Larry Jones is driving the minivan across the Utah desert on Highway 163, with Sally in the passenger seat and the two kids dozing in the back.
William Scaggs forScientific American
In this case we are the helpless passengers in the back, and our parliamentarians are the driver.
If Larry refuses to slow down, then it is up to us the passengers, to do everything we can to make sure he listens to us.
Tonight at 7pm in Auckland, probably the biggest ever meeting called by Generation Zero on climate change is due to take place. Held in the Owen Glen complex in the Fisher &Paykel Auditorium, Auckland University, Wynyard Street. Make sure you are there.
The National government are Larrys. Determined to take a chance.
Labour and the Greens are Sallys, frightened and worried, but too intimidated by Larry to speak up.
On the plus side.The Green Party did call a conference on climate change at parliament. Which was boycotted by Shearer. This was a brave attempt to drag the reluctant Labour Party to the table.
They need to do more of the same.
But the Greens still refuse to make climate change a leading election issue.
And they are still determined to get seats in a Shearer cabinet, even though they know the cost will be to drop their opposition to deep sea oil drilling, fracking and Denniston. The three big things that symbolise BAU. And the three big things that the National and the Labour Parties are deathly committed to.
I have maintained and still maintain that if the Greens do go into coalition with Labour on these terms, they will be finished as an electoral force.
Is this title biased or what?
Only in the 3rd paragraph do we read…”The Green Party was the big winner, lifting from 9 per cent to 14. After several weeks of debate and protest over the GCSB Bill, National fell to 46 per cent – down three points since the May poll.”
Maybe headline should have been….
“Government’s spying policies bleed support to the Greens’.
The editor of the Herald must be paid a lot by the foreign corporates taking our country over.
FFS, Jenny, we need a review of the entire intelligence system in NZ before we can make informed decisions. You’ve been told this. As I said above, you’re just not listening.
Draco, don’t include me in your “we” thanks.
Don’t tell me I can’t make an informed decision right now without a bunch of parliamentary hacks telling me what information I am entitled to.
After Waihopai, Manning, Doctom, Snowden et al what more information do you need to condemn the whole surveillance state?
Liberal commentators have been forced to admit that surveillance is a euphemism for the political repression of all the blowback from numerous colonial wars and invasions. The US is creating Jihadis in its own suburbia for gods sake.
I don’t want a review by any of these professional politicians.
That’s just a formula for doing nothing on full pay for a year or two while our privacy is wiped and the the globe is destroyed.
I want a ‘repeal’ though its unlikely that Labour will make it into Government unless the other left parties can make up for its pathetic crawling to the establishment.
If Labour campaigned right now for Kill the Bill it might just create the support it needs to Kill the Act.
You’re talking about two issues. The bill that NACT are passing which needs to be repealed if not stopped and a review which sets out to clearly define the purpose of the intelligence apparatus and it’s limits. I agree that Labour should come out and say that they will repeal the legislation that NACT are presently passing and going to the status quo ante. We’ll still need that review as well so as to make a better intelligence apparatus.
Jenny, we need a review of the entire intelligence system in NZ before we can make informed decisions. You’ve been told this. As I said above, you’re just not listening.
Draco T Bastard
What’s to review?
You either support the mass surveillance of the population. or you don’t. Which is what this legislation is about.
Just like Shearer. Draco it is you, who are not listening.
The collecting, storing, and transmission of mass surveillance (metadata) on the general population by police and spy agencies needs to be made a criminal offence punishable by law.
David Shearer the leader of the Labour Party says that on becoming the government he will have “a review”. Not an inquiry mind you “a review”.
A review is not an inquiry. Most people know what an inquiry is, they know what a review is. Most people know “review” is code for “do nothing”.
The broad spectrum surveillance and collection and dissemination and transfer of metadata on every single New Zealander needs to be kept illegal.
There is no middle ground.
John Key;“because the alternative here would be either we don’t collect this data at all.”
David Cunliffe; “based upon what we have heard here tonight. I personally, and I am sure my caucus colleagues would be of the view that this legislation, must not, will not, and cannot stand.”
David Shearer; “We will have a review.”
There is no alternative, there is no middle ground. Key acknowledges it, Cunliffe does too. You either collect metadata, or you don’t.
There is no fence to sit on here Draco, no matter how much you claim it.
To support a review over an inquiry and/or a ban, is to normalise the collection of metadata.
Will a review stop the corruption?
Will a review identify the guilty?
Will a review identify the wronged?
Will a review stop the collection of metadata?
I think we can all agree that the answer to each of these questions is no it will not.
Therefore a review will be a farce and an insult to the intelligence of most New Zealanders.
Until David Shearer promises to reveal the identities of the 88 New Zealanders illegally spied on, so that we can all judge the validity of the need for this legislation, then his promised review will be nothing but a cover up for Business As Usual.
It probably needs a Royal Commission of Inquiry so that findings and recommendations aren’t buried and forgotten in some lowly status report and instead remain in perpetuity and can be referred to easily when future governments try to attack rights of citizens in the way Key and his mates are currently doing.
No he didn’t. He mentioned it, and probably supports it, but he didn’t call for it, he said that Shearer had. What Cunliffe clearly called for was the repeal of this legislation
Cunliffe said that the Leader of the Labour Party has promised a “thorough review”. He obviously wants to go further than the review promised by his leader. Because he followed this statement up, by saying this legislation “cannot stand”.
David Shearer yelled out “We will be having a review”.
The implication being, that’s all you’re gonna get Cunliffe. No, cannot stand nonsense.
The further implication is that David Shearer would be comfortable with allowing the collection of metadata spying on every New Zealander to stand.
And by his silence on the withholding of the information about the illegal spying on the 88 New Zealanders, David Shearer is quite happy to let this situation stand as well.
To convince the public that he can be trusted, David Shearer needs to make a statement that on taking charge of the secret services he will order them to release this information to those affected if they request it.
Simple, clear, honest.
Yet not being done.
P.S. TRP, Draco maybe you and other Shearer apologists might like to further try and justify Shearer’s refusal to commit to releasing the names of the 88?
I suppose you might say that releasing this information could reveal the identities of the spies responsible, thereby compromising their ability to continue their under cover work. Lawbreakers guilty of crimes against members of the public are not above the law just because they are members of the secret service. So what if it costs them their jobs. By allowing the secret police officers to remain above the law if they are discovered breaking it, is a very dangerous precedent to set.
If it does come to court, as many of these cases undoubtably will, these accused spies can ask for name suppression and I am sure that they will be granted it.
“David Shearer yelled out “We will be having a review”.
The implication being, that’s all you’re gonna get Cunliffe.”
You’re a slow learner, Jenny. You have miserably failed to back up your fantasy and the presence of hundreds of people in the hall who didn’t see any such exchange doesn’t appear to have put you off continuing to talk crap about Shearer and Cunliffe. Were you even there? Nah, I guess not, eh.
“P.S. TRP, Draco maybe you and other Shearer apologists might like to further try and justify Shearer’s refusal to commit to releasing the names of the 88?”
Nope, I doubt anyone is going to waste much time pissing on your feeble strawman.
The people who watched TV3 on 26 July saw and heard Shearer say “We will be having a review”, after Cunliffe’s speech. Go and watch TV3 news on that day.
The difference between me and you, Jenny, is that I know what the review is for.
The intelligence services aren’t going away and so a review of just what they’re for and what powers they have is a reasonable action. This is what Labour have promised. As I say above, I would be more comfortable if they promised to drop the legislation that NACT are presently putting through but either way I still support a review of the intelligence services.
You, on the other hand, are focusing solely upon a single bit of legislation. It is this focus that has you being completely wrong about what people are saying.
Until David Shearer promises to reveal the identities of the 88 New Zealanders illegally spied on,
If I was one of those 88 I’d prefer it if the government told me and then let me decide if I told the rest of NZ and didn’t just go out and tell the rest of NZ.
If I was one of those 88 I’d prefer it if the government told me and then let me decide if I told the rest of NZ and didn’t just go out and tell the rest of NZ.
Draco T Bastard
Goes without saying. At present if you suspect you are being illegally spied on, if you request this information from the government you are told you are not allowed to know.
Currently the government are shielding the lawbreakers from their victims. Draco do you personally support the continuation of this criminal government policy?
Has David Shearer promised to, as future head of the secret security services allow people to access this information about themselves?
Let us see who the GCSB are spying on. If as many suspect they are not terrorists at all and that innocent people are being illegally victimised then this needs to come out so that they can get some redress.
Onnit Paul. Utterly shameless blatancy. No mention forever of Roy Morgan – until it favours the Natsies last week. Deliberate distortion (Gran) and totally ignored (Stuff) of yesterday’s Left lift.
On the silver lining side, concrete confirmation of the “self-fulfilling prophesy” power of polls. A fact long ago twigged of course by the Continuous Propaganda Party, its organs and their bottomless pockets.
A comparative analysis of MSM coverage of blue-friendly polls versus red-friendly over the past few years would be staggering.
Lolz the pic the Herald used today has David Shearer looking like He is starring in the movie ”Revenge of the Lizard People”,
i don’t see the Colmar-Brunton painting Labour in that bad a position, the Green Party on 14% has the bloc level with National who have 1% more of support to lose which would make that Party pretty much unable to form a Government on those numbers,
Between them, the Mana Party and the dying Maori Party hold the other 3% of the left’s support if we view the electorate on the basis of 50/50,
i can see the Mana Party entering the 2015 Parliament with 3 MP’s and the Maori Party with zero, not a bad position to be in this far out from November 2014,
The interest now will be what sort of damage has been inflicted upon National from the sordid little and long running GCSB affair…
Labour has wasted far too much time on this nonsense, I don’t know if it’s just desperation and the Labour HQ thinks this is all they’ve got to attack National with or it’s just arrogance and the intellectuals in the party just can’t admit the strategy sucks and just persevere because of ego.
Ah here it is back from a weekend being ‘primed’ with the Farrar, Hooten, Blubber boy line that no-body cares about the deliberate unlawful accessing of private email and phone information by the Office of the Prime Minister,
Keep singing that song Boyo, a mere 1-2% of right wing voters need only ‘care’ deeply enough about the executive misuse of power to in November 2014 give you something that will really make you care,
The opposition parties, by objecting to the GCSB, are highlighting the now typical disregard that Nat govt shows toward democratic principles. This is what the opposition parties need to be doing, because it is vital that voters are aware that there is another, better, way of doing things. Hopefully NZers will see these options loud and clear and not be bamboozled by the slogans ‘that it isn’t important’.
I would be ripping my hair out even more than I already am if the opposition parties were not presenting strong objections to the GCSB; I would have thought there would be many others who feel the same way.
Thing is anyone with half a brain can see that Labour isn’t really against what is been proposed.
From what I’ve read the bill will pretty much stay in it’s current form if Labour gets into power, which makes all the shrieking and carry on is just a shitty attempt to try and smear Key and pin blame on him because some public servant fucked up again not because this bill is all that’s evil.
If you’re going to treat the voting population like idiots at least try to be clever about it.
That is the brilliant thing about strong opposition. If the opposition parties go on record strongly opposing a certain approach, then if they get into power and do the self-same thing they can be called on it.
If voters continue to vote for a party that shows severe disrespect toward democratic principles it is hard not to see them as idiots because they are giving up the safeguards they would have had, had they voted for parties that opposed such undemocratic actions.
For this reason, suspecting Labour is much the same as National is not a good reason to not vote against National at this point.
Politicians need to be given the clear message as to what is acceptable and what is not. What is going on at present is simply not acceptable and only a complete fool would continue to vote for such behaviour.
John Key’s aim here is not the security and defence of the realm… It is self-preservation.
This is a classic cover up. It has all the hallmarks:
i) Denials
ii) Stone-walling
iii) Misinformation
iv) Obfuscation
v) Scapegoating
John Key and his advisors are following, almost word for word, the Watergate script.
It’s by Winston so obviously don’t agree with everything he says but he does make some good points about the GCSB and other things so worth reading.
@DTB
Only just read the speech – yes it is interesting.
I rate Mr Peters very highly on the skills he has shown as an opposition MP. Before NZF got back the Greens were doing a fair job -yet were alone in this. The overall opposition was insipid. I view Winston as having had a huge impact on the strength of the opposition this term.
Key and Co. didn’t put all that effort years ago into discrediting NZ First for no good reason.
Relating to this I believe it is worth looking around to see where that type of effort is going now.
So far my search provides me with the result of Mr Hone Harawira. There seems to have been a inordinate amount of interest in condemning his family (around Waitangi, housing protest and the nephew’s court case)
Is that the Helen Clark who said this: ”If beneficiaries want to get working for Families payments they should get a job”,
As bad if not worse than the current leaders ‘roof-painting bene bludger’ speech,a sentence i could well imagine coming from the lips of Richardson or Shiply,
Refusing to uphold the principle tenet of the welfare state, that it is based around the greatest need, will always cause Labour trouble in the electorate until such time as it has shaken the last vestiges of the left of the party from it’s rump,
Mind you at 33% of polled support it could be considered to have mostly achieved the above…
bad12
Yes I come back to middle class Labourites with jobs and favourable future visions talking simplistic and unhelpful shit about beneficiaries, and so-called non-working. When Steve Maharey was in government I thought his background in social sciences would result in more intelligent and wide-ranging innovations in getting positive returns from the unemployed and beneficiary payouts, that were helpful to them and the country, but nothing startling shook the scene.
He didn’t seem to have absorbed or was capable of triumphing over the middle-class stodge with new ideas despite his closeness to the thinkers in the social policy field. We can notice the same lack of independent thought about our economy emanating from financial wizard Kay.
“Who will rid us of these turbulent politicians?” (and bring in some good ones dedicated to doing good policies for the people and the country that actually bring benefits, not vague or fiery promises that just leave a sweet hopeful smell of roses hanging in the air.)
Interesting possible fact got from google. About Henry 2, and his saying –
He initially said “Never again will I have to say “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest” (he had in fact had several of the previous archbishops murdered) …
That’s going a bit over the top I think!
