Nickey Hager: Ugly man, ugly invasion of his property

I’m surprised it’s taken so long for this story to become a thing.

In searching for the source of the data used in his book Dirty Politics, the police enlisted the aid of Hager’s bank, Westpac, who happily handed over to them all his private banking information including over 10 months of his banking transactions from all of his accounts. This was all handed over without a warrant.

The revelation Westpac handed over author Nicky Hager's bank records to the police - without so much as a by-your-leave from the courts - should send a shiver down the spine.
    It ought, too, to be a wake-up call to any other corporates out there who think their customers' records are fair game for any authority figure that comes knocking.
    They are not.
    Kudos to the likes of Spark, Vodafone, Air New Zealand, Jetstar and TradeMe for recognising that - and refusing a similar request from the police.
    In the case of Hager's records - sought when the police were trying to find who hacked blogger Cameron Slater's computer (providing the material for Hager's book Dirty Politics) - there is more at stake than simply tracking down a potential criminal.

Yes, there is.

Leave aside for the moment that Hager himself publishes book based on illegal access to people’s private data (Whale Oil’s, Don Brash’s, Helen Clark’s, anyone you like really).

(And leave aside that Mr Whale Oil himself ended up in court for publishing a businessman’s illegal data.)

And leave aside if you can the fact Hager’s legal team calls this a “privacy breach.”

So the irony does go all the way down.

But there’s something very wrong with a bank handing over a person’s private banking information to the authorities without that person’s permission, without their knowledge and without the appropriate legal warrant.

Even if that person is Nicky Hager.

There’s something very wrong because to gain that information properly the authorities should provide a warrant—and I include in that number the Inland Revenue. The need to provide a warrant issued by a different branch of government, to whom the authorities requesting it must provide some proof of your culpability—is a small but valuable piece of due process providing all individuals some legal protection against abuse by the authorities of their authority.

It is not something that should be ignored. The more it is, the less protection we have.

And the fact is that small but valuable piece of due process has been ignored too much too recently—banks being required to hand over private information to the Inland Revenue without a warrant whenever Inland Revenue care to ask for it, and to the police whenever the bank thinks you might be handling too much of the folding stuff. So banks are probably so used to handing over to the authorities whatever is asked for and whenever they ask for it—and to give it up three bags full.

Doesn’t make it right.

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• “The broader concept which a so-called privacy right obscures is our legitimate property rights…”
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• “The ‘right to privacy’ is a misguided attempt to save some shreds of certain [legitimate] rights while retaining a way to eviscerate others.”
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• “In ‘the old days’ the need to obtain a search warrant was your protection against every state agency except the IRD. But we are now in a new age.”
  “The Moment of Truth”: Too many agendas
• “’Politics is: the gutless in thrall to the clueless. Therein lies its real dirtiness, not in the machinations, grubby though they may be, revealed in equally grubby Nicky Hager’s latest dump of stolen e-mails’.”
  The Real Dirtiness in NZ Politics
• “The #DirtyPolitics saga saw the commentariat almost immediately begin comparing John Key to their favourite modern-day bogeyman, Richard Nixon. The real connection is not so much dirty trick s or Judith Collins’s alleged enemies list; the real connection is ideology – or, to be precise, the lack of one.”
  The #1 reason for #dirtypolitics: the barrenness of the "centre-right"
  

The Real Dirtiness in NZ Politics

The subject has thankfully gone cold, but Lindsay Perigo is running hot on the real dirtiness in NZ politics:

“Every election” said H. L. Mencken, “is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods.” Elections, we may agree, are a process whereby loot is exchanged for votes, to gratify the power-lust of sub-humans who crave control over real humans.
    Our 2014 election campaign kicked off with a frenzy of auctioneering that would have startled even Mencken. Tens of millions here, hundreds of millions there—in reckless indifference to where it might all come from and flagrant contempt for the Other People whose Money it is.
    Reacting to Labour’s multi-trillion dollar health package, outgoing Health Minister Tony Ryall was moved to note, “The bidding war between parties on the left is now out of control.” Was it ever under control? Did National ever behave any differently?
    The best that might be said of National is that its bribery has been marginally less irresponsible than Labour’s.
    What is especially ominous about this latest bribery epidemic is that it takes place against a backdrop of the most dumbed-down electorate ever. Our latter-day child-molesters of the mind, the education bureaucracy and the teacher unions, have seen to that—in faithful obeisance to their unacknowledged mentor, Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who enjoined communists the world over to destroy Western Civilisation not by overt revolution but by stealth, a “Long March through the Culture,” infiltrating and mortally corrupting all core institutions and organisations.

The real dirtiness in NZ politics – the real source of all the alleged dirty laundry aired and being aired?

Conviction politics has become extinct. “Opinion polls,” Mike Moore once admitted, “have made cowards of us all.” Politics is: the gutless in thrall to the clueless. Therein lies its real dirtiness, not in the machinations, grubby though they may be, revealed in equally grubby Nicky Hager’s latest dump of stolen e-mails.

What to do?  Read on, MacDuff.

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• The #1 reason for #dirtypolitics...

Hager, rhymes with macabre

Nicky Hager’s thesis appears to be that negative attack politics damages our political system. He makes the case in a book that is a negative political attack, the fourth in a series of attacks he has hoped each time will change an election.

Nicky Hager is a privacy campaigner utterly opposed to government intrusion into private data and communications. Nicky Hager has published four books based on data derived from stolen communications.

Nicky Hager is appalled that some bloggers (Cameron Slater, David Farrar) are National Party members, and are part of National Party campaigning. He is relaxed however about other blogs and bloggers (Martin Bradbury, The Double Standard ) being members of other parties and part of other parties’ campaigns.

Nicky Hager is an unreliable witness.

But so too are the dim bulbs in the mainstream media who allow themselves to be manipulated.

The mainstream media has failed, still, to come to terms with blogs and bloggers -- part of the reason Hager’s claims at this election get traction. The mainstream media and its commentariat section have been ignorant for years about what constitutes objective journalism. Failing to understand that objectivity does not mean neutrality – that even in selecting the facts to report, every journalist necessarily betrays their own position – since the birth of blogs the mainstream has risen up in horror at bloggers broadcasting their own opinions loud and proud in every word, sentence and paragraph they publish.

To bloggers and blog readers, this the pleasure of blogs.  To the mainstream finger-waggers, this is a crime. And not just do bloggers broadcast their own opinions – and none so loudly locally as Cameron Slater – they have the temerity to publish them without the imprimatur of the media’s gate-keepers. This crime, still unforgiveable in some circles, has the MSM ready to convict every time the words Slater and Cameron come up.

I say: note the facts, and beware of hyperbole.

Nicky Hager (rhymes with saga) makes a short story long.  But that is no excuse to make it wrong.

The always-wrong Armstrong for example has already decided Cameron’s openly-boasted-about downloading of documents from an insecure Labour Party website is akin to Watergate – ignoring that Watergate was an amateurish attempted theft that only brought down a president because he tried to cover it up, not a blogger publicly downloading documents the website had made open to the world.

The MSM has mostly accepted unquestioningly Hager’s claim that he is “letting people know about the government” (as he told ZB’s Hosking this morning), yet all he’s told us about, at best, is what some party hacks got up to.  Interesting, maybe; but devastating? Really?

The claims last night that secret SIS dirt on Phil Goff was dished to Cameron to serve up already looks like hogwash: being revealed now as as a claim Cameron was invited to file an Official Information Application to get details of Phil Goff’s briefing by the SIS – a claim some miles down the road of hyperbole broadcast last night, and another already denied by the Whale.

