No wonder people don't join political parties

So, United Future is apparently ready to re-register as a party, but has been held up by the Electoral Commission's insistence on paper membership records.

As someone who has grown up in the internet age, this is simply backwards. In an age where I can get a passport, do my taxes, or submit on legislation online, the idea that I have to fill out an actual paper form to join a political party (as opposed to any other organisation) is just arcahic. But its also possibly illegal. Why? Because in 2002, Parliament passed the Electronic Transactions Act 2002, the thrust of which is basically "electronic stuff counts". While a lot of the specific requirements of the Act do not apply to meeting the legal requirements of the Electoral Act (because if we're going to do electronic voting, it has to be right), the general provisions, including the overarching one that "to avoid doubt, information is not denied legal effect solely because it is in electronic form or is in an electronic communication", do. So is there a specific reason under the Electoral Act to deny an electronic membership form legal effect?

No. When it comes to proof of membership of a political party, all the Electoral Act says is that applications to register must

be accompanied by evidence, in a form approved by the Electoral Commission, that the party has at least 500 current financial members who are eligible to enrol as electors

So basically the Electoral Commission could accept electronic membership records; they just choose not to. And that choice appears to be contrary to S 8 of the Electronic Transactions Act 2002.

Administrative decisions cannot trump the law. The Electoral Commission needs to drag itself into the 21st century and start accepting electronic memberships. And who knows? Perhaps if you don't need to use bronze-age technology to participate, people might actually start joining political parties again.

Connecting the dots II

Why is the government closing schools in Christchurch? So it can pay its cronies to build their replacements:

The Education Ministry's $41 million proposed year 1-13 super school for Christchurch is set to be funded by the private sector, a document reveals.

The document, obtained by APNZ, outlines advice given to Education Minister Hekia Parata and shows she signed off on five of eight recommendations.

Ms Parata added in her handwriting that four Christchurch eastern suburb schools should close a year later, in December 2016, to allow for "considerations of public-private partnership procurement."

The privately funded school, known as a public-private partnership (PPP) school, would be the second in New Zealand after the Hobsonville Point primary school opened this year in Auckland.

A PPP means that a company designs, builds and maintains the school buildings. While this is supposed to save the government money, experience overseas (particularly in the UK, where PPPs have been widely used) shows that they are a scam which sees the government pay significantly more for infrastructure than if they built it themselves. And that's the experience here as well - the Transmission Gully PPP will see us pay an extra $300 million straight into the pockets of the private operator.

The advantage of PPPs? They hide debt, which allows politicians to pretend to be "good financial managers". Of course, that service costs money - but its us, rather than the politicians, who are paying for it.

Wouldn't it be nice to have an Education Minister who focuse don education, rather than enriching her parties cronies?

An illegal DNA databank in the UK

Back in 1995, the UK government set up a national DNA databank to hold the DNA profiles of people arrested and imprisoned. Since then it has become one of the most extensive DNA databases in the world, holding profiles on almost 6 million people (many of whom have not been charged with any crime). But that's not enough for the police - it turns out they've been keeping a parallel secret database without statutory authority:

Police and intelligence services have been sending terror suspects’ DNA to counterparts around the world with no official scrutiny over their actions, a government watchdog has warned.

The National DNA Database Ethics Group has demanded an explanation as fears emerged that a little-known archive of thousands of samples, often taken without permission from innocent people during counter-terrorism operations, had been operating with “no statutory basis”.

The group has also asked ministers to detail exactly what information from the Counter Terrorism DNA database – operated by the Metropolitan Police as an “adjunct” to the national database – has been handed to foreign governments and intelligence services, and what safeguards govern how the information is used.

This likely violates the Data Protection Act and possibly other legislation. The question now is whether the police will be punished for it, or whether they are in fact above the law.

Meanwhile, this raises an obvious question: are our police doing the same?

New Fisk

The Lebanese army fears rise of the Sunni Muslim Salafists

No denial from Key

With all the news leaking out about the NSA's mass-surveillance, what we need from our government is a cast-iron denial - backed by transparency so we can see its not just a lie - that our spies are not involved and neither contribute to or receive this data. Sadly, we're not getting one from John Key:

Prime Minister John Key has categorically denied that the Government Communications Security Bureau has been circumventing New Zealand law by accessing information from an international spying network.

