Posts by Matthew Poole
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: all the fault…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
less likely that a chair is going to stand up and say “man the minister [who is also the PM and holds my political future in his hand] screwed this up bad” than in some other countries.
Which, by extension, would make it logical for the Chair of the Intelligence & Security Committee to be the Leader of the Opposition. They thus have zero to fear from incurring the wrath of the PM by asking awkward questions. Keep the majority as members of the governing coalition but make the leadership someone who is not in any way beholden to the PM.
What I would really like to see is the PM ejected from membership of or participation in the I&SC (beyond nominating members), each agency appointing and funding a full-time Inspector General, and those IGs (as well as the PM) being fully answerable to the I&SC but with its restrictions on asking questions completely removed.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: all the fault…, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
I don’t mind the majority of the committee being from the house majority.
I would mind considerably less if one of them wasn't statutorily required to be the person whose agencies are meant to be kept in check by this Committee. And did I mention that he's also the Chair? The fox guarding the hen house is a rather apt metaphor.
It also makes sense for Norman, as a co-leader of the third-largest party in the House, to be a member. I suspect that he wouldn't have got a look-in if the Greens were only four or five MPs and Labour had got the rest of the seats the Green Party currently occupies.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: all the fault…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
Its true of much of our Committee structure. It’s good for some things, and avoids some things we might want it to avoid, but it doesn’t do hard-hitting inquiries in public or private.
What I find so discomfiting about this situation is that, unlike pretty much every other executive branch, the spooks have no public face outside recruiting. Even Defence and the Police, the other national security portfolios, have substantial public activity. And some searching found me this debate from 2009, when the current members of the Intelligence and Security Committee were ratified. Of particular note is this, from Russell Norman:
...the Intelligence and Security Committee has very few powers to do anything much to make the security services answer questions. For example, if the chief executive officer of a security service declares any information to be sensitive then we cannot ask any further questions about it. That is written in the Act. We do not know what the information is, but if the chief executive officer of any security service says “No, the question you are asking is of a sensitive nature; it is sensitive information.”, then they do not have to answer any questions about it. So it is fundamentally different to the select committees established under the Standing Orders of this House.
Unlike select committees, the chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee is the Minister responsible for the security services. The way select committees are established in this House is that the chair is always independent—it is not the Minister—so that the chair of the committee, which is meant to be keeping these Government agencies accountable, is at arm’s length from the Minister. What this means is that very few people know what the security services do. It is very difficult for the Intelligence and Security Committee to get to the bottom of what the security services do, because we do not have the powers. It means that the chair of the committee is actually the Minister, so it puts us in a very difficult situation.
So we've got a Committee that is one-fifth the Minister in charge of the portfolio, one-fifth the Leader of the Opposition, two-fifths the Minister's hand-picked nominees (currently Dunne and Banks), and the remaining fifth a nominee of the Leader of the Opposition (currently Norman). I count three fifths of the Committee as being part of the House majority, and thus not terribly inclined to vote in ways that might displease the governing party. It's legislatively composed to have no independence from the ministerial or operational leader.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: all the fault…, in reply to DexterX,
the culture at the GCSB is that individuals act in accordance with directions, are task focused and work largely in isolation of each other.
Compartmentalisation is a characteristic of spooky organisations, so nothing surprising there, and ELINT is the kind of field where one person can be extraordinarily productive. Being, at least historically, peopled with military types, the culture being compliant is also not surprising.
Where it falls apart is where there’s little internal oversight and, it would seem, some less-than-spectacular performance by internal legal counsel. I’m still not resiling from my position that GCSB were not wrong to rely on what they were told by OFCANZ about KDC’s residence status, but their legal counsel should have known the applicable law and understood that what he had been granted made him a protected person (assuming OFCANZ told them the correct information). That is, after all, their job. And if there was any confusion they should’ve gone back to OFCANZ to seek clarity. I have no problem with GCSB not making direct enquiries of DIA and instead working through the Police, but I expect them to do more than go through the motions of checking how that information affects them.I was listening to an old Radio NZ podcast the other day, and the interviewee was formerly a senior counsel to the US DoJ. One comment he made was that the constitutionally-established oversight roles that the legislature and judiciary have wrt the executive’s agencies are taken seriously, and used seriously. The problem we’re having here, I realised, is that the head of the executive is also the person who has control of the spy agencies’ operations and is the person who chairs the legislature’s oversight committee. That should probably be changed.