Rosetinted, Lol, yes just slightly, over the top that is, considering to all extents and purposes we are in ‘a public place’, but, i do know the ‘feeling’,
My view for quite some time is that as ‘the left’ have hived off Labour in a continuing process under MMP Labour have along with its current support base ‘morphed’ into a middle class Party, how much of this is deliberate or a natural change is debatable,
What is of interest to me from the Colmar Brunton poll is that 2% of the fence sitters, registered voters who have previously refused to indicate a preference, have come down off of the fence in this poll and the Green Party seems to have picked up all these voters,
This would to a certain extent indicate the Prime Minister having labelled Labour/Green as the ‘devil beast’ has certainly had an effect upon the electorate, the opposite tho of what the Prime Minister intended,
The past couple of elections appear to me to have been fought mainly in the middle ground of the electorate, if as this poll indicates, those who have stayed at home whilst this middle class battle has run it’s course are now ‘seeing’ the necessity to become involved and the fact that such involvement as indicated by the Colmar Brunton has moved left to the Green Party is a great look for the left especially if the indicated trend continues…
bad12
Interesting thoughts. I referred to a discussion of Brit Labour recently, forgotten where. I’d have to look back over my comments archive, but so amazing that what we see in NZ parallels theirs so far away. Of course we have always followed Brit thinking and connections and education and politics so maybe not so amazing. But their progression or regression could perhaps be studied with an objective eye to give substance to theories of what has been behind the Labour movement’s change here.
(this was my reaction to her self-serving/past-glossing-over appearance on q & a..)
“…next up is helen clark..(and i am sorry..i have so many other questions for clark..(maybe starting with her govt. totally ignoring/marginalising the poorest/sickest for nine long years..
..and at the same time..so efficiently preparing the ground for the current pogrom against those poorest/sickest..
..that my mind glazes over at her current unctions..
..save to note she fully supports spooks/spooking..(but is anti-mass-trawling..)
(and of course after that wholesale ignoring of real poverty in new zealand for those nine long years..that she now is at the un..’fighting-poverty’..
..must cause irony-overdose/gastric-reflux in most watchers..)..”
Ad +1….and they should be sucking up all the Kiwi unemployed and training them on the job in the reconstruction of Christchurch…instead of importing labour
+ 1 Colonial Viper …..Youth unemployment is a tragedy !…..which will keep ricocheting for generations!…… It should be a number one priority.
I think the Germans have a lot to teach us on this….Kids from high school go directly into apprenticeships or internships …..so they can sort out what they want to do….eg get training in a line of work they like or become a university student…..I don’t think they are allowed to be unemployed …same in Switzerland
Massive turnaround in the one news poll for Labour and Shearer and a big hit for National which means Shearers showing what he can do, hes the right leader for Labour
I noted, in the last speech of his I heard on the radio, that he was no longer hesitating on hitting the decisive word in the sentence and was showing more conviction. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ may be a cliche, but there is some merit in that statement. Whether it will be enough is another matter ..
Yeah you have to give David Shearer a couple of brownie points when His current speech making is compared with His earlier efforts,
What i perceived from His ummm aaaah delivery’s after His ascension to the position of leader was that He was ‘self editing’, stopping mid-sentence to seek a ‘better’ word to use in the point He was making,
Obviously the media trainers have been at work and to a large extent corrected this bad habit, now all’s we need do is convince His advisers that the only required reading for the leader of the Labour Party is ‘Labour during the Norman Kirk years’ and we might actually get some decent policy from that Party which addresses the ‘bread and butter’ issues of those in our society that survive on the least amount of income…
Shearer just needs a little more time (like maybe when it comes to the election debates with John Key) to really show the people of NZ what hes made of 🙂
Probably won’t matter, Key will likely have banned TV and newspapers by then. Or hopefully people will awake and see the conman Key for what he is, all those used car sales types seem to have free-flowing bullshit in abundance.
[lprent: But Santi got banned until after the next election. I guess there could be a resumption of the strange RWNJ penis extender technique that involves getting banned from TS? Young shrivelled bucks do some really stupid things in the pursuit of coups. ]
This weekend 24 US embassies closed their doors because there was believable information that they were in eminent danger from a terrorist attack.
Problem is that this information seems to have sprung from an unlikely source. The mst important Qaeda leader going by the name of Ayman al Zawahiri ! Here is the link to the NZ News Website where I found this.
The same leader also alleged that the coup against Mursi the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood president was engineered by the US on the 3 August. Here is the link to the Guardian article.
Problem is that according to the MSM this Al Qaeda leader was killed during a drone attack on 9/12 2012.
See why I’m having trouble with these eminent terror attack announcements?
OOPPSS. Or it seems that Prism can speak to those who have died, Can they ask my Mother where she hid the recipes for the tiny cakes, that go with a cup of tea.
Um… It’s dudette for you and try this and know that reading is what I do very well but you are right that was the wrong article to link to as it didn’t detail the entire history of Zawahiri’s many reported deaths.
The trouble with following Shearer’s delivery to the media etc with bated breath is that once again it’s pinning hopes on getting any Labour government in, as if that is all there is to be concerned about.
What we are already getting is just more bene bashing coming from the left. In government it would be more self-satisfied ‘We’re running the country right and keeping it on an even keel’ stuff, and being happy with showing positive trends in the measurements of policies set in place with right wing advantages.
I was looking at a 2005 NZ Listener and the list of top 50 powerful people. Cullen was near the top, and mentioned was his 67c ‘chewing gum’ tax cut. He and Helen Clark didn’t have enough nous to institute something like sliding inflation indices on tax levels. When do the good people who are not comfortably off, get considered. Answer not often.
Such complacency about Labour’s vulnerable constituents will continue going by Shearer’s comments about the guy on the roof, and there must be more in the pot. In a previous Labour government Trevor Mallard went round slashing small rural schools and then that was followed by cuts to bus transport by him or the next lot and so on. It’s just a progression of lost services and rights and lost economic conditions and as confusing as that TV series Lost where everything seemed fluid and uncertain.
The program is run jointly with other agencies including Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate, and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau.
Greenwald said low level analysts can via systems like XKeyscore “listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst.”
And of course no need to worry in the slightest about sharing said transcripts with a joint agency. Or its head.
I didn’t think much of it and went about my merry way roaming the net. Amongst my first visits after I installed the plug in was the daily blog and to my surprise the Pink Floyd song “The dark side of the moon” the alert for NSA monitoring started to play!
I closed the page and went to the Standard blog where again the song started to play.
I again closed the page and this time I opened the Kiwiblog page and the Whaleoil page both pages opened without any problems and no dark side of the moon!
The Daily Blog and The Standard are two “left” wing blogs. The Standard is the third biggest blog in New Zealand for those of you who don’t know it and the Daily Blog is a blog run by prominent activist and journalist Martyn Bradbury to which a whole slew of left wing journalists and writers contribute.
Kiwiblog and Whaleoil are the two biggest blogs in New Zealand and both are closely aligned with the National party and aligned with the right wing.
Which begs the question: Are the Standard and the Daily blog monitored by the NSA and if so why?
Actually, I have to agree with TheConformist here. The code of the program isn’t reliable ie it doesn’t perform the task it says it’s meant to. There is a clear distinction between your computer and a website hosted elsewhere. It appears that you’re trying to deter people from viewing the two main leftwing blogs in New Zealand.
@travellerev: Interesting. Our similar topic posts crossed. Try opening the site I posted below: PACC PAMS 13 even if just for the love of Pink Floyd….
@David H on thread below, this site tries to install something on your computer, so don’t click through. A friend used my computer to find information about countries attending the conference and must have run the installation – I’m running my malware now. However, it looks like the site is down now.
The way the NSA do their monitoring (sweeping up full copies of internet traffic from fibre optic junctions) should be completely invisible to the end user machine.
Yes.
But I was thinking about the low-level wannabe types playing spy games rather than the NSA
The site looks like a twelve-year old group of boys playing around with WordPress rather than a US or NZ Defence Force production. Incongruous with an international conference for army chiefs.
Surely there should be delays that would indicate interference. Any telecommunications service that nows its latency should be able to detect such interference?
It takes a while for the Addon to sound the alerts when you open a page indicating it is interacting with something before it decides there is the possibility of NSA monitoring. For those of you curious about the addon here is the link for you to try it out yourself.
If you want to disable it again go to your addons under the tools dropdown menu and click disable.
Here is the link to the code of the addon for those of you so inclined and by invitation of the author of the addon Justin Binder. Seems fair to me.
It should but is it? Or is the addon reacting to something else on the main servers but before you go into that let me confess to you that with regards to software, code and other things that go bing in computers I am completely blond! (Although I did learn to put them together when I was a couple of decennia younger)
All I did was convey what happened. I have no opinion on what happened other than that we are all monitored (not necessarily in a personal way but more in a “lets get all the info and store it somewhere until someone becomes troublesome and we need to deal to that person” kind of way) and have been as a matter of course for years and that all they try to do now is to make it lawful so that they can act when needed within a legal framework so that the dotcoms of this world have no legal recourse anymore.
History reveals that most governments are so inclined and even more so in uncertain economic times and the internet is simply to good an opportunity to waste! It’s nothing personal, it’s just business as usual.
travellerev .. using your link, have a look at the comments on the app.
It is using sites that are publicly named as being monitored by Prism et al … still interesting in terms of the left wing blogs, but it is supposed to be for fun ….
Here for you from your link …
by Ken Saunders on June 17, 2013 · permalink
If you are thinking about using this add-on, keep these things in mind.
1) It’s for fun, and not some sort of magical NSA/Prism blocking add-on.
2) Purchase Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album if you want to pause, mute, etc, the songs.
3) Here’s a list of the companies, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040991/report-nsa-prism-program-spied-on-americans-emails-searches.html
4) Firefox button > Add-ons > Extensions > Dark Side Of The Prism > Disable, disables this add-on or you can choose Remove.
This is a brilliant and funny add-on!Thanks for developing it.
First of all I stated that this is just a claim made. I tried it out on a lot of sites though and it seems pretty consistent. And no it is not an add on to block NSA monitoring and neither does it purport to be all accurate either. Funny though how it sounded when accessing two left wing blogs in far away New Zealand and not Kiwiblog or Whaleoil two rightwing blogs closely aligned to National. It doesn’t sound with newspapers but it did sound on Max Keiser’s blog who is a fervent anti-banker RT TV Host.
It didn’t sound with Veterans today but it did sound when I opened the Global research site dedicated to studying globalism and the power elite. It also sounded when I opened Washington’s blog but not when I opened Zero hedge blog.
The fact that this application didn’t ‘alert’ when you visited Kiwiblog and Whaleoil is evidence that it wouldn’t be picking up NSA monitored sites. If I was an intelligence operative I would be trying to garner information from popular sites to ascertain what the mood of the politicised section of a country is. Kiwiblog and Whaleoil are the two most popular political blogs in the country. They would be prime targets for gathering intelliegence on NZ.
Gosman I’ve been reading the tripe you post for a while now and I can say with the utmost confidence that there is no chance of you ever doing anything involving intelligence.
“It is using sites that are publicly named as being monitored by Prism et al”
A link to that list of publicly named sites would be nice. I’m sure Martin Bradbury and Iprent would be delighted to know they are on a public list of Prism monitored sites!
Nope no list other than a few companies who are known to cooperate with the Prism program. Daily blog, the Standard, Kiwiblog, Whaleoil are all blogs based on wordpress blogging software but some of them are tagged ad someof them are not. Still does not explain why the two left wing blogs were singled out by the add on while the two right wing ones were not.
I would have thought the answer to your question was pretty obvious.
People who are concerned about the welfare of people (as opposed to the economic interests of the very wealthy) are now considered traitors to the interests that spy networks are working for.
This is very clear given the official reaction to Mr Snowden’s actions.
Which begs the question: Are the Standard and the Daily blog monitored by the NSA and if so why?
Maybe
For a laugh (its why I come here)
[lprent: I just assume that the site is monitored by someone(s). What I’m interested in is making it hard for material from the site to be able to be used in anything legal without requiring the means to be disclosed (take some time and think the logic through). ]
The NZDF is hosting the PACC PAM (?) conference in Auckland this year.
Searching for which countries belong to this group, and who will be attending – results in not a lot on Google. Although PACC PAM, links back to the US Defence Force via a couple of other organisations.
However, this bizarre site PACC PAMS 13 – Army Conference Agenda comes up in regards to the NZ conference this year. Has random NZ photos and strange layout. Looks like a site from a bad 70s spy movie, and heads up, you will get a couple of automatic messages if you click through.
A friend wanted to use my computer to find out the list of countries, and is Google-challenged. They must have clicked through the installation prompt – will run my malware programs to double check.
The rest of the site – which I will not return to after deleting whatever has been loaded – is pictures of the skytower, NZ currency, people at a restaurant etc. Just checked if the installation message comes up for me – and the site is now down.
1) Alanz …4 August 5.57pm (under “Friday Document Dump” August 2nd)…Stated i)that the media should keep digging because there are 3 key, pivotal issues not covered in the document dump.ii) Also there are nationally grave matters not yet public …
2) exitlane… 3 August 4.47pm ( under “Andrea Vance’s Privacy Breach” August 3rd)…. Stated that under the GCSB ( refs. Snowden / “NZL” docs / re Xkeystore ) phone calls and email content anywhere can be accessed with a few keystrokes without a warrant….Hence John Key would have known everything about Dunne and Vance even without the help of Parliamentary services !!!!…..sooner Dunne realises that this and what he is thinking of voting for are tied up inextricably ,the better)
My Question:
Is Dunne complicit in a cover up ….when Key had everything already?…..Does Dunne know this?….If so , Dunne’s squealing about Parliamentary breaches of his privacy are rather spurious…and it makes him a lot more complicit and tricky in the implementation of the GCSB bill than what many thought
Of course he is. Because he knows Key has seen all the emails. Key has him over a barrel. Jesus, have we ever had such a nasty piece of work for a prime-minister. It also shows Dunne is weak as dishwater.
@ Anne…yes but Dunne seems to be trying to keep the two issues separate …and it is also the case in the media ….ie Parliament breaches are being kept separate from GCSB breaches on privacy( ie John Key having access to the emails already via GCSB.) It is as if they want to keep the bigger picture of the GCSB and what it is doing under the carpet.