But crucially he has yet to make a statement on whether the spy bureau actually uses or has access to the Prism system which the US uses to harvest information from Facebook, Gmail and other technology giants.

Mr Key, who is the Minister in charge of the GCSB, told TV3's Firstline the bureau did not get information about New Zealanders through the data harvesting system Prism to get around a ban against spying on its own citizens.

[Emphasis added]

...which some people might take as a denial. But its not. Saying "I don't go shopping to buy fish" isn't the same as saying "I don't go shopping". In this case, GCSB isn't using PRISM to circumvent NZ law because the law only prohibits them from intercepting the communications of New Zealand citizens and residents. It is entirely legal for them to intercept metadata, and to analyse foreign-intercepted metadata. And Key happily admits that they do exchange data, and in one report even that they gather and exchange data on "New Zealander[s] of interest".

And its not harmless. Contrary to my local radio dicks (who woke me this morning claiming the government couldn't learn anything by tracking anyone's phone calls), you can learn an awful lot from metadata. That example uses membership in C18th seditious organisations to track treason, but the modern version gives the government access to all of our digitally-mediated social relationships. And while they say they're hunting "terrorists", we only have their word for it, and the data-set isn't restricted to information only useful for that purpose. It could for example be used to track TV pirates, or greens, or people who support human rights, or even people who don't like spies and think their powers should be constrained. And we're utterly at their mercy if they ever change their mind.

This is what spies do: if you give them money and power, they gather all the information they possibly can, because knowledge is power. The only solution is not to give them money and power. The GCSB has shown that it cannot be trusted. It should be defunded, disbanded, and replaced by an agency which does the legitimate job: not spying, but making sure our government's electronic communications (and the private data we entrust to it) are secure.

An abuse of privilege

Labour has laid a complaint of breach of Privilege against former Revenue Minister Peter Dunne. While I regard misleading a select committee as a very serious business, in this case the questioning of Dunne on an subject unrelated to the business of the committee was an abuse of the committee (a point noted by the committee chair at the time). Seeking to bring a privilege claim for his answers to such an abuse of the committee is simply an abuse of privilege - and of power.

Not that Labour cares about any of this - they're simply trying to put more pressure on Dunne to force him to resign rather than reveal his emails, thus building their narrative about unstable government. And they're not concerned by the damage this does to our constitutional norms or our democratic culture. Its another example of how beltway politicians put the game before the stakes.

(As for the substance, Andrew Geddis tackles it here. My only addition is that the question is first and foremost one for the select committee, and they'd be well within their rights to simply kick it on the grounds that the committee wasn't misled by answers to an unrelated and abusive line of questioning).

Mass surveillance is about control, not terrorism

When word first broke that the NSA was spying on everyone's internet use and phone calls, President Obama was quick to defend the practice, saying it was "to keep the American people safe" - the implication being that it was about terrorism.

He lied:

I can tell you that everybody that attended an Occupy Wall Street protest, and didn’t turn their cell phone off, or put it — and sometimes even if they did — the identity of that cell phone has been logged, and everybody who was at that demonstration, whether they were arrested, not arrested, whether their photos were ID’d, whether an informant pointed them out, it’s known they were there anyway. This is routine.

The NSA's mass-surveillance is not about terrorism, it is about control. And in a democracy, that is a very, very dubious idea.

New Fisk

Ahmadinejad’s successor is supposed to be chosen by the people, not guardians

"No comment" is not good enough

More revelations on the giant NSA leaks today, with the whistleblower outing himself and fleeing to Hong Kong. He will apparently be applying for political asylum in Iceland; the fact that he didn't choose New Zealand should be a source of lasting shame to us as a democracy and a sign that our relations with the US are too close to be trusted.

Meanwhile, over in the UK, questions are being asked about GCHQ's use of data extracted from the US's PRISM system. We've suspected for a while that the spy agencies circumvent restrictions on spying on their own citizens by getting their allies to do it and then trading the data, and the NSA leak seems to support that, showing GCHQ as a user of the system. Our GCSB has a similar (OK, more subserviant) relationship with the NSA to GCHQ, and the same questions are inevitably being asked here. The response?

