Posts by Matthew Poole
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Been waiting for an excuse to break out this classic comic from Oatmeal about the "joys" of buying (I'll get my coat as soon as I finish this post) into The Cult of the iJobs.
I think Apple make beautiful products, aesthetically, but I'm one of these people who objects to not even being allowed to change the colour of a window's title bar (one of the main ways I tell which window has focus, and don't you dare tell me that I need to drag my eyes away from my work area to look at the top of the screen!) without having to jump through ridiculous hoops. Don't believe me? Try it, Apple lovers. You can't do it. You have to create a whole new theme, and to do that you have to go hunting through Google to find out how. Windows, Gnome, KDE, all of those lesser systems make it a matter of a handful of clicks, but oh no, the Holy iJobs has decreed that users may only change the appearance of the Blessed Operating System through much effort and angst.
Fuck that shit, Silent Bob! -
And the SIS don't vet candidates
That should be political candidates. Obviously they vet employment candidates.
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Obviously I misunderstood what I read about vetting of MPs, but clearly at least some of them, such as Pull'ya Benefit, do get vetted. What's so special about Bennett that she gets vetted? I would hardly call being the Minister of Social Development and Minister of Youth Affairs posts of great import to national security. She's not even on any select committees. So if she's vetted, one reasonably assumes that other Ministers are vetted too. If that was an assumption too far, my bad.
NRT, the SIS don't "get a veto" on anything. They make no decisions about granting clearances. They provide the information and a recommendation, but the clearance is granted by the head of the organisation responsible for the classified information in question. ie: Broad's designees grant clearances for Police personnel, Matapere's designees grant clearances for Defence personnel, and so forth. Tucker only grants clearances for information classified by NZSIS. It's entirely possible for the head of a granting agency to ignore the SIS's recommendation, though there would doubtless be hard questions if the person was later found to have leaked classified information.
And the SIS don't vet candidates, so even if they did grant clearances they still wouldn't get to do it until after an election. You can vote for whoever you like, and they can be elected, no matter what the role of the SIS in all of this. -
Phil, don't forget Police. STG has an establishment of 60, I believe, plus probably half that in support staff (radio techs, etc). DPS shares a lot of the support staff, but has its own constables. Thinking about it, AOS are probably also TS-cleared. Also intelligence analysts, senior officers (all commissioned are TS-cleared, I would assume), etc.
900 for defence? Really? SAS plus 1 Commando is over 100 fighters, never mind their support staff. A lot of the support staff are cleared highly because they have to look after functions that involved TS material. A friend was TS-cleared because he was a network engineer supporting TS networks, for example.
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Seriously though, are MPs really vetted and "cleared"? We have a right to elect who we want - even if they're a secret Taliban.
Vetted, yes. Cleared, that's up to the PM (I assume, given that they're head of DPMC). Cabinet Ministers are all cleared, because things like deciding to go to war are within their purview.
Being vetted doesn't mean you get a clearance, it just means you get investigated so that the person who does grant the clearances can make an informed decision. And MPs have to be vetted because there are select committees that have sensitive responsibilities. Putting someone onto a committee that deals with defence matters, for example, and then finding out that, actually, they're on the hook to some Chinese mafioso for gambling debts isn't a very good look. Doesn't mean they can't be elected, but it does mean they're probably not a good choice for handling national security material.Joanna, if you didn't have to submit to a credit check it was only Secret. And not in the least surprised that MFAT requires clearance, given what their role is in our international relations.
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Ben, I guess you could use gold, but the cost would be horrendous. Maybe I should've said "there's nothing better than lead at being a vaguely-affordable radiation sheild" :)
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Phil, I'm quite familiar with SIGS, as that aspect of governments' activities is an interest. The reality is that we just don't go gung-ho on classification like the Americans do. We don't have an entire law enforcement agency full of people with Top Secret clearance, for example. We couldn't muster 12,000 people if we gave every private, airman and rating TS clearance, and we don't. Even junior officers only get Secret.
Every Cabinet Minister is vetted to TS. Every MP is vetted to at least Secret. Even if every MP was vetted to TS, and every one of them had six vetted staff, that's still fewer than a thousand people. They don't all have six vetted staff, and they're not all vetted to TS. Many MPs will never be vetted that high in their entire careers, because they'll never need to be.
Most cops never go near classified material, though my understanding is that they're all vetted to Confidential just through the process of becoming constables, and obviously the DPS and STG are all vetted to TS. Not sure about the AOS. Similarly most military personnel don't get clearance, though there are quite broad swathes of the trades that need it because of their roles - signallers/comms operators, for example, and intelligence personnel. The SAS all have TS, for obvious reasons, and above a certain grade all officers will be vetted before gaining further promotion. That, however, only equates to another few hundred people. Most MFAT policy staff are vetted, though where S ends and TS begins isn't something that people talk about so I only know that there's a line. Although every employee walking the hallways of the SIS and GCSB buildings is TS vetted, that's fewer than 500 people. Our military support operations aren't surrounded by people with clearance, even to Secret, never mind to TS.
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The Grauniad has the backstory on the leak and the leaker:
Bradley Manning, aka Bradass87, was the leaker of the video showing the AH64 shooting in Afghanistan. Given that he's been in federal custody for several months now, I can't see how he could also be the leaker of this lot of information since the implication from Assange is that there's been coordination about release timing that involved the leaker.
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Phil, what's really funny is that I have TSA open in another tab - link found while I was trying to recall the name for SIPRNet - but hadn't yet started reading. Spooky.
And that is a very, very scary number. Terrifying, even, when one considers that Top Secret information is that which poses the risk of grave harm to national security interests if it is released. I bet nothing like 12,000 people (310m/854k=363. 4.37m/363=12,072) in NZ have TS clearances. I'd be amazed if it's half that. -
Sure, in the olden days (circa 1980), your 19" Ferguson had toxic stuff in it
And in the "olden days" of last week a brand-new CRT is still loaded up with lead and other lovely things that you really don't want in a landfill. They're still heavy for a reason. Pretty much everything with a PCB in it has some contents that are environmentally-unfriendly, though that is changing. CRTs will never fit into that category, because there's nothing better than lead at being a radiation shield.
Also, as environmental-awareness improves so does the cleanliness of the contents of electronics. Today's LCD is much cleaner than one from five years ago.