…..So Dunne is ‘outraged’ by Parliamentary services and one head has rolled there….But Dunne also wants to vote for the GCSB bill when he knows the bigger picture is that the Prime Minister had all this information independently via GCSB……( I feel sorry for the guy that got rolled unnecessarily)
And whereas before I just thought Dunne was being blackmailed and felt a wee bit sorry for him…..now I think he is a tricky Dicky
Probably everyone on this site knows this already…but I have just realised this could be the case….it sort of makes the outrage at the illegal spying on the 88 rather redundant….. everyone has been spied on…in which case why isnt the media saying so?…and why did the guy in Parliament services fall on his sword?
2. To have responded once the report was released.
Had Vance done 2. she would have implicated Dunne because in those emails Dunne has to have shot himself in the foot. Dunne must be feeling happy with himself that the chance of Vance releasing his emails is now remote as she would be branded a hypocrite if she did.
@ KJT…..Yes but did Key get it via Parliamentary services or independently via the GCSB…..even before a law has been passed ( with Dunne’s help) making it legal?
How the rich countries can screw the poor ones. Many consulates in Brit are being ordered to close their bank accounts under regulations to control money laundering. This comes from high law instigated by some high-minded countries with impeccable financial trading. Some countries are having difficulty finding ways to trade internationally.
I remember hearing a story about Rwanda I think, being left on the outer when the world financial system refused them membership. They determined to conduct some business in cash, one of their dignitaries took off from home with a caseful, and I don’t know if that transaction was ever completed, but I heard that the dignitary settled in I think France. Probably opened a consulate there in his home. So some good may have come out of the move, who knows. Nothing is straightforward in politics and finance.
Years ago, in Reagan’s time there was a bank that dealt illegally in funds connected with drug running venture capital, and though this was known it was allowed to remain in business, and was used to pay for arms used in some overseas destabilising action. Standards of probity have to be seen to remain in place, so that the exception can prove the rule I imagine. Some whistle blowing investigative journalist found out about it. Otherwise we would never have known, and probably most don’t anyway. I just was curious to check out a second hand book. If from now on there aren’t any accessible documents in hard copy extant, that will happen less.
Banking/debt based money supply/transaction systems are being used as a way to control and contain entire countries. If you are in the “in crowd” good for you, you get privileged access to these systems and your country (and government) can continue to survive; if you are not – then all bets are off the table, and if it means that tens of millions of your people have to suffer economic deprivation and hunger in the process, ah well too bad.
I was trying to get details on Steffan Browning , Greens who made a good point this morning that NZ is too dependent on one business type – ie dairy.
And from google going through Kiwiblog I got a message that – something to the server chain is incomplete and something is not registered and do I accept and I said no. Don’t know what that was about. Sounds like the vehicle needs its spark plugs cleaned!
Gleaned from Radionz Rural and Business News headings:
MPI under-staffed to cope with China trade
The Ministry for Primary Industries admitted that despite a tripling in New Zealand’s trade with China over the past five years, it did not have anywhere near enough staff in the ministry nor in China to cope with that escalating trade relationship.
Online tool to map stock theft
Farmers who have lost stock to rustlers have a new way of hitting back at them.
Signs of resistance to varroa bee mite treatments – assoc
The National Beekeepers Association says the battle against the varroa mite may cost almost $1 billion over the next three decades.
Chorus gets further debt facility
Chorus has secured further debt facilities, which the company says will support its funding needs to rollout of the ultra fast broadband over the next six years.
Hills Flooring in liquidation
Family-owned carpet retailer Hills Flooring is in liquidation, blaming the failure of the construction company Mainzeal and the tough retail market.
These are matters that should have oversight by ordinary NZs.
* Hills Flooring – established NZ company being lost – why?
* Chorus – is an arm of Telecom isn’t it? And its got further debt facility – from whom and why? Was that debt facility available to other contenders?
* Varroa bee mite – Bees and beekeepers – are they getting proper support and tax incentives and grants to pay for the costs of this terrible outcome of increased import risks without the concomitant spending on increased biosecurity?
* Help for farmers to combat stock theft – sounds good. The rural side, apart just from dairy, need support through proper services from government.
* MPI being understaffed to meet the needs that increased trade with Asia and China brings is just another of NZs failures to follow through on initiatives and new policies which need extra work, with increased money spent on them. This is to ensure that the money that is hoped to be made, and the business and contacts generated, are properly handled and treasured.
And that involves more than giving fast track visas to big spenders from Asian countries to come here and. hopefully, offload. That might be more profitable than before if countries trying to appear highly principled financially shut down on bank accounts for possibly dodgy dealers. Just the thing for a fresh-faced keen little country like us. We could welcome these poor refugees from the nasty big wide world financial system!
* Embassy accounts being closed by HSBC bank
HSBC, the biggest bank in Britain is reported to have given dozens of diplomatic missions in London 60 days to move their accounts elsewhere.
Debt ridden, and sabotaged primary sector – Should help bring NZ to its knees in short time,
Swelling national debt, private debt, spiraling living costs , decreasing incomes!, government books loaded with off balance sheet derivatives, just like the banks, all of them!
Nah she’s going sweet mate, the recovery is really just about to kick!
And now they are spinning spinning spinning through this fabulous land!!!
You have to wonder if the Slippery little Shyster we have as Prime Minister considers us all to be just plain dumb,
His claim now is that He did not know until Friday that the Dunne/Vance emails had been handed over to His Office/the Henry Inquiry from Parliamentary Services/the IT ‘contractor’ just takes spin to a whole new level,
The Prime Minister seems here to be attempting to dodge charges from the Opposition in the House that He the Prime Minister has mislead the Parliament,
Does the Slippery little Shyster live in some form of airless bubble,along with all of His executive officials occupying their own secular bubbles, under a rock each in other words miles apart in a vast desert without the communications of this modern world to disturb their meditations,
This claim from the Prime Minister is simply one serious piece of bullshit too far, at a time when the Henry Inquiry, the Chief executive of the Prime Minister’s own office, and the Prime Ministers own Chief of Staff all KNEW of the emails and KNEW that the emails had been obtained from Parliamentary Services/the IT ‘contractor’ this Prime Minister wishes us all to believe he knew nothing,
Now that is the Sergeant Shultz defence if i ever heard it, i know nothing nothing you hear, the contention that He, the Prime Minister only found out about the Dunne/Vance emails would have us believe that the document dump on Friday from the Prime Ministers own office of over 100 pages was all material that He had never once read,
Dodge,duck,dive, what the Prime Minister really ‘means’ is not that He had not the slightest notion until Friday that the Dunne/Vance emails had been released to the Henry Inquiry/Office of the Prime Minister, what He really ‘means’ is that he found out on the Friday that ‘we’ knew that He had reached the emails of Dunne/Vance and were discussing this openly here at the Standard on the Thursday night befor the document dump occurred from His office on the Friday,
it is not the prime minister’s chief executive of the prime ministers office that should be offering to resign here, there’s something rotten right at the core of this particular apple and it is the Prime Minister exhibiting all those signs of rot, it is Him who should be offering the resignation…
Just say what you mean instead of beating around the bush bad12. John Key has lied! His office, namely the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, has instructed Parliamentary Service to intercept three moths worth of communications between a journalist, Andrea Vance, and a Minister of the Crown, Peter Dunce. It is likely that this “contractor” supposedly employed by Parliamentary Service is actually the GCSB who was instructed by no other that John Key himself.
Despite that blatant breach of privacy, which has resulted in him resigning his Ministerial portfolios, Peter Dunce is going to support a bill that legalizes similar surveillance on us all. However, he will not allow his communications in this instance to be released to the public. 2+2 really does equal 4. What is the bouffant hiding? It is likely only his own scalp. Such is the way of politicians I suppose.
Conveniently for John Key there is now a more major story to take the attention off his administration. The Prime Minister can now appear the hero, admonishing Fonterra for not informing the public that their dairy supplies could be contaminated with BOTULISM. A delay that has only taken + 15 months to occur. Saved by the bell I suppose from some negative publicity…some negative spying allegations. Who really cares that their privacy now means nothing and that the scientist are also scratching their heads about how exactly this latest (convenient) sideshow can be real?
How much is it really costing New Zealand to protect John Keys credibility I wonder?
LOLZ, me beat around the bush, now that is funny, i think that you are wrong when you posit that the ‘IT contractor’ is likely to be the GCSB,
There is a distinction between the two arms of intelligence,(hah intelligence here being an oxymoron in terminology), what i have is the sneaking suspicion that this ‘contractor’ to Parliamentary Services is simply a front company for the SIS,
As far as i can ascertain it is the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Chief Executive Andrew Kibblewhite who is probably carrying less guilt in the whole process of the initial obtaining of the Dunne/Vance phone/email records and Kibblewhite is simply being used as a convenient excuse, the toilet if you will, down which the Prime Minister is attempting to flush His knowledge of the illegally gained phone/email records,
It appears from what is known that Eaggleson, the Prime Ministers chief of Staff was the point man fronting the Parliamentary Service on behalf of the Prime Minister, and if threats were made in order to force Parliamentary Services to hand over anything, then Eaggleson would have been issuing such threats,
Did Andrew Kibblewhite know the full extent of the illegal information gathering occurring on behalf of the Henry Inquiry, you bet, along with everyone else on the Beehives 9th floor obviously including Eaggleson who strong armed Parliamentary Services into agreeing to the release,
Why if it is in fact the SIS acting in drag as a private IT contractor to Parliamentary Services go to all the trouble of strong-arming Parliamentary Services into ‘releasing’ the Dunne/Vance phone/email records???,
To provide a layer of protection to the 9th floor of the Beehive, the Prime Ministers Office, should the s**t, as it did, get caught in the ventilation system and the smell get spread far and wide, and, should my ‘sneaking suspicion’ that the Parliamentary Services ‘IT contractor’ is the SIS using a private company as a ‘front’ to monitor the communications into and out of the Parliaments precinct Parliamentary Services were to be shouldered with the blame creating a smokescreen within the furore where the ‘IT contractors’ actions were minimalized thus attracting scant attention,
i doubt Dunne, who’s every word must be suspect in this whole sordid little tale will appear befor the Privileges Committee hearing later this month and further doubt that any one of substance from the Prime Ministers office will either,
The Prime Minister suggesting that no-one, not Kibblewhite, not Eaggleson, who obviously had full knowledge of the email data, informed Him of this beggars belief and is simply one large slab of bullshit to far from the ever Slippery Prime Minister…
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New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has described Labour's original COVID-19 commercial rent dispute proposal as "poorly targeted". Justice Minister Andrew Little hasannounced a temporary law changeto force commercial landlords and renters to consider COVID-19 in disputes over rent issues, almost two months after the Government first floated the idea. But ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First New Zealand First acknowledges that some small businesses have been struggling to meet fixed costs due to the loss of revenue by COVID-19. We also know some businesses are at greater risk of insolvency when they cannot come to a reasonable ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First New Zealand First is disappointed that the removal of the spousal deductions has had to be delayed by the Ministry fo Social Development, due to COVID19 workload pressures. “New Zealand First has always stood for fairness when it comes to superannuation ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First On the steps of Parliament today the Leader of New Zealand First, Rt Hon Winston Peters received a petition from registered nurse Anna Maria Coervers, requesting an amendment to the Protection for First Responders Bill which will ensure the legislation also include registered ...
It's been a busy seven days as we start to rebuild New Zealand together. From delivering extra support for small businesses, to investing in our artists and arts organisations, to cutting red tape on home DIY projects, we're rolling out our plan to get the economy and New Zealand moving ...
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters says alert level 2 restrictions have to be discussed during today's Cabinet meeting. Thousands gathered across the country, including at Parliament, yesterday forBlack Lives Matter marcheswhere social distancing and mass gathering rules were flouted. Mr Peters said the breaching of Alert Level 2 rules at ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of State Owned Enterprises KiwiRail’s Northland rail upgrade steps up another gear today and will help Northland recover from the impacts of COVID-19, State Owned Enterprises Minister Winston Peters says. The Government is investing $204.5 million through the Provincial Growth Fund to ...
“Today and every day we stand in solidarity with George Floyd’s family, friends and community who feel pain and fear about his untimely death at the hands of Minneapolis police”, said Green Party Co-leader and Māori Development spokesperson Marama Davidson. ...
Fletcher Tabuteau, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Hon Eugenie Sage, Minister of Conservation The West Coast forests of Mount Te Kinga at Kotuku Whakaoho/Lake Brunner are the latest predator free project to receive Government funding, announced Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage and Under Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher ...
The Green Party says major freshwater reforms announced today provide the strongest ever protections of our waterways, to help ensure the next generation can swim in the rivers of Aotearoa. ...
The Green Party has begun the process for a Select Committee inquiry into student accommodation, which has been exposed during COVID-19 as an under-regulated sector that straddles students with unfair debt. ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Hon Megan Woods, Minister of Research, Science and Innovation Hon Dr David Clark, Minister of Health Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters, Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods, and Health Minister David Clark today announced a COVID-19 vaccine strategy, ...
Budget 2020 is about rebuilding together, supporting jobs, getting business moving and the books back into the black. It’s an integral part of our COVID-19 economic response, and our plan to grow our economy and get New Zealand moving again.Here’s a quick look at the five top things you ...
The Green Party is pleased to reveal its candidate list for the upcoming election. With a mix of familiar faces and fresh new talent, this exceptional group of candidates are ready to lead the Greens back into Government. ...
The Coalition Government has approved $206 million in essential upgrades at Ōhakea Air Base. Defence Minister Ron Mark said the money would be spent on improving old infrastructure. He said safety issues would be addressed, as well as upgrades to taxiways, accommodation and fresh, storm and waste water systems. "This ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Leader of New Zealand First “I am not persisting with this case just for myself, but for all people who have had their privacy breached. Privacy of information is a cornerstone of our country’s democracy. Without it our society truly faces a bleak future. We now ...
Forestry Minister Shane Jones has introduced a Bill to Parliament that he says will "force more transparency, integrity and respect" for the domestic wood-processing sector through the registration of log traders and practice standards. The Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill had its first reading in ...
Green MP Golriz Ghahraman is joining over 300 lawmakers from around the world in calling on the big banks and the IMF to forgive the debt of developing countries, in the wake of the COVID crisis. ...
Extra 40,000 businesses to be eligible for wage subsidy extension Small business cashflow support application period extended The Government is today announcing further support for businesses that continue to be affected by the global COVID-19 pandemic, as the broader economy becomes one of the most open in the world following ...