A New Zealand government spokeswoman declined to comment on Sunday when asked if the GCSB co-operated with the NSA programme.

''We do not comment on security and intelligence matters. New Zealand's intelligence agencies are subject to an oversight regime, which we are looking to strengthen ...''

Which isn't good enough. These are serious questions about our privacy, our democratic rights, and the GCSB's compliance with the clearly expressed will of Parliament that it not spy on New Zealanders. We deserve real answers, not the usual pap. If the GCSB won't give them, we can only assume that their refusal masks guilt.

Finally, its worth pointing out: the government's new spy bill would allow them to do exactly what the NSA is doing, legally and secretly. If you don't like the idea of the government tapping all your phone calls and reading all your emails, then you should speak up and say so. Details on how to submit on the bill can be found here.

The Greens should support leakers, not oppose them

Yesterday, in the wake of Peter Dunne's resignation over the Kitteridge leak, Winston Peters immediately called for him to be prosecuted. That's expected - Peters is a xenophobic authoritarian happy to cloak himself in ridiculous claims of "national security" to persecute his political opponents. What was unexpected was seeing this call echoed by the Greens:

Green Party co-leader Russel Norman said the inquiry into the leak to Fairfax Media does not confirm whether Mr Dunne in fact did it, and police need to investigate and force Mr Dunne to release the emails.

"Clearly (inquiry head) David Henry didn't have sufficient powers to make Peter Dunne release the emails. If the police are investigating a Crimes Act offence, then they do have the powers to get Peter Dunne to release the emails."

Dr Norman said it needs to be seen whether Mr Dunne has breached the Crimes Act.

Firstly, the idea that this leak breached the Crimes Act is utterly ridiculous. Both the offences of espionage (which peters accused Dunne of in Parliament on Thursday) and wrongful communication of official information require that the information in question "be likely to prejudice seriously the security or defence of New Zealand". John Key was quite clear in his press conference that that was not the case, and there is no possible way in which the leak of material exposing GCSB wrongdoing could be seen in that light. So, the idea that an offence has been commited is pure bullshit, and the Greens should not be trading in it.

Secondly, such prosecutions are highly dubious in a democracy. Quite apart from philosophical objections (like treason, they get the relationship between citizen and state exactly backwards and are a relic of feudalism), leaks are the lifeblood of democracy. And the more sensitive and embarrassing the leak, the greater the public interest in protecting the leaker. If Dunne leaked this report, he should be viewed as a hero, not a criminal (I take the government's assertion that the report would be published anyway with a grain of salt, given that they broke their word that they would publish the Inspector-General's report into the same wrongdoing). A party like the Greens, committed to democracy and freedom, should be encouraging such leaks, not calling for them to be punished - especially given the shit we're learning about what the GCSB's foreign masters have been getting up to.

Russel Norman has sought to justify his position on the grounds that such leaks undermine the idea of Parliamentary oversight of intelligence agencies. Firstly, this wasn't an ISC document, so that's just a non-sequitur. But more importantly, Parliament pays the bills, so it has an absolute right to scrutinise what is done with our money, no matter how secret and sensitive. And I regard it as not just a right, but a duty of politicians on the ISC to inform the public of wrongdoing. If Norman seriously believes what he's said, then he is not doing his job properly, and should resign immediately so that his place can be taken by someone less credulous and authoritarian.

Calls for leakers to be prosecuted should be seen in the same light as calling environmentalists treasonous economic saboteurs: the last refuge of scoundrels. I expect the Greens to support democratic values and be above such things.

The all-important question

Having watched two press conferences this afternoon, I'm left with one vital question I'd like to ask Peter Dunne. No, not the shitty one that underpant-sniffer Patrick Gower asked repeatedly (really, the man is scum and should be ashamed of himself), but a substantive one of policy: will Dunne now be voting for National's spy bills and their massive expansion of GCSB powers?

Dunne said repeatedly that he takes privacy seriously. The spy bills threaten that privacy. They would let GCSB do exactly what the US NSA has just been caught doing: spy on everyone's phone calls and emails. If Dunne is as serious about privacy as he would have us believe, surely he will vote against this legislation?