Looking at the Intelligence and Security Committee Act 1996, I note that the Committee is explicitly forbidden to enquire “into any matter that is operationally sensitive, including any matter that relates to intelligence collection and production methods or sources of information”, which effectively castrates any possibility that the Committee could act as a check on the operations of the spy agencies.Key is setting a new high watermark for dishonesty and incompetence.
Well, that's not surprising either. This is, after all, the man who only considers it necessary for ministers of the Crown to act legally, not ethically.
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Hard News: Media3: Standards Showdown, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
We should have a national test that all children sit each year…
There used to be something similar. I have strong memories of taking written language and maths aptitude tests at the beginning of at least two years of my primary schooling, using standardised-format answer sheets. Someone out there will know the ones I mean. Are those no longer used?
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I'm more interested in this revelation:
However, it has been revealed that on February 16 police told GCSB that the spying may have been illegal - but GCSB's legal department concluded there was no problem.
ETA: I don't find it encouraging that they had a 3/58 rate of questionable legal accuracy, either.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: We need an Inquiry!, in reply to Sacha,
Not much left under the rug.
Except a court process. You know, justice.
With a statutory limitation period which had expired on the easily-proved charge, and a shittily-worded law that provided a defence through which one could drive a bulldozer to the other charge. The Police do, contrary to the beliefs of people in this forum, consider whether a defence (remember, reasonable doubt) is likely to succeed before mounting a prosecution.
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Legal Beagle: Kim Dotcom: We need an Inquiry!, in reply to Sacha,
BREAKING: PM admits Kim Dotcom was mentioned briefly in a GCSB briefing in Feb; but he wasn't told about surveillance till Sept
There goes that 'fact'.
And then you read the full context, which was that a photo was shown as one of 11 in a montage as part of a bigger presentation about general GCSB operations, and the operation was mentioned as an example of cooperation with the Police. Suddenly the scandal doesn't seem like quite such a scandal after all, especially when there was no written briefing provided to accompany the presentation.
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Legal Beagle: Dotcom spying: Crown…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Because the Americans are subject to no form of oversight or restraint as to how they use or release this information.
Which still doesn't make it a Privacy Act breach. It'll be called sharing information between law enforcement agencies, which is entirely proper. The Act is very, very unclear about sharing of information between law enforcement agencies, but is quite explicit about NZ adhering to international agreements such as the ones about law enforcement cooperation.
Also, things like this will be disseminated as classified material which then imparts its own protections, and that protection will be observed, because respect for information classification is a nicety that has very real significance to intelligence-sharing relationships in other areas.Apart from anything else, streaming data in realtime serves no purpose beyond demonstrating the size of the various cops and spies genitalia.
Not at all inclined to disagree. The Scoop story makes it sound like a lot of the reason for doing it was for the purpose of proving that our cops can play in the bigs, and that goes with the whole combined operations raid using helicopters and the STG, too.
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Legal Beagle: Dotcom spying: Crown…, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Was this activity - sending a video of the raid to the US in realtime legal?
Privacy Act? Reasonable use of public funds? Police code of conduct re. releasing information?
Why would it have been a breach of the Privacy Act? It's not a public release, it's internal documentation of the operation and that's quite proper. It's either legal or it's not, there's no change just because it got shared with the people who kicked off the operation.
If they were sending the footage back to HQ anyway, which I'm sure they would've, there's no extra cost to send it overseas. All the links and technology have other purposes, so it's not like this would have been created just for the raid.
As for the CoC, see first point. It's not a general release of information, it's information-sharing to a narrow group of interested organisations about a joint operation.