The Coalition Government has confirmed five Lockheed Martin C-130J-30 Super Hercules transport aircraft will be purchased to replace the existing fleet, Defence Minister Ron Mark announced today. “Last year, Cabinet selected these aircraft as the preferred option to replace the current Hercules fleet. Procurement of the Super Hercules has been ...
New public housing that will save tenants money in energy bills, and provide warmer, healthier and more comfortable homes, is setting the standard for the Government’s future public housing programme, Housing Minister Megan Woods said. Dr Woods opened the new Kāinga Ora – Homes and Communities complex, which has a ...
The Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage is celebrating World Environment Day with an announcement of a major step towards Wairarapa Moana being recognised as an internationally significant wetland. “Wairarapa Moana is an ecosystem of 10,000 hectares of wetland and open water that provides a home for indigenous fish, birds and ...
A new-look Police graduation ceremony to take account of COVID19 health rules has marked the completion of training for 57 new constables. Police Minister Stuart Nash attended this afternoon's ceremony, where officers of Recruit Wing 337 were formally sworn in at the Royal New Zealand Police College without the normal support of ...
Mobile traders and truck shops must adhere to responsible lending requirements Interest rate cap on high-cost loans Lenders prohibited from offering further credit to an applicant who has taken two high-cost loans in the past 90 days The Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Kris Faafoi, has signalled an end ...
94% of firms say wage subsidy had positive impact on cashflow 62% of firms say support helped to manage non-wage costs like rent A survey of business that have received the Government’s wage subsidy show it has played a significant role in saving jobs, and freed up cash flow to ...
New legislation introduced to Parliament today will support growth and assist businesses on the road to economic recovery, said Revenue Minister Stuart Nash. “The Taxation (Annual Rates for 2020-21, Feasibility Expenditure, and Remedial Matters) Bill proposes that businesses can get tax deductions for ‘feasibility expenditure’ on new investments,” said Mr ...
Sport and Recreation Minister Grant Robertson has welcomed the first release of funds from the $265 million Sport Recovery Package announced as part of Budget 2020. Sport NZ has announced that $4.6 million in funding will go to the Wellington Phoenix, NZ Warriors, Super Rugby teams and the ANZ Premiership ...
An iconic New Zealand tourism attraction and the country’s 31 Regional Tourism Organisations are the first recipients of support from the $400 million Tourism Sector Recovery Plan, to help position the sector for recovery from COVID-19, Tourism Minister Kelvin Davis announced today. The plan includes a Strategic Tourism Assets Protection ...
The Government will legislate to ensure businesses that suffered as a result of the COVID-19 response will get help to resolve disputes over commercial rent issues, Justice Minister Andrew Little announced today. A temporary amendment to the Property Law Act will insert a clause in commercial leases requiring a fair ...
The Minister for Small Business says new data from Xero highlights the urgency of prompt payment practices to small and medium enterprises as we move into economic recovery. Last month Government ministers wrote to significant private enterprises and the banking industry to request they join efforts by government agencies to ...
Young people in Waikato will be the first to have free access to period products in schools in another step to support children and young people in poverty,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said. During term 3, the Ministry of Education will begin providing free period products to schools following the ...
The Minister of Police Stuart Nash has issued the following statement in response to charges filed against three Police officers this morning in the New Plymouth District Court. “Any incident involving a loss of life in Police custody is taken very seriously. The charges today reflect the gravity of the ...
$196 million for Crown Research Institutes $150 million for R&D loan scheme $33 million for Māori research and development opportunities $12 million for the Nationally Significant Collections and Databases $10 million to help maintain in-house capability at Callaghan Innovation New Zealand’s entrepreneurs, innovators and crown researchers will benefit from a ...
Further temporary changes to NCEA and University Entrance (UE) will support senior secondary school students whose teaching and learning have been disrupted by COVID-19. “The wellbeing of students and teachers is a priority. As we are all aware, COVID-19 has created massive disruption to the school system, and the Government ...
Minister for Racing Winston Peters today announced that the terms for the directors of the Racing Industry Transition Agency (RITA) have been extended to 30 June 2021. Due to the COVID-19 crisis the transition period has been extended to ensure that the Racing Industry Bill can complete its progress through ...
The deadline for landlords to include detailed information in their tenancy agreements about how their property meets the Healthy Homes Standards, so tenants can see the home they are renting is compliant, has been extended from 1 July 2020 to 1 December 2020. The Healthy Homes Standards became law on 1 July 2019. The Standards are ...
Justice Minister Andrew Little today announced details of further appointments to the Criminal Cases Review Commission. “I am pleased to announce Paula Rose QSO OStJ as Deputy Chief Commissioner for a term of five years commencing on 15 June 2020,” said Andrew Little. “I am also pleased to announce the ...
The Targeted Training and Apprenticeships Fund (TTAF) will pay costs of learners of all ages to undertake vocational education and training The fund will target support for areas of study and training that will give learners better employment prospects as New Zealand recovers from COVID-19 Apprentices working in all industries ...
The Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) will finally start to cut New Zealand’s greenhouse gas pollution as it was originally intended to, because of changes announced today by the Minister for Climate Change, James Shaw. The changes include a limit on the total emissions allowed within the ETS, rules to ensure ...
Minister for Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio says the Queen’s Birthday 2020 Honours List provides an abundance of examples that Pacific people’s leadership capability is unquestionable in Aotearoa. “The work and the individuals we acknowledge this year highlights the kind of visionary examples and dedicated community leadership that we need ...
The Government is backing a new $27 million project aimed at boosting sustainable horticulture production and New Zealand’s COVID-19 recovery efforts, says Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor. “Our horticulture sector has long been one of New Zealand’s export star performers, contributing around $6 billion a year to our economy. During and ...
Applications have opened for 2021 Ngā Karahipi Uru Rākau – Forestry Scholarships, which will support more Māori and women to pursue careers in forestry science, says Forestry Minister Shane Jones. “I’m delighted Te Uru Rākau is offering Ngā Karahipi Uru Rākau – Forestry Scholarships for the third year running. These ...
The Queen’s Birthday 2020 Honours List once again highlights the dedication by many to looking after our native plants and wildlife, including incredible work to restore the populations of critically endangered birds says Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage. Anne Richardson of Hororata has been made an Officer of the New ...
The Government will invest $10 million from the One Billion Trees Fund for large-scale planting to provide jobs in communities and improve the environment, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor and Forestry Minister Shane Jones have announced. New, more flexible funding criteria for applications will help up to 10 catchment groups plant ...
Organisations that support women are invited to apply to a new $1,000,000 fund as part of the Government’s COVID-19 response. “We know women, and organisations that support women, have been affected by COVID-19. This new money will ensure funding for groups that support women and women’s rights,” said Minister for ...
Healthier waterways are front and centre in a new project involving more than 300 King Country sheep, beef and dairy farmers. The Government is investing $844,000 in King Country River Care, a group that helps farmers to lift freshwater quality and farming practice, Agriculture Minister Damien O’Connor announced today. “Yesterday ...
A major funding package for libraries will allow them to play a far greater role in supporting their communities and people seeking jobs as part of the economic recovery from COVID-19. “Budget 2020 contains over $60 million of funding to protect library services and to protect jobs,” says Internal Affairs ...
A jobseekers programme for the creative sector and four new funds have been set up by the Government to help our arts and music industry recover from the blow of COVID-19. Thousands of jobs will be supported through today’s $175 million package in a crucial economic boost to support the ...
Minister for Veterans Ron Mark has welcomed the First Reading of a Bill that will make legislative changes to further improve the veterans’ support system. The Veterans’ Support Amendment Bill No 2, which will amend the Veterans’ Support Act 2014, passed First Reading today. The bill addresses a number of ...
Views sought on Order in Council to help fast track the reinstatement of the Christ Church Cathedral The Associate Minister for Greater Christchurch Regeneration, Hon Poto Williams, will be seeking public written comment, following Cabinet approving the drafting of an Order in Council aimed at fast-tracking the reinstatement of the ...
The law setting out New Zealanders’ basic civil and human rights is today one step towards being strengthened following the first reading of a Bill that requires Parliament to take action if a court says a statute undermines those rights. At present, a senior court can issue a ‘declaration of ...
Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters today reiterated the deep concern of the New Zealand Government following confirmation by China’s National People’s Congress of national security legislation relating to Hong Kong. “New Zealand shares the international community’s significant and long-standing stake in Hong Kong’s prosperity and stability,” Mr Peters said. “New Zealand ...
Thousands of artists and creatives at hundreds of cultural and heritage organisations have been given much-needed support to recover from the impact of COVID-19, Prime Minister and Minister for Arts, Culture and Heritage Jacinda Ardern announced today. “The cultural sector was amongst the worst hit by the global pandemic,” Jacinda ...
Key New Zealand assets will be better protected from being sold to overseas owners in a way contrary to the national interest, with the passage of the Overseas Investment (Urgent Measures) Bill. The Bill, which passed its third reading in Parliament today, also cuts unnecessary red tape to help attract ...
Setting higher health standards at swimming spots Requiring urban waterways to be cleaned up and new protections for urban streams Putting controls on higher-risk farm practices such as winter grazing and feed lots Setting stricter controls on nitrogen pollution and new bottom lines on other measures of waterway health Ensuring ...
The Government is on the verge of reaching its target of state sector boards and committees made up of at least 50 percent women, says Minister for Women Julie Anne Genter and Minister for Ethnic Communities Jenny Salesa. For the first time, the Government stocktake measures the number of Māori, ...
The Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister and Broadcasting, Communications and Digital Media Minister, Kris Faafoi, has today announced the appointment of Tristan Gilbertson as the new Telecommunications Commissioner and member of the Commerce Commission. “Mr Gilbertson has considerable experience in the telecommunications industry and a strong reputation amongst his peers,” ...
Throughout Anglo colonial states there is a constant habit of defining people who aren’t white as a problem, writes Aaron Smale in this personal essay. It was a balmy summer evening in the capital and cops were standing over a young brown man. I was walking down Courtenay Place on ...
"The countdown clock ticks 2, then 1, then the prime minister raises her drink": dystopia, by Ōtautahi writer Laura Borrowdale. You stand in the centre of the room, and around you, the guests seem to swirl and blend into one. There’s a mouth, gaping and red, filled with laughter. A ...
Martin Luther King Jr said in 1963: “America has given the Black people a bad cheque, a cheque which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds’." Six generations of egregious police violence later, the sentiment out of which those bad cheques were born could be shifting. In the wake of egregious police violence, ...
WATCH: In a candid interview on Sky Sport, Dame Susan Devoy talks on her concern for rising sports stars, the state of NZ squash, and the spectre of racism. Dame Susan Devoy is proudly still “a little terrier who fights for the underdog”. “I have been doing it all my life and ...
Of the huge funding boost coming for early childhood education, Playcentre has been left with just the crumbs, writes Kate Barber. Amidst all the celebration of the $430m funding boost for early childhood education (ECE) announced in this year’s budget, little attention was paid to the plight of Playcentre. The ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vikrant Minhas, PhD candidate, University of Adelaide Although bacteria are single-celled and microscopically small, they still need energy to survive, just like us. One of the most efficient ways of acquiring energy for bacteria is through sweet, soluble carbohydrates: sugars. In fact, ...
PACIFIC PANDEMIC DIARY:By David Robie Three cartoonists had especially poignant takes on the tragic and toxic political aftermath of martyr George Floyd’s brutal killing under the knee of a white American policeman in Minneapolis last week. The Boston Globe’s Christopher Weyant featured a split frame contrasting a red-capped “Make ...
Are central bankers jealous that epidemiologists are the rock stars of the current crisis?There is talk that both the British and New Zealand central banks might institute negative interest rates as part of the policy response to the Covid shock. While Sweden’s central bank ended its five year experiment ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Monika Sarder, Senior Strategic Analyst, Monash University Algorithmic decision-making has enormous potential to do good. From identifying priority areas for first response after an earthquake hits, to identifying those at risk of COVID-19 within minutes, their application has proven hugely beneficial. But ...
LISTEN: This week's Extra Time podcast discusses racism in sport and the role of athletes and organisations in making a stand for good. Former Silver Fern and Black Fern Louisa Wall believes today's sports stars must have a social conscience and stand up against discrimination and divisiveness. Sport and politics, once ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Emma Thomas, Associate professor, Flinders University We have seen ten days of protests in the United States over the death of George Floyd. While thousands of people have gathered to express their outrage peacefully, some demonstrations have been marred by vandalism and ...
40 percent of millennials have one, and an increasing number of GenXers and Baby Boomers do too. Two Cents' Worth delves into the world of side hustles. ...
Auckland writer Caroline Barron has a terrific book out today called Ripiro Beach: A Memoir of Life After Near Death. Here, she writes about the memoirs that have been a balm, a lesson, or both. Throughout my life, I’ve sought solace between the covers of books, particularly memoirs. There, I’ve learnt ...
An exclusive interview with Steve McSteverson about his traumatic and tragic ordeal this week.Many New Zealanders are struggling with the news that a children’s book not commissioned or authorised by Jacinda Ardern was advertised in a newsletter for children’s books. This horrific attack on New Zealanders whose ears are permanently ...
Air New Zealand staff are dismayed and angered at the company’s announcement to cut a further $150 million from their wage bill. On Friday, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, Greg Foran, made the announcement to employees, who are still ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dr. Bodean Hedwards, Lecturer, Monash University This week the leaders of India and Australia reaffirmed their mutual interest in closer diplomatic and economic ties. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison during their long-delayed Thursday “virtual summit”: ...
The Herald reported this morning that MediaWorks was on the verge of selling its TV assets to US TV giant Discovery – but an internal email and senior source suggest the story may have been premature.A senior MediaWorks source has emphatically denied a report in the NZ Herald that a ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Gery Karantzas, Associate professor in Social Psychology / Relationship Science, Deakin University Life in lockdown has been tough on many relationships. But negotiating the transition back to “normal” as restrictions continue to lift could also be a challenge for couples. So what ...
