Hard News by Russell Brown

It's in the Wild

I have a copy of the 156-page police affidavit excerpted by the Dominion Post as "The Terrorism Files". Handwritten notes on the scanned pages and the nature of the US-based site hosting the PDF document both strongly suggest that it has not been leaked by the police, but by someone on the defence side.

It is, as you might expect, fascinating.

I am not going to link to it (although probably hundreds of people have it now, and it's effectively game over for its secrecy), or directly quote from it, but I will, as others have done, briefly characterise the evidence.

In context, some of the headline quotes in the Fairfax papers do read like bluster, and I can see why the evidence did not meet the high threshold for charges under the Terrorism Suppression Act (although the Solictor General will have seen informant evidence redacted here). Other evidence in the affidavit strikes me as much more damning.

But that's it. I'm not in a position to invite a nastygram from the Solicitor General. I'm also not enabling discussion for this post. You can jump over to a thread at Kiwiblog if you like.

Add me to the list of people who think there should be an inquiry. That inquiry might find that the police response was disproportionate in scale. I can't imagine that it will discover, as various interested parties have been insisting, that there was nothing to see here.