Perhaps the most pathetic of all the claims that have emerged so far (and at the time of writing this, Dim Post seems to have the most concise summary) is the whole chapter of the “explosive” tome devoted to Hager’s belated discovery that David Farrar is an active National Party member and pollster – something evident to most of us since at least 1996 when Farrar was on Usenet, and widely advertised since, not least on the very blog that Hager claims is a National Party front, yet repeated breathlessly this morning by every news broadcast it’s been impossible to avoid. [Farrar answers the hysterics here.]

This is not to totally discount any actual facts that might be found in the book – a book, remember, based on six years of stolen emails, amongst which you’d expect to find at least an interesting tale or two to tell, if you didn’t mind betraying someone’s privacy.

But perhaps the biggest message already from the results of Hager’s carefully-orchestrated document dump is that it’s not a dump at all -- that is, it’s not a dump in the Climategate/Wikileaks sense of dumping a ton of documents online so all the facts can be revealed. Instead, it’s a cherry-picking by Hager of what he considers to be the worst stories imaginable he can spin from the stolen documents.

And if this is the best he can do – if the worst he can say about a collusion between senior government ministers, party staff and high-profile bloggers is that they exchange emails and occasionally post anonymously, then it seems this little country at the bottom of the South Pacific has less to worry about than we might have thought. You know, compared to evidence from, say, the States that the Justice Department there was compiling data from journalists’ phones; that their IRS is actively targeting political opponents of the president; that an opposition film-maker has been jailed based on trumped-up charges …  in the cold light of day I can’t help thinking that by comparison it makes what Hager so breathlessly revealed all seem remarkably benign.

Which I hardly think was the conclusion Hager was inviting us to draw.

Hager v Whale

Nicky Hager (rhymes with lager) alleges that politics is dirty. He alleges it as if that’s news. As if the corpses of a thousand political victims never happened.

He further alleges that John Key uses a friendly blog, mainly Cameron Slater‘s, to help get his message out. As if that’s unique. As if not one in a thousand leftwing blogs have any affiliation whatsoever with unions, Labour Party, Greens or the German Billionaire Marxist Maori nationalist party.¹

He even further alleges, on the basis of emails and webs hacks he alleges were stolen (somehow) while Cameron’s website was hacked (which doesn’t explain how Cameron’s offline emails would be hacked, but there you go), that (and here I quote from Hager’s press release):

During the 2011 election campaign … the prime minister’s office used its knowledge of secret SIS documents to tip off Slater and arrange an attack on the Labour leader.

That last paragraph of mine is as tangled as Hager’s usual reasoning. Nonetheless, if true, it is political dynamite.

But is it true? Can he prove it? Has he proven it? Is this really news?  I have no idea. None whatsoever. And neither does anyone else who hasn’t read the book – but expect a slew of commentary by those who have by this hour tomorrow morning, and a to  of  innuendo from every politician on all sides of the electoral divide whether they’ve read it or not.

It’s no accident it’s released so close to an election that few will bother to check if the mud has any bottom – nor that Hager’s focus on dirt in politics shines a light only on Team Blue, when Teams Red, White, Brown, Black and Green have been and are no angels. Nor has Hager himself (once again, these are stolen communications he’s relying on, right? )

And it’s true too that Cameron has been happy all along to downplay the importance of the SIS and GCSB being granted powers to bug and surveil without warrants, mostly on the basis that it’s okay if his mates are doing it, or it’s being done  their behalf, or they’re the ones in power while it’s done. But if he had been leaked material from SIS with which to attack Phil Goff in 2011, it must have been pretty bloody innocuous since not one member of the commentariat can remember anything remotely larcenous raised against him.

So it’s entirely probable that, as with every other Nicky Hager book since publishing began, he is making too much stew from too few onions.

If however he can prove it, and if that proof is actually and only contained within the pages of his book, I’m sure you’ll hear about it– without having to pay him any money – in every headline between now and Christmas.  And it will be an outrage.

And Cameron will still enjoy every headline,interview and new blog reader that he gets. Which by September will probably be counted in their hundreds, if not the thousands.