A slight bounce in the economy is brightening the outlook as the country heads into the winter months, Radio NZ reports. Retail spending is up and NZ shares rose on Thursday for a third day running. Key indicators have led some economists to point to a faster recovery than expected. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Geoff Hanmer, Adjunct Professor of Architecture, University of Adelaide HomeBuilder is a good idea gone bad. It is possibly the most complex and least equitable program the government could have devised to deliver construction jobs. It gives $25,000 to people who already ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Peter Keller, Professor of Cognitive Science, Western Sydney University The coronavirus pandemic has silenced the world’s concert halls and opera theatres. Organisations specialising in live performance face an existential crisis under current restrictions on social gatherings, with up to 75% of people ...
Finance Minister Grant Robertson, wearing his Sport and Recreation ministerial hat, can show he can be a big spender and draw voters’ attention to his largess each time he dispenses money from the funds under his control – or the control of an agency within his ministerial bailiwick. Yesterday he ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Pi-Shen Seet, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Edith Cowan University Scott Morrison wants to overhaul the skills workforce to ensure a better post-COVID-19 recovery. But there may not be enough people with the necessary skills to do so. And travel restrictions, which ...
As we transition out of a Covid-focused world and prepare for what comes next, New Zealand’s ICT industry is gearing towards growth.From app development helping track the Covid-19 virus to website engineering keeping businesses in touch and online, ICT knowledge has been crucial to keeping New Zealand working over the ...
Analysis: As New Zealand eases restrictions, it no longer has international precedent to look towards and must decide on its own how to reopen the economy while reducing the risk of a second wave of infections, Marc Daalder reports While most of the country eagerly awaits a likely move to ...
Ten days is too long. That from insurance claimant advocate, Ali Jones. EQC has today made contact with homeowners via email after accidentally releasing confidential details of 8000 insurance claims on May 26. Jones says although she has not received ...
The only published and available best-selling indie book chart in New Zealand is the top 10 sales list recorded every week at Unity Books’ stores in High St, Auckland, and Willis St, Wellington.AUCKLAND1 Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo (Penguin Classics, $24)Winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. The other day, ...
Simon Day discovers how the voluntary carbon market allows both individuals and companies to offset their emissions at the same time as investing in native forest regeneration.When Celia Wade-Brown sold her first batch of carbon credits earned from the native forest on her Wairarapa farm, she had two customers: Z ...
Simon Day discovers how the voluntary carbon market allows both individuals and companies to offset their emissions at the same time as investing in native forest regeneration.When Celia Wade-Brown sold her first batch of carbon credits earned from the native forest on her Wairarapa farm, she had two customers: Z ...
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Keith Rankin. The conversation around the 2020 covid19 pandemic has been widely framed as ‘health versus the economy’. It has been quite political, with people leaning to the left emphasising ‘health’, and people leaning to the right emphasising ‘the economy’. A couple of weeks ago ...
Sam Brooks pays tribute to Alex Rider, and the new TV series that (finally) captures the spirit of the books.“What if James Bond was a teenager?”The concept for Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series is so simple but so brilliant. There’s a reason why the franchise has managed to sustain 12 ...
Analysis - The PM resists pressure to move immediately to level 1, Winston Peters' tactics play into the hands of the Opposition and the government at last works out a commercial rent solution, writes Peter Wilson. ...
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage By COHAFrom Washington DC Federal charges against the four protectors of the Venezuelan Embassy, who defended the building in Washington DC against violent opposition crowds for several weeks between April 10 and May 16 of 2019, were completely dropped in a case that ...
Source: Council on Hemispheric Affairs – Analysis-Reportage By COHA Editorial TeamFrom Washington DC The Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) joins the Black Alliance for Peace[1] and other pro-democracy organizations throughout the world in calling for the United Nations to address the systemic violations of human rights by the police and ...
Being shot by police had a profound, transformational effect on Rob Mokaraka’s life in more ways than you’d expect. A new documentary, airing on Māori TV at 7.30pm on Sunday, explores the work he’s done to heal his own mind and to ensure nobody has to go through the same ...
Human rights watchdog TAPOL has condemned the demand by Indonesian prosecutors seeking 17 and five years imprisonment for West Papuan activists Buchtar Tabuni and Irwanus Uropmabin. On June 2, the Jayapura District Prosecutor’s Office issued 33 pages containing charges against the defendant Irwanus Uropmabin. In the document, the Public Prosecutor ...
The arrival of Dan Carter is far from the first time the ever-struggling Auckland team has hoped to turn around its fortunes with a star signing, writes Jamie Wall.New Zealand rugby Twitter is a generally desolate place, especially lately given that there’s been nothing to talk about ever since the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Robyn J. Whitaker, Senior Lecturer in New Testament, Pilgrim Theological College, University of Divinity US President Donald Trump delivered an address this week in which he threatened military action on the nation. Then he walked to the nearby St John’s Episcopal Church ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Vincent Ho, Senior Lecturer and clinical academic gastroenterologist, Western Sydney University Why do we burp? We sometimes also burp before meals, why does this happen? — Ahaana, age 7 That is a really interesting question, Ahaana! There ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justine Bell-James, Associate Professor, TC Beirne School of Law, The University of Queensland After years of litigation, Australia’s highest court will today make a major decision on the fate of the controversial proposed expansion to the New Acland Coal mine in Queensland. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Nicholas Williams, Associate Professor in Urban Ecology and Urban Horticulture, University of Melbourne Tomorrow is the first World Green Roof Day. Cities around the world will celebrate the well-documented environmental, economic and social benefits of green roofs. New ground-level green spaces are ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Elise Klein, Senior Lecturer, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University Robodebt isn’t the only measure the government should consider withdrawing. Late last Friday, after a long press conference from the prime minister which avoided any mention of the topic, the ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Richard Holden, Professor of Economics, UNSW Harvard University’s Alberto Alesina died suddenly of a heart attack on May 23. He was 63. His long-time colleague and friend Larry Summers wrote that before him, “there was no academic field of political economy. Today, ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Julian Meyrick, Professor of Creative Arts, Griffith University What keeps democracies together? As America burns, Brazilians die and Europe braces for another wave of the coronavirus, the question assumes an alarming immediacy. If the answer is complicated in one way, it is ...
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level two – read The Spinoff’s giant explainer about what that means here. For official government advice, see here.The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is made possible thanks to donations from Spinoff Members. ...
Good morning and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Millions of dollars divvied up by Sport NZ, MSD’s problem with wrongly denied payments grows, and internal coalition battles emerge in time for election.It’s Friday, and there hasn’t been a lot of it recently, so we’re going to start with ...
The Government picks Waitomo caves as 'strategic tourism asset' and grants $4m to Tourism Holdings, boosting shares another 7.8 percent. Facebook staff and alumni revolt over Zuckerberg's inaction on Trump ...
This week's biggest-selling New Zealand books, as recorded by the Nielsen BookScan NZ bestseller list and described by ReadingRoom literary editor Steve Braunias.NON-FICTION 1 Vegful by Nadia Lim (Nude Food, $55) 2 Stop Surviving Start Fighting by Jazz Thornton (Penguin Random House, $38) 3 So Delish! by Simone Anderson ...
Anomalies in the policy for superannuitants with overseas pensions are an indictment on the justice process in New Zealand, write Susan St John and Dr Claire Dale Along with many others, the Retirement Policy and Research Centre has worked assiduously for more than a decade to alert the public, policy-makers ...
A new study indicates native plants, despite their tendency to grow more slowly than exotic species like Pinus Radiata, are better at storing carbon in the soil for longer periods of time. ...
Systemic white violence against black Americans is alive and well, and it's white violence that sustains white supremacy Current scenes from the United States are both familiar and shocking. George Floyd’s life being brutally snuffed out by Minneapolis police, followed by peaceful protests of Floyd’s murder as well as legitimate ...
The US isn't the only country with a broken criminal justice system that works to criminalise and destroy the lives of black and brown families. Dylan Asafo puts forward two ways NZ could lead in dismantling systems of white supremacy. If you were to imagine a society without racial oppression, ...
The British Tribe Next Door attracted over 60 complaints of racist themes from viewers when it first aired in the UK. Now TVNZ is streaming it on its OnDemand service attracting concerns from members of Aotearoa’s African community and a letter from race relations commissioner Meng Foon.When The British Tribe ...
When approached by The Spinoff Jeanette Wilson denied having told participants in an online session that the product ‘lined the lungs’, despite clear evidence to the contrary.The Covid-19 crisis has sparked misinformation in every corner of the world. In New Zealand, a “psychic healer” whose fixations read like a conspiracy ...
The union movement launched a push earlier this week to double the legal minimum of sick leave from five days a year to 10. Is a change likely?What’s all this then?In light of the recent global pandemic putting the focus on health in the workplace, unions have called for changes ...
An African American pastor from George Floyd's community gives The Detail a special insight into what's happening there - and gives us hope for the future. “Nobody in America wants to be a racist.” David Hill is a pastor in the Third Ward neighbourhood of Houston where George Floyd grew ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra When Ken Wyatt, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, last week effectively pronounced dead the prospect of a referendum on indigenous recognition being put to the people this parliamentary term, the demise of his hoped-for timetable ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra The Morrison government will significantly strengthen its scrutiny of foreign investment to protect sensitive national security technology and information and further ring fence the nation’s critical infrastructure. It will insert a new “national security test” ...
Analysis by Dr Bryce Edwards. Political scientist, Dr Bryce Edwards. Does National have any chance of winning the election in September? It’s looking very unlikely, especially after National’s change of leadership hasn’t exactly produced Mullermania in the first two weeks. Quite the opposite, in fact, as I summarised in ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Denis Muller, Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Advancing Journalism, University of Melbourne When a newspaper with the authority of The New York Times chooses to publish a party-political essay calculated to further inflame the violence wracking cities across America, serious questions arise. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michael Plank, Professor in Mathematics, University of Canterbury There is now a 95% chance COVID-19 has been eliminated in New Zealand, according to our modelling, based on official Ministry of Health data. As of June 4, New Zealand has had 20 consecutive ...
In 2014, Duncan Greive was invited to interview Dan Carter on the back of the All Black’s spokesmodelling gig for Jockey underwear – a meeting that would eventually lead to Greive co-writing Carter’s autobiography, My Story. To celebrate today’s big Dan Carter news, we republish that original Metro story here.In ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Coates, Program Director, Household Finances, Grattan Institute Scott Morrison’s new housing stimulus package is straight-out retail politics. HomeBuilder offers homeowners (including first home buyers) a grant of A$25,000 to build a new home worth less than $750,000 or to spend between ...
Business is Boring is a weekly podcast series presented by The Spinoff in association with Callaghan Innovation. Host Simon Pound speaks with innovators and commentators focused on the future of New Zealand. This week he talks to Rachel Taulelei, CEO of Kono.Demand for New Zealand produce overseas is currently up. ...
By Moch. Fiqih Prawira Adjie in Jakarta A panel of judges at the Jakarta State Administrative Court (PTUN) has granted a lawsuit filed by civil society groups against the Indonesian government’s decision to impose an internet blackout during weeks of protests in Papua and West Papua provinces last year, declaring ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brett Mitchell, Professor of Nursing, University of Newcastle With coronavirus restrictions gradually lifting across the country, we’re now able to resume many of our regular activities. A lot of us might have been particularly keen to get back to the gym, which ...
Open mike 05/08/2013 
Oliver Twist, famously asked for ‘more’. He did not challenge the system of workhouses – Dickens did – nor the authority of Beadle Bumble. He was only nine. I am often struck how critics of the current income maintenance system are like Oliver Twist. They ask for more, but they ...11 hours ago
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This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections The Trump administration, after less than one full first term, has every likelihood of being adjudged the most anti-climate, anti-science, and anti-environment executive branch in U.S. history. With numerous high-level Trump nominees having cut their teeth as lobbyists with major polluting industries, the administration ...24 hours ago
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George Thomson, Nick Wilson, Richard Edwards This blog discusses the passing of the Smoke-free Environments (Prohibiting Smoking in Motor Vehicles Carrying Children) Amendment Act last week. We briefly review some lessons from this legislation’s long journey and explore future smokefree possibilities in Aotearoa / New Zealand. A law ...2 days ago
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For a good part of my adult life I have studied civil-military relations. I have studied authoritarian and democratic variants, and I have studied them across countries and regions. I have also worked in and with several US security agencies and have lectured on the theme at a number of ...3 days ago
by The Spark “The system is broken”—the words of a young black man in Minneapolis watching flames destroy a police precinct demonstrators had torched. Broken? Yes, it is! What else could you say about a system whose police for nine minutes casually knelt on a black man’s neck, watching until ...3 days ago
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age credit: Science and Politics – Skeptically.org It seems impossible to keep politics out of science. It’s a pity because politics can end up forcing science to produce the results desired by ... 2 weeks ago
Rt Hon Winston Peters, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters today announced two diplomatic appointments: New Zealand’s High Commissioner to India and Consul-General to Hong Kong. “As New Zealand recovers from COVID-19, our diplomatic and trade networks are more important than ever. That is ...14 hours ago
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http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/08/04/global-warming-the-folly-of-certainty/
In this case we are the helpless passengers in the back, and our parliamentarians are the driver.
If Larry refuses to slow down, then it is up to us the passengers, to do everything we can to make sure he listens to us.
Tonight at 7pm in Auckland, probably the biggest ever meeting called by Generation Zero on climate change is due to take place. Held in the Owen Glen complex in the Fisher &Paykel Auditorium, Auckland University, Wynyard Street. Make sure you are there.
The National government are Larrys. Determined to take a chance.
Labour and the Greens are Sallys, frightened and worried, but too intimidated by Larry to speak up.
FIFY, the Greens are speaking up – you’re just not listening.
On the plus side.The Green Party did call a conference on climate change at parliament. Which was boycotted by Shearer. This was a brave attempt to drag the reluctant Labour Party to the table.
They need to do more of the same.
But the Greens still refuse to make climate change a leading election issue.
And they are still determined to get seats in a Shearer cabinet, even though they know the cost will be to drop their opposition to deep sea oil drilling, fracking and Denniston. The three big things that symbolise BAU. And the three big things that the National and the Labour Parties are deathly committed to.
I have maintained and still maintain that if the Greens do go into coalition with Labour on these terms, they will be finished as an electoral force.
The Herald isn’t even pretending anymore.