The Henry report

So, the Henry report has been released, and Peter Dunne has resigned as a Minister as a result. Not because it found that he leaked the Kitteridge report into the GCSB, but because he had failed to cooperate fully with the inquiry and therefore the Prime Minister could not have confidence in him. A couple of points:

Firstly, while the report (and Key) views Dunne's refusal to hand over his emails as deeply suspicious, there's potentially an innocent explanation. Dunne is the leader of a political party, and it is entirely normal for him to communicate with journalists. Given his previously expressed views on the GCSB and the fact that he is a critical swing vote in passing the government's spy bill, its even entirely natural for him to communicate with a journalist on GCSB issues. And it is entirely natural for him to regard those communications as none of the PM's business.

Secondly, if he did leak the report, Dunne is a muppet. The first rule of leaking is don't get caught. You never leak stuff by email - or if you do, you do it through another account, from another computer, so that you have deniability (and more importantly, so that a government inquiry can't automatically retrieve your end of the conversation). Its not hard to make a disposable gmail account, and it offers access by https, which makes it non-trivial to snoop. They should teach all Ministers and public servants this stuff in their job induction.

Thirdly, there's plenty of muppetry to go around. Our superspies, the Masters of Cyberspace? They don't have even basic precautions around document handling:

A system for numbering copies was used at GCSB but was incomplete and somewhat confusing. Not all copies were numbered and the number series included numbers allocated to earlier drafts. Copies distributed on 22 march 2013 were not included in the number series and nor were the copies provided to the Cabinet office on 25 March 2013

If this is how things are done in our top secret agency, it needs a bit of a shake-up.

Fourthly, John Key has confirmed that the leak did not threaten "national security". So Winston Peters is full of shit when he accuses Dunne of espionage and calls for him to be prosecuted.

Finally, if Dunne did leak this report, he did us all a service. He deserves our thanks for being willing to inform the public of GCSB wrongdoing - not our condemnation. His resignation is entirely understandable, given that it is a question of key's confidence in him. But whistleblowers are heroes, not villains.

Boo-hoo

Apparently we're meant to feel sorry for America's drone murderers now:

Brandon Bryant has helped America to kill 1626 people as a drone operator for the US Air Force. He has watched, from the safety of his desk, his targets "bleed out" thousands of kilometres away.

The carnage he has seen has left him permanently scarred; he has post-traumatic stress disorder and he is haunted by the images of his kills.

[...]

He said he quit the Air Force because the job made him feel like a "sociopath", someone who had "lost respect for life".

That's because he is a sociopath with no respect for life. Its undoubtedly a good thing that he has quit and is no longer murdering people, but I'll be damned if I'm going to feel sorry for him.

Utterly barbaric

Where do you get to kill a woman because she refuses to have sex with you? Saudi Arabia? Afghanistan? No - Texas:

A Texas jury acquitted a man for the murder of a woman he hired as an escort, after his lawyers claimed he was authorized to use deadly force because she refused sex.

Ezekiel Gilbert shot Lenora Ivie Frago in the neck on Christmas Eve, after she denied his requests for sex and wouldn’t return the $150 he had paid her, according to the San Antonio Express-News. Under Texas law, an individual is authorized to use deadly force to “retrieve stolen property at night,” and Gilbert’s lawyers cited that provision as justification for Gilbert’s action, reasoning that Frago had stolen $150 from him by taking his money without delivering sex. In a police interview played for jurors, Gilbert “never mentioned anything about theft,” a detective told the San Antonio Express-News. Frago, who was 21, was critically injured and died several months later.

This is simply utterly barbaric. But its where you end up when you have a toxic combination of misogyny and lax gun laws.

Pillaging the conservation estate again

Here we go again: National is again planning to pillage the conservation estate:

Most of the area the Government is considering offering for platinum exploration is conservation land.

Six parcels of land making up 4422 square kilometres are proposed for exploration in the South Island, of which 76% forms part of the conservation estate.

Within those areas are key sites renowned for their landscapes or biological diversity and environmentalists are demanding they be removed from the bidding selection.

Given their repeated attempts at this, you'd get the impression that the government does not know what "conservation" means. Maybe they should spend some of their enormous Ministerial slush funds on buying a dictionary.