---

1. Liberty Scott’s quip was so good I had to borrow it.

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• Hager, rhymes with macabre

#SurveillanceState: When acts of honour are made illegal

"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done
|today, then any act of honour or restitution has to be hidden underground."
-Ragnar Danneskjold

The government wants to spy on your communications and harvest your private details. Actually, they already consider they have the power to do that—and have done  it to some—now they just want to do it legally.

Their argument is they need to spy on you to protect you.

But this argument falls at the first hurdle. If the “war” they are engaged in involves warding off terrorists, then that war requires naming and targeting the enemy. It does not require, and nor should it involve, a massive spying dragnet on New Zealanders.

The government says it will be careful with the information about us that it harvests.

But the kerfuffle over the public release of journalist Andrea Vance’s private details gives us a clue how little the agents of government value the privacy of our private details.  We have their assurance this is not the tip of an iceberg. But people’s private details have been made public in vast numbers by ACC, by the Ministry of Health, and by Paula Bennett’s Ministry of Social Development. “Oops,” they say after it happens. But “oops” doesn’t help those who’ve been blundered upon.

And the news that government departments who extract private information from us will soon be sharing information with the Inland Revenue, the department dedicated to extracting money from us, gives cause for great alarm--particularly in an age when cash-strapped governments will do anything for money, and in the US the Inland Revenue Service has been used by Presidents past and present to frighten and scare off their political enemies. 

This is just one reason to spurn the argument that if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear from Big Brother monitoring your communications. Because those communications will more and more routinely be used against you to enforce, right or wrong,either the government’s will or the will of those in government.

Consider the revelations that the very journalist who broke a story about illegal spying was snooped on by Parliament’s bureaucrats. “The violation of Vance’s privacy is a prospect now facing every citizen in the country under the GCSB Bill,” says Gordon Campbell, and he’s right. Get offside with the government of the day, and don’t be surprised if your private details become public, whether by design or by incompetence. “The boundaries of privacy are being erased for no discernible reason, and in the absence of any proportionate threat… But who will be watching the watchers [under the new bill]? Why, it will be the same kind of people – in key respects, the very same people – who brought about the Andrea Vance scandal.”

Bullied investigative journalist Jon Stephenson is another local case in point. His communications were allegedly monitored on behalf of the very defence force that a leaked NZ Defence Force document reveals lists investigative journalists as subversive threats.  Would you like to be surveilled by the American NSA at the invitation of our Army? Or bullied by the SAS because what you say makes someone uncomfortable?

Kim DotCom is another case in point.  What he is alleged to have committed is a crime, fair enough. But while that crime has still yet to be proven, his life has been made public, his property has been stripped, and the NZ government has bent over backwards to give agents of the US government access beyond law, and without proof, to do over a New Zealand citizen.

Which makes the argument ‘we have nothing to worry about’ absurd. Because at the moment the US government’s departments and security agencies are going rogue. Journalists are bugged and surveilled; political campaigners are targeted by the IRS; air travellers are humiliated and delayed; and a programme of drone strikes controlled by the CIA, and apparently monitored by no-one, suggests any idea the powers given them by the PATRIOT Act to fight terrorists has long become simply power itself, exercised for the sake of itself.

Again, you may not like everything about Bradley Manning or Edward Snowden, or even Nicky Hager, but if what they and others have been revealing does not leave you using the word “frightening” to describe many of those revelations, then your head is planted more firmly in the sand than Cameron Slater’s fingers are in his ears.

If it was disturbing when we learned Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World hacked people’s phones,  then how much more frightening is it when folk are surveilled by people with an arsenal of guns, drones and IRS agents, and not just a basement full of printer’s ink.

When you realise what they can do to you, why would you not think twice about what you’re doing.

Whistle blowers like Manning and Snowden have become heroes to many because what they’ve exposed about illegal hidden government operations would not have appeared in public without them—and what have exposed about legal government operations is frightening.  As Ragnar Danneskjold says in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged,

"When robbery is done in open daylight by sanction of the law, as it is done today, then any act of honour or restitution has to be hidden underground."