What a headline…. ‘Foreigner ban fails to lift Labour” and what a picture of Shearer.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10908241
Is this title biased or what?
Only in the 3rd paragraph do we read…”The Green Party was the big winner, lifting from 9 per cent to 14. After several weeks of debate and protest over the GCSB Bill, National fell to 46 per cent – down three points since the May poll.”
Maybe headline should have been….
“Government’s spying policies bleed support to the Greens’.
The editor of the Herald must be paid a lot by the foreign corporates taking our country over.
….while Labour and United Future lobby for a “review”.
FFS, Jenny, we need a review of the entire intelligence system in NZ before we can make informed decisions. You’ve been told this. As I said above, you’re just not listening.
Draco, don’t include me in your “we” thanks.
Don’t tell me I can’t make an informed decision right now without a bunch of parliamentary hacks telling me what information I am entitled to.
After Waihopai, Manning, Doctom, Snowden et al what more information do you need to condemn the whole surveillance state?
Liberal commentators have been forced to admit that surveillance is a euphemism for the political repression of all the blowback from numerous colonial wars and invasions. The US is creating Jihadis in its own suburbia for gods sake.
I don’t want a review by any of these professional politicians.
That’s just a formula for doing nothing on full pay for a year or two while our privacy is wiped and the the globe is destroyed.
I want a ‘repeal’ though its unlikely that Labour will make it into Government unless the other left parties can make up for its pathetic crawling to the establishment.
If Labour campaigned right now for Kill the Bill it might just create the support it needs to Kill the Act.
/facepalm
You’re talking about two issues. The bill that NACT are passing which needs to be repealed if not stopped and a review which sets out to clearly define the purpose of the intelligence apparatus and it’s limits. I agree that Labour should come out and say that they will repeal the legislation that NACT are presently passing and going to the status quo ante. We’ll still need that review as well so as to make a better intelligence apparatus.
What’s to review?
You either support the mass surveillance of the population. or you don’t. Which is what this legislation is about.
Just like Shearer. Draco it is you, who are not listening.
The collecting, storing, and transmission of mass surveillance (metadata) on the general population by police and spy agencies needs to be made a criminal offence punishable by law.
David Shearer the leader of the Labour Party says that on becoming the government he will have “a review”. Not an inquiry mind you “a review”.
A review is not an inquiry. Most people know what an inquiry is, they know what a review is. Most people know “review” is code for “do nothing”.
The broad spectrum surveillance and collection and dissemination and transfer of metadata on every single New Zealander needs to be kept illegal.
There is no middle ground.
John Key;“because the alternative here would be either we don’t collect this data at all.”
David Cunliffe; “based upon what we have heard here tonight. I personally, and I am sure my caucus colleagues would be of the view that this legislation, must not, will not, and cannot stand.”
David Shearer; “We will have a review.”
There is no alternative, there is no middle ground. Key acknowledges it, Cunliffe does too. You either collect metadata, or you don’t.
There is no fence to sit on here Draco, no matter how much you claim it.
To support a review over an inquiry and/or a ban, is to normalise the collection of metadata.
Will a review stop the corruption?
Will a review identify the guilty?
Will a review identify the wronged?
Will a review stop the collection of metadata?
I think we can all agree that the answer to each of these questions is no it will not.
Therefore a review will be a farce and an insult to the intelligence of most New Zealanders.
Until David Shearer promises to reveal the identities of the 88 New Zealanders illegally spied on, so that we can all judge the validity of the need for this legislation, then his promised review will be nothing but a cover up for Business As Usual.
Cunliffe called for a review, too, but that’s not consistent with your worldview, so lets just leave that bit out, eh?
A review is exactly what’s needed. NZ needs to decide what kind of intelligence services it requires for the future and start again from there.
It probably needs a Royal Commission of Inquiry so that findings and recommendations aren’t buried and forgotten in some lowly status report and instead remain in perpetuity and can be referred to easily when future governments try to attack rights of citizens in the way Key and his mates are currently doing.
No he didn’t. He mentioned it, and probably supports it, but he didn’t call for it, he said that Shearer had. What Cunliffe clearly called for was the repeal of this legislation
Read the transcript.
Cunliffe said that the Leader of the Labour Party has promised a “thorough review”. He obviously wants to go further than the review promised by his leader. Because he followed this statement up, by saying this legislation “cannot stand”.
David Shearer yelled out “We will be having a review”.
The implication being, that’s all you’re gonna get Cunliffe. No, cannot stand nonsense.
The further implication is that David Shearer would be comfortable with allowing the collection of metadata spying on every New Zealander to stand.
And by his silence on the withholding of the information about the illegal spying on the 88 New Zealanders, David Shearer is quite happy to let this situation stand as well.
To convince the public that he can be trusted, David Shearer needs to make a statement that on taking charge of the secret services he will order them to release this information to those affected if they request it.
Simple, clear, honest.
Yet not being done.
P.S. TRP, Draco maybe you and other Shearer apologists might like to further try and justify Shearer’s refusal to commit to releasing the names of the 88?
I suppose you might say that releasing this information could reveal the identities of the spies responsible, thereby compromising their ability to continue their under cover work. Lawbreakers guilty of crimes against members of the public are not above the law just because they are members of the secret service. So what if it costs them their jobs. By allowing the secret police officers to remain above the law if they are discovered breaking it, is a very dangerous precedent to set.
If it does come to court, as many of these cases undoubtably will, these accused spies can ask for name suppression and I am sure that they will be granted it.
“David Shearer yelled out “We will be having a review”.
The implication being, that’s all you’re gonna get Cunliffe.”
You’re a slow learner, Jenny. You have miserably failed to back up your fantasy and the presence of hundreds of people in the hall who didn’t see any such exchange doesn’t appear to have put you off continuing to talk crap about Shearer and Cunliffe. Were you even there? Nah, I guess not, eh.
“P.S. TRP, Draco maybe you and other Shearer apologists might like to further try and justify Shearer’s refusal to commit to releasing the names of the 88?”
Nope, I doubt anyone is going to waste much time pissing on your feeble strawman.
The people who watched TV3 on 26 July saw and heard Shearer say “We will be having a review”, after Cunliffe’s speech. Go and watch TV3 news on that day.
“… saw and heard Shearer say …”
So not yelling at Cunliffe, then. Thanks for the back up, Jaymam.
Can someone please just make her stop with the stupid?
This is why a review is needed Jenny:
http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/04/11/breaking-worse-than-we-thought-rebecca-kitteridge-and-the-new-community-of-spooks/
The difference between me and you, Jenny, is that I know what the review is for.
The intelligence services aren’t going away and so a review of just what they’re for and what powers they have is a reasonable action. This is what Labour have promised. As I say above, I would be more comfortable if they promised to drop the legislation that NACT are presently putting through but either way I still support a review of the intelligence services.
You, on the other hand, are focusing solely upon a single bit of legislation. It is this focus that has you being completely wrong about what people are saying.
If I was one of those 88 I’d prefer it if the government told me and then let me decide if I told the rest of NZ and didn’t just go out and tell the rest of NZ.
Goes without saying. At present if you suspect you are being illegally spied on, if you request this information from the government you are told you are not allowed to know.
Currently the government are shielding the lawbreakers from their victims. Draco do you personally support the continuation of this criminal government policy?
Has David Shearer promised to, as future head of the secret security services allow people to access this information about themselves?
Let us see who the GCSB are spying on. If as many suspect they are not terrorists at all and that innocent people are being illegally victimised then this needs to come out so that they can get some redress.
Jenny, you have repeatedly called for the names of the 88 to be made public. Have you changed your mind now?
Onnit Paul. Utterly shameless blatancy. No mention forever of Roy Morgan – until it favours the Natsies last week. Deliberate distortion (Gran) and totally ignored (Stuff) of yesterday’s Left lift.
On the silver lining side, concrete confirmation of the “self-fulfilling prophesy” power of polls. A fact long ago twigged of course by the Continuous Propaganda Party, its organs and their bottomless pockets.
A comparative analysis of MSM coverage of blue-friendly polls versus red-friendly over the past few years would be staggering.
Lolz the pic the Herald used today has David Shearer looking like He is starring in the movie ”Revenge of the Lizard People”,
i don’t see the Colmar-Brunton painting Labour in that bad a position, the Green Party on 14% has the bloc level with National who have 1% more of support to lose which would make that Party pretty much unable to form a Government on those numbers,
Between them, the Mana Party and the dying Maori Party hold the other 3% of the left’s support if we view the electorate on the basis of 50/50,
i can see the Mana Party entering the 2015 Parliament with 3 MP’s and the Maori Party with zero, not a bad position to be in this far out from November 2014,
The interest now will be what sort of damage has been inflicted upon National from the sordid little and long running GCSB affair…
Paul +1
what a great show
A passable wielder of the sonic screwdriver.
Anyone else miss Helen Clark right now?
Asked on National Radio yesterday what would be her highest priority if she were PM of the coutnry right now, she said, immediately: “Unemployment.”
For the amount of comparatively trivial bull that all parties are immersed in right now, she cut through it.
Agree
GSCB= beltway, no one cares.
Labour has wasted far too much time on this nonsense, I don’t know if it’s just desperation and the Labour HQ thinks this is all they’ve got to attack National with or it’s just arrogance and the intellectuals in the party just can’t admit the strategy sucks and just persevere because of ego.
Edit: don’t agree with the missing Clarkula bit.
Ah here it is back from a weekend being ‘primed’ with the Farrar, Hooten, Blubber boy line that no-body cares about the deliberate unlawful accessing of private email and phone information by the Office of the Prime Minister,
Keep singing that song Boyo, a mere 1-2% of right wing voters need only ‘care’ deeply enough about the executive misuse of power to in November 2014 give you something that will really make you care,
Another 9 on the opposition benches…
+1 Bad12
The opposition parties, by objecting to the GCSB, are highlighting the now typical disregard that Nat govt shows toward democratic principles. This is what the opposition parties need to be doing, because it is vital that voters are aware that there is another, better, way of doing things. Hopefully NZers will see these options loud and clear and not be bamboozled by the slogans ‘that it isn’t important’.
I would be ripping my hair out even more than I already am if the opposition parties were not presenting strong objections to the GCSB; I would have thought there would be many others who feel the same way.
Thing is anyone with half a brain can see that Labour isn’t really against what is been proposed.
From what I’ve read the bill will pretty much stay in it’s current form if Labour gets into power, which makes all the shrieking and carry on is just a shitty attempt to try and smear Key and pin blame on him because some public servant fucked up again not because this bill is all that’s evil.
If you’re going to treat the voting population like idiots at least try to be clever about it.
@ BM,
That is the brilliant thing about strong opposition. If the opposition parties go on record strongly opposing a certain approach, then if they get into power and do the self-same thing they can be called on it.
If voters continue to vote for a party that shows severe disrespect toward democratic principles it is hard not to see them as idiots because they are giving up the safeguards they would have had, had they voted for parties that opposed such undemocratic actions.
For this reason, suspecting Labour is much the same as National is not a good reason to not vote against National at this point.
Politicians need to be given the clear message as to what is acceptable and what is not. What is going on at present is simply not acceptable and only a complete fool would continue to vote for such behaviour.
Why Politics Matters – POLS 111 Lecture
It’s by Winston so obviously don’t agree with everything he says but he does make some good points about the GCSB and other things so worth reading.
@DTB
Only just read the speech – yes it is interesting.
I rate Mr Peters very highly on the skills he has shown as an opposition MP. Before NZF got back the Greens were doing a fair job -yet were alone in this. The overall opposition was insipid. I view Winston as having had a huge impact on the strength of the opposition this term.
Yep. Winston has lifted the class of the Opposition (which as you say the Greens were performing well at although alone) to a brand new level.
Key and Co. didn’t put all that effort years ago into discrediting NZ First for no good reason.
Key and Co. didn’t put all that effort years ago into discrediting NZ First for no good reason.
Relating to this I believe it is worth looking around to see where that type of effort is going now.
So far my search provides me with the result of Mr Hone Harawira. There seems to have been a inordinate amount of interest in condemning his family (around Waitangi, housing protest and the nephew’s court case)
Ah, so the GCSB bills are hurting National and so the astroturfers have been given their orders to try to divert from it.
+1 DtB
Is that the Helen Clark who said this: ”If beneficiaries want to get working for Families payments they should get a job”,
As bad if not worse than the current leaders ‘roof-painting bene bludger’ speech,a sentence i could well imagine coming from the lips of Richardson or Shiply,
Refusing to uphold the principle tenet of the welfare state, that it is based around the greatest need, will always cause Labour trouble in the electorate until such time as it has shaken the last vestiges of the left of the party from it’s rump,
Mind you at 33% of polled support it could be considered to have mostly achieved the above…
bad12
Yes I come back to middle class Labourites with jobs and favourable future visions talking simplistic and unhelpful shit about beneficiaries, and so-called non-working. When Steve Maharey was in government I thought his background in social sciences would result in more intelligent and wide-ranging innovations in getting positive returns from the unemployed and beneficiary payouts, that were helpful to them and the country, but nothing startling shook the scene.
He didn’t seem to have absorbed or was capable of triumphing over the middle-class stodge with new ideas despite his closeness to the thinkers in the social policy field. We can notice the same lack of independent thought about our economy emanating from financial wizard Kay.
“Who will rid us of these turbulent politicians?” (and bring in some good ones dedicated to doing good policies for the people and the country that actually bring benefits, not vague or fiery promises that just leave a sweet hopeful smell of roses hanging in the air.)
Interesting possible fact got from google. About Henry 2, and his saying –
He initially said “Never again will I have to say “Who will rid me of this turbulent priest”
(he had in fact had several of the previous archbishops murdered) …
That’s going a bit over the top I think!
