Firstly, is the policy clear enough as to what the police are permitted to do? Probably not.

Secondly, the police clearly cannot be trusted to obey policy. There should be an independent body with the ability to not only investigate complaints, but to carry out proactive audits. And police misconduct should be a criminal offence that can be prosecuted even after a cop has retired.

She found out about the emails before the election but being a good Labour Party activist, waited until National had won before spilling the beans.

Would this have come out if Labour had been returned?

Obviously her outrage was subservient to her desire to protect Labour – what sort of “activist” is that?

Oh – unless you mean harassment by the protest group. Certainly the attack on Keys site is harassment alright and the police should definately be watching anyone who attacks the countries leaders. Just a pity they werent more diligent in finding the trail of the emails which were stolen and given to Hager.

its must be just soooooooo bloody embarrasing that the informer was also the bonker……

Hilarious

IrishBill: I’m bored with your ignorant trolling. Take a fortnight off.

And these left wing activists thought the government was on their side………

ALL governments watch ALL activist groups – doesnt matter if they are the mongrel mob or the Save the Plants from being Eaten group. They are all extremist of one form or another (they dont think they are – but they are) – just like extremist muslims or extremist christians or jews. They are all watched.

[lprent: Who cares if they watch them. That is quite different from what has been happening here - there has recently been an active policy of harassment on the basis of faulty intel. That is the issue.]

Protestors or activists are all the same. Greenpeace to white supremists they are all activists. The police should monitor them all.

How much should they monitor them?

Are there any lines they shouldn’t cross? Or shouldn’t cross under some circumstances?

Of course she mainly did the google bomb more as an exercise in looking at the new 2007 google algorithms to prevent google bombs. Key was just convenient. She obviously organised it well. JK’s site is still the target of the google bomb.

Her main political focus is (and always has been) on animal rights. Young labour was another way of pursuing that.

I think that most people would want the police to monitor people who are dangerous. The question is how far should the police go in monitoring activist groups. Infiltration, harrassment with unjustified charges, unjustified search warrants, provocation (ie getting infiltrators to incite action), training the activists, etc etc. Should they extend past the target people to examine all of the others who are involved in a activist group.

The problem is that we have to trust the police to be balanced. Recently, from what I’ve seen they are not. The SIG and TAu appear to lack the discrimination to be trusted.

Essentially when dealing with this kind of “black box” funded intelligence work it is up too the officer in charge’s judgment, sorry for the generalisation here but many police officers tend to be at the authoritarian end of right wing in their political beliefs, yet the officer in charge appears completely ignorant of the (for lack of a better phrase) constitutional significance and objective requirements of this and other such work. These officers see it fit for their personal prejudice and subjective opinion on who might be dangerous, or even just who they do and not like, to form the basis for decisions on what to commit large amounts of money and personal towards investigating.

Many people are saying in defence of the police that it is important they keep an eye on these groups in case they do something illegal, well quite plainly, as pointed out here and in the article is just not the case, they may not like the message these groups spread, but none of them have been planning to harm people. Of the multitude of charges laid against left wing activists almost none result in conviction, and those that did, the conviction is spurilous too the act in question, more of a legal technicality than the person acting in a dangerous manner. Quite simply the justification for the behaviour of the SIG just does not add up, they must be brought to account.

It would be nice for there to be a thorough investigation, looking at the way in which the police and other government agencies (SIS and GSCB, too a lesser extent, they seem to understand the significance of what they do slightly more) behave in regards for legitimate protest, the groups they look at, and the information they gather, too see whether it really stacks up, fat chance of that happening under National though. The Police also need to be taught that protestingis not illegal, it’s as simple as that, but you wouldn’t think so from their behaviour.

Again Lynn, you must be extremely proud of Rochelle, amazing work she did uncovering this, I can‘t praise her highly enough.

“Rees, who works as a computer programmer, reinstalled his email programme and then made a routine check that his old emails hadn’t been corrupted. She was puzzled to see hundreds of emails with the “sender” and “subject” lines blank.”

That would seem to be the point at which her suspicions were sufficiently roused to look at individual emails.

The article continues:

“Checking them, she found they were all private political emails and all being forwarded to the same anonymous address. Something was very wrong. But she didn’t know what.
She and a friend looked through the emails and found documents with titles such as “Intel Request”. From that first clue a picture gradually emerged of 10 years of police surveillance.”

I’ll be here for another ten minutes if you have any more plain English sentences you need de-coded.