That’s a dangerous place in which to operate.

The Ayn Rand Center’s Yaron Brook makes the relevant final point that only needs one addition to make it local:

A proper government is the agent of its citizens, not the master. In its role as the agent, the default should be openness, not secrecy;  in very few contexts is it appropriate for the government to operate in secrecy. Only when the government can convince its citizens that secrecy is necessary for protecting their rights is it acceptable. With respect to the NSA [and GCSB and SIS] surveillance programs, that burden has not been met.

And nor is it likely to be.

Truth in headlining

I’ve seen a few quotes and headlines around the traps today that need to be rewritten to make them more accurate.  There used to be a move for “truth in sentencing.”  Here’s what “truth in headlining” might look like.

* * At the Sub-Standard the headline reads High unemployment helps Nats keep wages down , when if accuracy was important it would instead say:

High wages help keep unemployment up.”

* * Hone Kaa of the Maori child lobby organisation Te Kahui Mana Ririki told a select committee enquiry that "For the sake of our children we support the prohibition of tobacco."  When if accuracy was important what he should have said was:

 For the sake of our own commitment to the the notion that nanny knows best, we want to show you what real bullying looks like.”

After all, which is more dangerous: tobacco, or government force?

* * At Labour’s Red Alert blog, David “Silent T” Cunliffe opines, “There is a quiet revolution underway in macroeconomics,” when what he really should have said if he were accurate would be:

Central bankers looking for excuses to let inflation rip.”

* * And in any number of places, John Key has been quoted as saying about Don Brash’s stolen emails, “"I think the computer system was hacked into, that's my view but I can't back that up."  When what he would really be saying if honesty were a virtue would be:

I know who stole them and passed them on to Nicky Hager--and anyone with even half a brain could work it out for themselves--but I’m still not telling, so there.”

And that’s just a few from an almost random sample.  What other examples can you find?

Non-investigation files still Brashly unreleased [update 2]

Whale Oil is right. Why are the police releasing unedited in all its glory the Tony Veitch file, but not the full unedited file of their non-investigation into who illegally stole the Leader of the Opposition's emails?

What's going on here? As a commenter at Whale's blog suggested, does someone have to kick Nicky Hager in the spine to see some action? This was a serious security breach at the very highest level of state . . . and it's treated with all the importance of a theft at a school tuck shop.

Who exactly are the police protecting? And what does this say about their partiality? Fran O'Sullivan's conclusion is unchallengable:

This is [all] frankly unacceptable in a democratic system where authorities like the police should be expected to get to the bottom of what was obviously a politically motivated burglary.

UPDATE 1: Brash has called for a formal inquiry into the email theft.

Phil Goff agrees with him. Bill English apparently doesn't.

Is this a clue?

UPDATE 2:  Police Commissioner Howard Broad has appointed an "independent commissioner" to look at the whole issue -- so independent he  just happens to be Broad's Assistant Commissioner.  Reports The Herald [hat tip DPF]:

    Commissioner Broad said continued questioning of the police role could undermine public trust and confidence in the force.
    He ordered a full review of the case, including the recent release of the highly edited file, to be conducted by Assistant Commissioner Steve Shortland of Auckland, with an independent adviser working alongside him. …
    Dr Brash said he was happy with the steps being taken.

Police investigating greens?

The Sunday Star Times published claims yesterday that a police intelligence unit was spying on Greenpeace protestors.

Since this was the same Sunday Star Times, and the same so-called reporters, that not so long ago published claims that Tariana Turia was being bugged by the SIS – a claim investigated and subsequently demolished by Justice Paul Neazor, who called it "a work of fiction"  – you’ll forgive me if I don’t lend any credence to the report without better evidence than Nicky Hager and Anthony Hubbard provide.