Rosetinted, Lol, yes just slightly, over the top that is, considering to all extents and purposes we are in ‘a public place’, but, i do know the ‘feeling’,
My view for quite some time is that as ‘the left’ have hived off Labour in a continuing process under MMP Labour have along with its current support base ‘morphed’ into a middle class Party, how much of this is deliberate or a natural change is debatable,
What is of interest to me from the Colmar Brunton poll is that 2% of the fence sitters, registered voters who have previously refused to indicate a preference, have come down off of the fence in this poll and the Green Party seems to have picked up all these voters,
This would to a certain extent indicate the Prime Minister having labelled Labour/Green as the ‘devil beast’ has certainly had an effect upon the electorate, the opposite tho of what the Prime Minister intended,
The past couple of elections appear to me to have been fought mainly in the middle ground of the electorate, if as this poll indicates, those who have stayed at home whilst this middle class battle has run it’s course are now ‘seeing’ the necessity to become involved and the fact that such involvement as indicated by the Colmar Brunton has moved left to the Green Party is a great look for the left especially if the indicated trend continues…
bad12
Interesting thoughts. I referred to a discussion of Brit Labour recently, forgotten where. I’d have to look back over my comments archive, but so amazing that what we see in NZ parallels theirs so far away. Of course we have always followed Brit thinking and connections and education and politics so maybe not so amazing. But their progression or regression could perhaps be studied with an objective eye to give substance to theories of what has been behind the Labour movement’s change here.
“..Anyone else miss Helen Clark right now?..”…
..really..?..)
(this was my reaction to her self-serving/past-glossing-over appearance on q & a..)
“…next up is helen clark..(and i am sorry..i have so many other questions for clark..(maybe starting with her govt. totally ignoring/marginalising the poorest/sickest for nine long years..
..and at the same time..so efficiently preparing the ground for the current pogrom against those poorest/sickest..
..that my mind glazes over at her current unctions..
..save to note she fully supports spooks/spooking..(but is anti-mass-trawling..)
(and of course after that wholesale ignoring of real poverty in new zealand for those nine long years..that she now is at the un..’fighting-poverty’..
..must cause irony-overdose/gastric-reflux in most watchers..)..”
phillip ure..
Ad +1….and they should be sucking up all the Kiwi unemployed and training them on the job in the reconstruction of Christchurch…instead of importing labour
Absolutely. I want a Labour Party ready to recommit to policies of full employment, starting with full youth employment.
+ 1 Colonial Viper …..Youth unemployment is a tragedy !…..which will keep ricocheting for generations!…… It should be a number one priority.
I think the Germans have a lot to teach us on this….Kids from high school go directly into apprenticeships or internships …..so they can sort out what they want to do….eg get training in a line of work they like or become a university student…..I don’t think they are allowed to be unemployed …same in Switzerland
Massive turnaround in the one news poll for Labour and Shearer and a big hit for National which means Shearers showing what he can do, hes the right leader for Labour
I noted, in the last speech of his I heard on the radio, that he was no longer hesitating on hitting the decisive word in the sentence and was showing more conviction. ‘Necessity is the mother of invention’ may be a cliche, but there is some merit in that statement. Whether it will be enough is another matter ..
Yeah you have to give David Shearer a couple of brownie points when His current speech making is compared with His earlier efforts,
What i perceived from His ummm aaaah delivery’s after His ascension to the position of leader was that He was ‘self editing’, stopping mid-sentence to seek a ‘better’ word to use in the point He was making,
Obviously the media trainers have been at work and to a large extent corrected this bad habit, now all’s we need do is convince His advisers that the only required reading for the leader of the Labour Party is ‘Labour during the Norman Kirk years’ and we might actually get some decent policy from that Party which addresses the ‘bread and butter’ issues of those in our society that survive on the least amount of income…
Winston chanelling Santi, not a pretty site.
Shearer just needs a little more time (like maybe when it comes to the election debates with John Key) to really show the people of NZ what hes made of 🙂
Probably won’t matter, Key will likely have banned TV and newspapers by then. Or hopefully people will awake and see the conman Key for what he is, all those used car sales types seem to have free-flowing bullshit in abundance.
Oh good the old “hopefully the people will wake up” line, maybe the people have woken up already…
From observation, that seems very highly unlikely.
Winston is trying hard to take Santi’s place.
[lprent: But Santi got banned until after the next election. I guess there could be a resumption of the strange RWNJ penis extender technique that involves getting banned from TS? Young shrivelled bucks do some really stupid things in the pursuit of coups. ]
This weekend 24 US embassies closed their doors because there was believable information that they were in eminent danger from a terrorist attack.
Problem is that this information seems to have sprung from an unlikely source. The mst important Qaeda leader going by the name of Ayman al Zawahiri ! Here is the link to the NZ News Website where I found this.
The same leader also alleged that the coup against Mursi the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood president was engineered by the US on the 3 August. Here is the link to the Guardian article.
Problem is that according to the MSM this Al Qaeda leader was killed during a drone attack on 9/12 2012.
See why I’m having trouble with these eminent terror attack announcements?
OOPPSS. Or it seems that Prism can speak to those who have died, Can they ask my Mother where she hid the recipes for the tiny cakes, that go with a cup of tea.
Or were they talking to Achmed??
“Problem is that according to the MSM this Al Qaeda leader was killed during a drone attack on 9/12 2012”
Dude, that article isn’t saying al-Zawahiri was killed. The man identified as a future successor to him was. Learn to read.
Um… It’s dudette for you and try this and know that reading is what I do very well but you are right that was the wrong article to link to as it didn’t detail the entire history of Zawahiri’s many reported deaths.
The trouble with following Shearer’s delivery to the media etc with bated breath is that once again it’s pinning hopes on getting any Labour government in, as if that is all there is to be concerned about.
What we are already getting is just more bene bashing coming from the left. In government it would be more self-satisfied ‘We’re running the country right and keeping it on an even keel’ stuff, and being happy with showing positive trends in the measurements of policies set in place with right wing advantages.
I was looking at a 2005 NZ Listener and the list of top 50 powerful people. Cullen was near the top, and mentioned was his 67c ‘chewing gum’ tax cut. He and Helen Clark didn’t have enough nous to institute something like sliding inflation indices on tax levels. When do the good people who are not comfortably off, get considered. Answer not often.
Such complacency about Labour’s vulnerable constituents will continue going by Shearer’s comments about the guy on the roof, and there must be more in the pot. In a previous Labour government Trevor Mallard went round slashing small rural schools and then that was followed by cuts to bus transport by him or the next lot and so on. It’s just a progression of lost services and rights and lost economic conditions and as confusing as that TV series Lost where everything seemed fluid and uncertain.
Labour doesn’t have any vulnerable constituents. Not these days.
What about Shearer, I hear hes pretty vulnerable…
XKeyscore. Intriguing name, eh what?
Intriguing guff too, worth reminding ourselves:
The program is run jointly with other agencies including Australia’s Defence Signals Directorate, and New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau.
Greenwald said low level analysts can via systems like XKeyscore “listen to whatever emails they want, whatever telephone calls, browsing histories, Microsoft Word documents. And it’s all done with no need to go to a court, with no need to even get supervisor approval on the part of the analyst.”
And of course no need to worry in the slightest about sharing said transcripts with a joint agency. Or its head.
Yes, but can they open .pst ???
This took less time to find, than to type it up, So the answer is YES, they can open a .pst file
http://download.cnet.com/PST-Viewer/3000-2369_4-75289424.html
http://www.nucleustechnologies.com/pst-viewer.html
And just in case they had a Mac
https://answerqi.com/asq/1666/answermail/how-can-i-open-a-pst-file-without-microsoft-outlook-on-a-mac
thx david .. but maybe I shd have put a smiley face after it ….
OK this is worrying me:
Today I installed a firefox extension. The name of the extension is “Dark side of the prism” and purports to be able to alert users on the possibility that the NSA is monitoring websites they are visiting.
I didn’t think much of it and went about my merry way roaming the net. Amongst my first visits after I installed the plug in was the daily blog and to my surprise the Pink Floyd song “The dark side of the moon” the alert for NSA monitoring started to play!
I closed the page and went to the Standard blog where again the song started to play.
I again closed the page and this time I opened the Kiwiblog page and the Whaleoil page both pages opened without any problems and no dark side of the moon!
The Daily Blog and The Standard are two “left” wing blogs. The Standard is the third biggest blog in New Zealand for those of you who don’t know it and the Daily Blog is a blog run by prominent activist and journalist Martyn Bradbury to which a whole slew of left wing journalists and writers contribute.
Kiwiblog and Whaleoil are the two biggest blogs in New Zealand and both are closely aligned with the National party and aligned with the right wing.
Which begs the question: Are the Standard and the Daily blog monitored by the NSA and if so why?
Sounds like complete bullshit.
Your usual verbal elegance again I see!
Actually, I have to agree with TheConformist here. The code of the program isn’t reliable ie it doesn’t perform the task it says it’s meant to. There is a clear distinction between your computer and a website hosted elsewhere. It appears that you’re trying to deter people from viewing the two main leftwing blogs in New Zealand.
No J, I am just conveying what happened when I installed a firefox addon claiming to perform a certain action. And I asked the question: if… why…?
Nothing more and nothing less.
I also clicked on other sites such as yours and mine. Not a sausage! No bells and whistles and no Dark side of the moon!
@travellerev: Interesting. Our similar topic posts crossed. Try opening the site I posted below:
PACC PAMS 13 even if just for the love of Pink Floyd….
@David H on thread below, this site tries to install something on your computer, so don’t click through. A friend used my computer to find information about countries attending the conference and must have run the installation – I’m running my malware now. However, it looks like the site is down now.
The way the NSA do their monitoring (sweeping up full copies of internet traffic from fibre optic junctions) should be completely invisible to the end user machine.
[lprent: That is my understanding as well. ]
Yes.
But I was thinking about the low-level wannabe types playing spy games rather than the NSA
The site looks like a twelve-year old group of boys playing around with WordPress rather than a US or NZ Defence Force production. Incongruous with an international conference for army chiefs.
Another site like it is Warren Buffett’s massively rich investment thing Berkshire Hathaway. You wouldn’t think it makes USD22billion a year.
When you’re so big you don’t need to care about fripperies – like the Queen mucking around in wellies and old landrovers.
Surely there should be delays that would indicate interference. Any telecommunications service that nows its latency should be able to detect such interference?
It takes a while for the Addon to sound the alerts when you open a page indicating it is interacting with something before it decides there is the possibility of NSA monitoring. For those of you curious about the addon here is the link for you to try it out yourself.
If you want to disable it again go to your addons under the tools dropdown menu and click disable.
Here is the link to the code of the addon for those of you so inclined and by invitation of the author of the addon Justin Binder. Seems fair to me.
It should but is it? Or is the addon reacting to something else on the main servers but before you go into that let me confess to you that with regards to software, code and other things that go bing in computers I am completely blond! (Although I did learn to put them together when I was a couple of decennia younger)
All I did was convey what happened. I have no opinion on what happened other than that we are all monitored (not necessarily in a personal way but more in a “lets get all the info and store it somewhere until someone becomes troublesome and we need to deal to that person” kind of way) and have been as a matter of course for years and that all they try to do now is to make it lawful so that they can act when needed within a legal framework so that the dotcoms of this world have no legal recourse anymore.
History reveals that most governments are so inclined and even more so in uncertain economic times and the internet is simply to good an opportunity to waste! It’s nothing personal, it’s just business as usual.
travellerev .. using your link, have a look at the comments on the app.
It is using sites that are publicly named as being monitored by Prism et al … still interesting in terms of the left wing blogs, but it is supposed to be for fun ….
Here for you from your link …
by Ken Saunders on June 17, 2013 · permalink
If you are thinking about using this add-on, keep these things in mind.
1) It’s for fun, and not some sort of magical NSA/Prism blocking add-on.
2) Purchase Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon album if you want to pause, mute, etc, the songs.
3) Here’s a list of the companies, http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040991/report-nsa-prism-program-spied-on-americans-emails-searches.html
4) Firefox button > Add-ons > Extensions > Dark Side Of The Prism > Disable, disables this add-on or you can choose Remove.
This is a brilliant and funny add-on!Thanks for developing it.
First of all I stated that this is just a claim made. I tried it out on a lot of sites though and it seems pretty consistent. And no it is not an add on to block NSA monitoring and neither does it purport to be all accurate either. Funny though how it sounded when accessing two left wing blogs in far away New Zealand and not Kiwiblog or Whaleoil two rightwing blogs closely aligned to National. It doesn’t sound with newspapers but it did sound on Max Keiser’s blog who is a fervent anti-banker RT TV Host.
It didn’t sound with Veterans today but it did sound when I opened the Global research site dedicated to studying globalism and the power elite. It also sounded when I opened Washington’s blog but not when I opened Zero hedge blog.
The fact that this application didn’t ‘alert’ when you visited Kiwiblog and Whaleoil is evidence that it wouldn’t be picking up NSA monitored sites. If I was an intelligence operative I would be trying to garner information from popular sites to ascertain what the mood of the politicised section of a country is. Kiwiblog and Whaleoil are the two most popular political blogs in the country. They would be prime targets for gathering intelliegence on NZ.
Gosman I’ve been reading the tripe you post for a while now and I can say with the utmost confidence that there is no chance of you ever doing anything involving intelligence.
ROFL. Intelligence in you?
“It is using sites that are publicly named as being monitored by Prism et al”
A link to that list of publicly named sites would be nice. I’m sure Martin Bradbury and Iprent would be delighted to know they are on a public list of Prism monitored sites!
travellerev .. there is a link in my post 9.4 above to that very list .. point #3
Nope no list other than a few companies who are known to cooperate with the Prism program. Daily blog, the Standard, Kiwiblog, Whaleoil are all blogs based on wordpress blogging software but some of them are tagged ad someof them are not. Still does not explain why the two left wing blogs were singled out by the add on while the two right wing ones were not.
More than likely it is to do with who the sites are hosted with than the specific site.
@ Travellerev,
I would have thought the answer to your question was pretty obvious.
People who are concerned about the welfare of people (as opposed to the economic interests of the very wealthy) are now considered traitors to the interests that spy networks are working for.
This is very clear given the official reaction to Mr Snowden’s actions.
Which begs the question: Are the Standard and the Daily blog monitored by the NSA and if so why?
Maybe
For a laugh (its why I come here)
[lprent: I just assume that the site is monitored by someone(s). What I’m interested in is making it hard for material from the site to be able to be used in anything legal without requiring the means to be disclosed (take some time and think the logic through). ]
Typical taker, shame you never supply any laughs though, just ridiculous cheerleader slogans supplied to you by your shonkey idol.
Thats not true, I’ve supplied plenty of laughs (both deliberately and inadvertantly)
The NZDF is hosting the PACC PAM (?) conference in Auckland this year.
