its Pacific concentration camps. Which given the level of mental illness in those gulags, will mean most of the victims being brought to Australia. The government doesn't want this to pass, firstly because they're racists, and secondly because it will mean a vote in the House which they will lose. And that won't just be humiliating for them - it may also mean an election.

The government has spent all week talking about how vital the encryption legislation is, and how it Must Be Passed By Christmas to deal with some nameless threat to the holidays (despite it not actually coming into force until next year). But when push comes to shove, it seems that knee-jerk authoritarianism has lost out to their desire to deny basic medical care to the people they've tortured: rather than risk having to listen to doctors, they've sent the house home early for christmas, sacrificing their encryption legislation in the process. I guess it just wasn't that important after all - or at least, not as important as being irredeemable racist arseholes, and being seen to be so by the Australian electorate.

Update: Except of course you can always rely on the chickenshittedness of the Australian Labor Party. The moment the house rose, they pulled their amendments to the encryption backdoor bill, allowing it to pass without challenge. So, Australia gets to be racist and a tyranny. 'Straya!

Show us the backdoor

Today the GCSB banned Spark from using Huawei equipment in its planned 5G network. The ban was imposed for "national security" grounds, but naturally there's no details. So we're supposed to believe that Huawei gear is too dangerous to be used in our networks, but we are forbidden from knowing how to fix it.

This is simply bullshit. If Huawei gear is backdoored to e.g. route traffic back to Chinese state security agencies so they can read it (you know, like US stuff is), then the best way of protecting our security is for the details of those problems to be widely publicised, so that they can be fixed. There's no benefit to the public in keeping security flaws secret. The only people that benefits are the people who want to exploit those flaws: hackers, criminals, and spy agencies like the GCSB (or more likely, their foreign masters, the NSA). And if exposing Chinese backdoors causes the NSA's Chinese equivalent to expose American ones, allowing them to be patched, then again, we all benefit.

More generally, exposing and publicising bugs and security flaws makes the world a safer place. An agency genuinely interested in our security would do that. The fact that the GCSB doesn't - well, you can draw your own conclusions about their purpose.

Democracy vs Facebook

The UK Parliament has been investigating Facebook for some time over the Brexit referendum and Cambridge Analytica scandal. But so far Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has refused to appear before them and answer questions. So now they've upped the ante and seized Facebook documents from a visiting third-party CEO who had obtained them as part of a lawsuit in the US:

Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions.

The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.

Damian Collins, the chair of the culture, media and sport select committee, invoked a rare parliamentary mechanism to compel the founder of a US software company, Six4Three, to hand over the documents during a business trip to London. In another exceptional move, parliament sent a serjeant at arms to his hotel with a final warning and a two-hour deadline to comply with its order. When the software firm founder failed to do so, it’s understood he was escorted to parliament. He was told he risked fines and even imprisonment if he didn’t hand over the documents.

The UK parliament's contempt powers are ill-defined, and haven't really been exercised for some time, but in theory they could have imprisoned him until the next election (though the interaction between that, the Bill of Rights Act 1689 and the UK Human Rights Act and ECHR would have been fascinating). The documents themselves are subject to a non-disclosure order in the USA, of which the UK parliament has just forced a breach. Facebook will probably threaten to sue over that, but they won't get anywhere in a UK court because claims against parliament are simply non-justiciable. If they punish Six4Three's CEO for providing them, then that would seem to be a contempt of parliament which would expose them to sanctions in the UK. And now the committee has the documents, they can publicise them however they like under full cover of parliamentary privilege. But most interestingly, the UK parliament is subject to its Freedom of Information Act, so the documents could be requested (though probably not until the inquiry is over).

The fallout from this is going to be fascinating. And it will be interesting to see if any other legislatures take the hint that global corporations are globally vulnerable and take similar action to advance their own inquiries into how Facebook is used to undermine democracy and incite murder and genocide.

Netsafe defends freedom of the press

Last week, rich prick Ray Avery tried to use the Harmful Digital Communications Act to suppress media coverage about him. But approved agency Netsafe has rejected his complaint:

Internet regulator Netsafe has declined to pursue a complaint by entrepreneur Sir Ray Avery that Newsroom stories about him amounted to digital harm and harassment.

The publicly-funded agency, which is charged with mediating complaints of online bullying and harassment under the Harmful Digital Communications Act, told Newsroom today: "This complaint has now been closed at Netsafe."

It said the law was "not clear about how to treat HDC complaints as they apply to media, and there is limited case law from which to form our advice.

"Therefore we are not recommending you take any further action. We have recommended to Sir Ray Avery that if he wishes to pursue this complaint he has the option of applying to the District Court."

But this isn't over yet, because Avery has indicated from the start that that using the courts to suppress public-interest journalism is exactly what he intends to do. And while we can hope that the court will look at s14 of the Bill of Rights Act and interpret the law so as to be consistent with the right to free speech and freedom of the press and exclude public interest journalism, I would feel far safer if there was explicit protection. That would at least prevent rich pricks like Avery from trying it on, and forcing media organisations to rack up enormous legal bills defending themselves.

There is obvious scope for a member's bill here. I wonder if any of the "free speech loving" MPs in the opposition will take it - or whether the only speech they want to protect is that of racists and Nazis.

We told you so

When Parliament passed the Harmful Digital Communications Act 2015, people warned them that it threatened journalism. The lack of a public interest defence or explicit protection for media activities meant that:

If a current affairs investigation into a dodgy finance company offends that financier or his family... if a Fair Go report distresses some con man... or if a cartoon emotionally harms a pious soul, they now can use the law to ask for the offending item to be taken offline.

And now its happened, with rich prick Ray Avery seeking to suppress Newsroom's reports on his "background, products and promises":

Avery has told Netsafe, the legal agent for considering complaints under the Act, the reports have caused him serious emotional distress and amount to a form of digital harm - and wants Newsroom to consider removing them and to agree not to write further news stories about him.

"Ray believes these are written with the purpose of harassing him and contain false allegations," Netsafe has told Newsroom.

MP's who voted for the law are shocked, shocked! by this. But they were explicitly warned about it in submissions, and they explicitly rejected. And now the public are paying the price, with an attempted threat to our free press.

People are generally comfortable with the use of the law to prevent and punish actual online bullying. But this is too far. Parliament needs to take urgent steps to protect press freedoms by enacting a public interest defence. Otherwise, we can conclude that like Tracey Martin, they want the law to be used in this fashion, perhaps in an effort to protect themselves.