But let’s assume for argument’s sake that the claim is true.  So what? The groups are said to include the likes of Safe Animals from Exploitation (SAFE), Peace Action Wellington, GE-free groups, and Save Happy Valley.  All of these are law-breakers – as is their ‘mother ship’  Greenpeace, who if you’ll remember were supporters of the likes of the Sea Shepherd, which spends time in freezing Antarctic waters trying to sink Japanese whaling ships with all the lives on board. 

These people are not part of a knitting circle.

SAFE have a history of breaking and entering, and destroying people’s property.  It was GE-free groups who broke into Lincoln University a few years back and destroyed experiments worth millions (and, incidentally, risked spreading the GE virus against which they were protesting).  And Save Happy Valley and Peace Action Wellington are nothing like as benevolent as they sound: members of both these groups have been arrested and investigated in the past for wilful damage, and both were included in those arrested last year as part of the Te Qaeda/Urewera 17 operations. 

So even if the claim was proven true, if these groups are being investigated is simply means the police are doing their job.

PS:  If you harbour peaceful feelings about any of these groups, do yourself a favour and search Trevor Loudon’s blog for information on what they get up to, and what they’re involved with.  You’ll raise more than just your eyebrows.  Here’s a few links just to get you started:  Greenpeace, Peace Action Wellington, Save Happy Valley Coalition and animal rights groups.   Says Trevor, “Can't think why the police would be interested in these people. Any ideas?”

UPDATE: From the Dim Post:

    Left wing activists targeted by the police in an ongoing and controversial domestic intelligence operation have reported that they are ‘greatly relieved’ that information about their massive conspiracy to defraud the Social Welfare Department was not passed on to police by paid informer Rob Gilchrist.
    ‘We would have been totally busted,’ admitted Aro Valley resident Jules Fletcher, a 43 year old sickness beneficiary and tactical intelligence officer of the two man revolutionary cell ‘Tino-rangatiratanga People’s Global Jihad for Social and Environmental Justice Now!’.

Exit Maid Marian

Twice in her parliamentary career I've been surprised to find myself cheering on Marian Hobbs, who gave her valedictory speech to parliament last week.

Who wouldn't be surprised?

The  first time I found myself in her corner was with her resolute defence of science and genetic engineering in the face of Nicky Hager and "little creep" John Campbell's pathetic 'corngate' beat-up in the run-up to the 2002 election, when civilised New Zealanders were silently and not-so silently applauding Clark and Hobbs for allowing a GE crop to reach maturity, and reflecting that things could have been a lot worse with Nick Smith in the Environment chair, and will be a lot worse if rumours about Jeanette Fitzsimons taking the chair in a post-election Labour Cabinet were to come to pass.

The second time I applauded Hobbs was just yesterday when I came across her valedictory speech, and not just because she's leaving parliament, but for for her observations on the state of journalism which she identifies is more focused on personalities than it is policies.   This is not just the complaint of someone who's had a bad run with the media -- although it is partly that -- it's also right on the money.

    "Politics is about making decisions, be it the laws we pass or the budgets we approve," she said.  "But modern news media doesn't evaluate our decisions in the light of which policy is best.
    "Instead they build a web around personalities and behaviour. It's about a smiley new face versus the one we are familiar with. The news is about decision makers, rarely about decisions."

This is the reason scandal-mongering and smiley faces flourish in the corridors of power, while policy-makers are either ignored or pursue their work in the shadows - often to the detriment of those whom their policies damage.

"You need only to sound assertive, even when you don't know what you're talking about," she said.

There's a lot of that about, isn't there. When the focus of reporting is on "the game," and who's "winning it" rather than on policies and who's being done over by them, it's no wonder that flatulent fools like Winston Peters -- who's never read a whole policy document right to the end, but is a master at sounding assertive -- gets all the media time he does, while policy analysis -- even on the blogs -- is little more than left versus right.

UPDATE: "As the media often rate how well MPs are doing," David Farrar asked MPs to reverse the favour, and score the media and press gallery.  The results are here: MPs survey of the media.  On a scale of 0-10, very few scored over 5, and then only barely.