Some justice for Kenya

Between 1952 and 1956, the British waged a dirty colonial war in Kenya against the Mau-Mau. Opponents of the colonial regime were detained in camps, deported to reserves, and of course murdered, tortured, and raped. The extent of the atrocities was exposed by the release of the British Colonial Office's secret archive last year: beatings, castration, water torture, and the roasting alive of a prisoner. But now, the UK government is finally doing the right thing and compensating its victims:

Kenyans tortured by British colonial forces during the Mau Mau uprising will receive payouts totalling £20m, Foreign Secretary William Hague has announced.

He said the UK government recognised Kenyans were tortured and it "sincerely regrets" the abuses that took place.

A lawyer for the victims said they "at last have the recognition and justice they have sought for many years".

But read the fine print: the compensation is a paltry £3,000 per surviving victim (for torture and castration, remember), and the government accepts no legal liability. What should be an apology and recognition of wrongdoing has been sullied by cheapness and a refusal to accept responsibility for the wrong that was done. Looking at it from a country which specialises in apologies for past colonial wrongdoing, it looks more than a little halfhearted.

But then, the Kenyans weren't Britain's only victims. There are others in Cyprus, Malaysia, Yemen, Palestine and India who were similarly wronged and equally deserving of an apology and compensation. The UK's treatment of its Kenyan victims has one eye on limiting future claims from its victims elsewhere - a motivation which undermines the sincerity of their settlement.

It also has one eye on preserving the reputation of the British empire. But if there's one thing we should have learned, its that all empires are evil. Once you set out to dominate other countries, torture and oppression are an inescapable part of the project. Britain did it everywhere, the US is doing it now in Afghanistan and the Middle East (and increasingly to its own citizens); hell, we did it in Samoa when we tried to have our own little empire in the Pacific. If we want people to live in freedom and dignity, then we can't have empires. It's that simple.

Land of the Free II

It seems that the USA's totalitarian surveillance state is much worse than we thought:

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Which I guess tells us why the GCSB is so keen to get the power to spy domestically, monitor domestic networks and dictate their technology choices: because their US masters are already doing it.

Meanwhile, I suspect there's a sudden market opportunity for internet services and social networks based in a country which respects privacy and does not have such totalitarian surveillance. Sadly, National looks likely to piss that opportunity away by pandering to its rogue spies.

A farce

Question Time has descended into a farce today with Trevor Mallard walking out and New Zealand First declaring an ongoing boycott over David Carter's rulings around United Future's recognition as a party. Carter had ruled that he would not cease to recognise United Future, as the consequences would be severe and Dunne assured him the party would be re-registered within a week. This, despite clear Standing Orders saying that only registered parties would be recognised. He then refused to release the advice he had received on the matter, or even to say who he had consulted (hint: Gerry Brownlee).

The latter is particularly troubling. The Speaker is the servant of the House. He has neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak except as the House directs him. It is not the Speaker's advice, but the House's advice, and the House has a fundamental right to see it. If the Speaker refuses, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that it does not support his ruling and he is hiding it to cover up that fact.

If you can't cap it, don't drill it

Next year Anadarko - one of the companies responsible for the Deepwater Horizon spill - will begin drilling in deep water off our coast next year. So how long will it take them to plug the well if they cause a similar "accident" here? Two weeks:

An international petroleum company manager says it would take up to 14 days to cap a deep water well in the event of a blowout.

Anadarko is planning to drill two deep water exploration wells off the coast of Taranaki and Canterbury next year.

[...]

Mr Boggan says if there was a blowout in a deep water well, four jumbo jets would need to fly a capping stack from the UK and the cap would then need to be shipped to the site.

And in the meantime while they're pissing around, their well will be spewing oil, poisoning our oceans, our ecosystems, and our beaches. Anadarko clearly thinks that's acceptable. But they don't live here, and its not their backyard they'll be poisoning.

If you can't cap it, don't drill it. Companies who want to drill in New Zealand should be forced to keep this equipment here, on-site, in case of any accident. Otherwise, they should not be allowed to drill. Its that simple.

Good riddance to Ross Robertson

Ross Robertson is retiring from Parliament. Good riddance. He may be nice, he may have been an excellent Assistant Speaker, but he destroyed whatever legacy he hoped to have by voting against civil unions and marriage equality. Rather than being a respected elder statesman, he's just a dirty old bigot - and one we are well rid of.