Searching for which countries belong to this group, and who will be attending – results in not a lot on Google. Although PACC PAM, links back to the US Defence Force via a couple of other organisations.
However, this bizarre site PACC PAMS 13 – Army Conference Agenda comes up in regards to the NZ conference this year. Has random NZ photos and strange layout. Looks like a site from a bad 70s spy movie, and heads up, you will get a couple of automatic messages if you click through.
When i tried it, it wanted to install something on my computer. That was me gone. But from what i saw, it was an amateurish looking site.
@David H. Thanks for the heads up.
A friend wanted to use my computer to find out the list of countries, and is Google-challenged. They must have clicked through the installation prompt – will run my malware programs to double check.
The rest of the site – which I will not return to after deleting whatever has been loaded – is pictures of the skytower, NZ currency, people at a restaurant etc. Just checked if the installation message comes up for me – and the site is now down.
Interesting Posts:
1) Alanz …4 August 5.57pm (under “Friday Document Dump” August 2nd)…Stated i)that the media should keep digging because there are 3 key, pivotal issues not covered in the document dump.ii) Also there are nationally grave matters not yet public …
2) exitlane… 3 August 4.47pm ( under “Andrea Vance’s Privacy Breach” August 3rd)…. Stated that under the GCSB ( refs. Snowden / “NZL” docs / re Xkeystore ) phone calls and email content anywhere can be accessed with a few keystrokes without a warrant….Hence John Key would have known everything about Dunne and Vance even without the help of Parliamentary services !!!!…..sooner Dunne realises that this and what he is thinking of voting for are tied up inextricably ,the better)
My Question:
Is Dunne complicit in a cover up ….when Key had everything already?…..Does Dunne know this?….If so , Dunne’s squealing about Parliamentary breaches of his privacy are rather spurious…and it makes him a lot more complicit and tricky in the implementation of the GCSB bill than what many thought
Of course he is. Because he knows Key has seen all the emails. Key has him over a barrel. Jesus, have we ever had such a nasty piece of work for a prime-minister. It also shows Dunne is weak as dishwater.
@ Anne…yes but Dunne seems to be trying to keep the two issues separate …and it is also the case in the media ….ie Parliament breaches are being kept separate from GCSB breaches on privacy( ie John Key having access to the emails already via GCSB.) It is as if they want to keep the bigger picture of the GCSB and what it is doing under the carpet.
…..So Dunne is ‘outraged’ by Parliamentary services and one head has rolled there….But Dunne also wants to vote for the GCSB bill when he knows the bigger picture is that the Prime Minister had all this information independently via GCSB……( I feel sorry for the guy that got rolled unnecessarily)
And whereas before I just thought Dunne was being blackmailed and felt a wee bit sorry for him…..now I think he is a tricky Dicky
Probably everyone on this site knows this already…but I have just realised this could be the case….it sort of makes the outrage at the illegal spying on the 88 rather redundant….. everyone has been spied on…in which case why isnt the media saying so?…and why did the guy in Parliament services fall on his sword?
“tricky Dicky” lol.
Vance was fed by Dunne and Vance had a choice to,
1. Not release the report.
2. To have responded once the report was released.
Had Vance done 2. she would have implicated Dunne because in those emails Dunne has to have shot himself in the foot. Dunne must be feeling happy with himself that the chance of Vance releasing his emails is now remote as she would be branded a hypocrite if she did.
I am sure Key has something on what Dunne, done!
@ KJT…..Yes but did Key get it via Parliamentary services or independently via the GCSB…..even before a law has been passed ( with Dunne’s help) making it legal?
How the rich countries can screw the poor ones. Many consulates in Brit are being ordered to close their bank accounts under regulations to control money laundering. This comes from high law instigated by some high-minded countries with impeccable financial trading. Some countries are having difficulty finding ways to trade internationally.
I remember hearing a story about Rwanda I think, being left on the outer when the world financial system refused them membership. They determined to conduct some business in cash, one of their dignitaries took off from home with a caseful, and I don’t know if that transaction was ever completed, but I heard that the dignitary settled in I think France. Probably opened a consulate there in his home. So some good may have come out of the move, who knows. Nothing is straightforward in politics and finance.
Years ago, in Reagan’s time there was a bank that dealt illegally in funds connected with drug running venture capital, and though this was known it was allowed to remain in business, and was used to pay for arms used in some overseas destabilising action. Standards of probity have to be seen to remain in place, so that the exception can prove the rule I imagine. Some whistle blowing investigative journalist found out about it. Otherwise we would never have known, and probably most don’t anyway. I just was curious to check out a second hand book. If from now on there aren’t any accessible documents in hard copy extant, that will happen less.
Banking/debt based money supply/transaction systems are being used as a way to control and contain entire countries. If you are in the “in crowd” good for you, you get privileged access to these systems and your country (and government) can continue to survive; if you are not – then all bets are off the table, and if it means that tens of millions of your people have to suffer economic deprivation and hunger in the process, ah well too bad.
And we’re off – owner of a web host that aides internet anonymity arrested.
http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rlo0uu
https://openwatch.net/i/200/anonymous-web-host-freedom-hosting-owner-arrested
http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/fbi-bids-to-extradite-largest-childporn-dealer-on-planet-29469402.html
Boom!
I was trying to get details on Steffan Browning , Greens who made a good point this morning that NZ is too dependent on one business type – ie dairy.
And from google going through Kiwiblog I got a message that – something to the server chain is incomplete and something is not registered and do I accept and I said no. Don’t know what that was about. Sounds like the vehicle needs its spark plugs cleaned!
Gleaned from Radionz Rural and Business News headings:
MPI under-staffed to cope with China trade
The Ministry for Primary Industries admitted that despite a tripling in New Zealand’s trade with China over the past five years, it did not have anywhere near enough staff in the ministry nor in China to cope with that escalating trade relationship.
Online tool to map stock theft
Farmers who have lost stock to rustlers have a new way of hitting back at them.
Signs of resistance to varroa bee mite treatments – assoc
The National Beekeepers Association says the battle against the varroa mite may cost almost $1 billion over the next three decades.
Chorus gets further debt facility
Chorus has secured further debt facilities, which the company says will support its funding needs to rollout of the ultra fast broadband over the next six years.
Hills Flooring in liquidation
Family-owned carpet retailer Hills Flooring is in liquidation, blaming the failure of the construction company Mainzeal and the tough retail market.
These are matters that should have oversight by ordinary NZs.
* Hills Flooring – established NZ company being lost – why?
* Chorus – is an arm of Telecom isn’t it? And its got further debt facility – from whom and why? Was that debt facility available to other contenders?
* Varroa bee mite – Bees and beekeepers – are they getting proper support and tax incentives and grants to pay for the costs of this terrible outcome of increased import risks without the concomitant spending on increased biosecurity?
* Help for farmers to combat stock theft – sounds good. The rural side, apart just from dairy, need support through proper services from government.
* MPI being understaffed to meet the needs that increased trade with Asia and China brings is just another of NZs failures to follow through on initiatives and new policies which need extra work, with increased money spent on them. This is to ensure that the money that is hoped to be made, and the business and contacts generated, are properly handled and treasured.
And that involves more than giving fast track visas to big spenders from Asian countries to come here and. hopefully, offload. That might be more profitable than before if countries trying to appear highly principled financially shut down on bank accounts for possibly dodgy dealers. Just the thing for a fresh-faced keen little country like us. We could welcome these poor refugees from the nasty big wide world financial system!
* Embassy accounts being closed by HSBC bank
HSBC, the biggest bank in Britain is reported to have given dozens of diplomatic missions in London 60 days to move their accounts elsewhere.
“a good point this morning that NZ is too dependent on one business type – ie dairy.”
There’s always tourism… until the big oil shock/next GFC hits.
“Beyond the Shroud”
For those who want to watch this but do not have Sky TV or access to Face TV, the documentary will be streamed live from 8pm on Scoop.
http://www.scoop.co.nz/multimedia.html
Addition to the above.
It will also be streamed on Live.TheDailyBlog and LiveNews.co.nz.
Yes. Must see viewing.
Zero Hedge: Kiwi Plunges, 15% of Exports at Stake
Congrats NZ, your very own story on Zero Hedge
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-08-04/kiwi-plunges-china-russia-suspend-new-zealand-powder-milk-exports-15-gdp-stake
Debt ridden, and sabotaged primary sector – Should help bring NZ to its knees in short time,
Swelling national debt, private debt, spiraling living costs , decreasing incomes!, government books loaded with off balance sheet derivatives, just like the banks, all of them!
Nah she’s going sweet mate, the recovery is really just about to kick!
OBR
http://www.maggiebarry.co.nz/index.php?/archives/225-Finance-and-Expenditure-Select-Committee-Deputy-Chair-Role.html
Sorry about the link location – TV Presenter Barry, deputy chair of the above!
Oh dear!
And now they are spinning spinning spinning through this fabulous land!!!
You have to wonder if the Slippery little Shyster we have as Prime Minister considers us all to be just plain dumb,
His claim now is that He did not know until Friday that the Dunne/Vance emails had been handed over to His Office/the Henry Inquiry from Parliamentary Services/the IT ‘contractor’ just takes spin to a whole new level,
The Prime Minister seems here to be attempting to dodge charges from the Opposition in the House that He the Prime Minister has mislead the Parliament,
Does the Slippery little Shyster live in some form of airless bubble,along with all of His executive officials occupying their own secular bubbles, under a rock each in other words miles apart in a vast desert without the communications of this modern world to disturb their meditations,
This claim from the Prime Minister is simply one serious piece of bullshit too far, at a time when the Henry Inquiry, the Chief executive of the Prime Minister’s own office, and the Prime Ministers own Chief of Staff all KNEW of the emails and KNEW that the emails had been obtained from Parliamentary Services/the IT ‘contractor’ this Prime Minister wishes us all to believe he knew nothing,
Now that is the Sergeant Shultz defence if i ever heard it, i know nothing nothing you hear, the contention that He, the Prime Minister only found out about the Dunne/Vance emails would have us believe that the document dump on Friday from the Prime Ministers own office of over 100 pages was all material that He had never once read,
Dodge,duck,dive, what the Prime Minister really ‘means’ is not that He had not the slightest notion until Friday that the Dunne/Vance emails had been released to the Henry Inquiry/Office of the Prime Minister, what He really ‘means’ is that he found out on the Friday that ‘we’ knew that He had reached the emails of Dunne/Vance and were discussing this openly here at the Standard on the Thursday night befor the document dump occurred from His office on the Friday,
it is not the prime minister’s chief executive of the prime ministers office that should be offering to resign here, there’s something rotten right at the core of this particular apple and it is the Prime Minister exhibiting all those signs of rot, it is Him who should be offering the resignation…
Just say what you mean instead of beating around the bush bad12. John Key has lied! His office, namely the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, has instructed Parliamentary Service to intercept three moths worth of communications between a journalist, Andrea Vance, and a Minister of the Crown, Peter Dunce. It is likely that this “contractor” supposedly employed by Parliamentary Service is actually the GCSB who was instructed by no other that John Key himself.
Despite that blatant breach of privacy, which has resulted in him resigning his Ministerial portfolios, Peter Dunce is going to support a bill that legalizes similar surveillance on us all. However, he will not allow his communications in this instance to be released to the public. 2+2 really does equal 4. What is the bouffant hiding? It is likely only his own scalp. Such is the way of politicians I suppose.
Conveniently for John Key there is now a more major story to take the attention off his administration. The Prime Minister can now appear the hero, admonishing Fonterra for not informing the public that their dairy supplies could be contaminated with BOTULISM. A delay that has only taken + 15 months to occur. Saved by the bell I suppose from some negative publicity…some negative spying allegations. Who really cares that their privacy now means nothing and that the scientist are also scratching their heads about how exactly this latest (convenient) sideshow can be real?
How much is it really costing New Zealand to protect John Keys credibility I wonder?
“It is not usual to test dairy products for the presence of Clostridium botulinum.”
That is interesting.
LOLZ, me beat around the bush, now that is funny, i think that you are wrong when you posit that the ‘IT contractor’ is likely to be the GCSB,
There is a distinction between the two arms of intelligence,(hah intelligence here being an oxymoron in terminology), what i have is the sneaking suspicion that this ‘contractor’ to Parliamentary Services is simply a front company for the SIS,
As far as i can ascertain it is the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Chief Executive Andrew Kibblewhite who is probably carrying less guilt in the whole process of the initial obtaining of the Dunne/Vance phone/email records and Kibblewhite is simply being used as a convenient excuse, the toilet if you will, down which the Prime Minister is attempting to flush His knowledge of the illegally gained phone/email records,
It appears from what is known that Eaggleson, the Prime Ministers chief of Staff was the point man fronting the Parliamentary Service on behalf of the Prime Minister, and if threats were made in order to force Parliamentary Services to hand over anything, then Eaggleson would have been issuing such threats,
Did Andrew Kibblewhite know the full extent of the illegal information gathering occurring on behalf of the Henry Inquiry, you bet, along with everyone else on the Beehives 9th floor obviously including Eaggleson who strong armed Parliamentary Services into agreeing to the release,
Why if it is in fact the SIS acting in drag as a private IT contractor to Parliamentary Services go to all the trouble of strong-arming Parliamentary Services into ‘releasing’ the Dunne/Vance phone/email records???,
To provide a layer of protection to the 9th floor of the Beehive, the Prime Ministers Office, should the s**t, as it did, get caught in the ventilation system and the smell get spread far and wide, and, should my ‘sneaking suspicion’ that the Parliamentary Services ‘IT contractor’ is the SIS using a private company as a ‘front’ to monitor the communications into and out of the Parliaments precinct Parliamentary Services were to be shouldered with the blame creating a smokescreen within the furore where the ‘IT contractors’ actions were minimalized thus attracting scant attention,
i doubt Dunne, who’s every word must be suspect in this whole sordid little tale will appear befor the Privileges Committee hearing later this month and further doubt that any one of substance from the Prime Ministers office will either,
The Prime Minister suggesting that no-one, not Kibblewhite, not Eaggleson, who obviously had full knowledge of the email data, informed Him of this beggars belief and is simply one large slab of bullshit to far from the ever Slippery Prime Minister…