Posts by Matthew Poole
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Speaker: Naked Inside the Off-Ramp, in reply to Pete George,
one saying they could spy on behalf of other agencies
There was no such clause. What there was was a clause requiring them to assist other government agencies.
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Speaker: Naked Inside the Off-Ramp, in reply to Richard Love,
the GCSB was secretly ignoring its legislation.
The GCSB was the recipient of a law that was ambiguous in the face of the actual operational pattern of being a supporting agency. The demonisation of GCSB as deliberately breaking the law and knowing they were doing so doesn't stand up to scrutiny against Sir Bruce's description of how support services were delivered. As I say in that post, fixing the ambiguity (whether in the affirmative or the negative) is a small handful of words in the right place in the law. It doesn't need this rushed offensive on civil liberties.
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Speaker: Naked Inside the Off-Ramp, in reply to Idiot Savant,
I think the Greens could be persuaded to accept serious reform
I think serious oversight would satisfy the Greens, by and large. An independent watchdog with resources and teeth, reporting to an empowered select committee on which the PM doesn't even sit, never mind sitting as Chair, would go a really long way towards soothing the Greens' collective fevered brow. The very real consequences of disestablishing NZSIS and/or GCSB and withdrawing from Echelon, as outlined in the Kiwi Politico piece I linked before, should be sufficient to win that argument on the day, but only if the intelligence services are subjected to high-quality oversight from both within and without Parliament.
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Speaker: Naked Inside the Off-Ramp, in reply to Russell Brown,
demonstrate that Key was lying about his foreknowledge of the original raid.
Nearly. He's asserting that Key had foreknowledge of Dotcom before the raid, whereas Key is claiming that he'd never heard of the man up until the circus was in town and the master was in the ring.
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Paul Buchanan has a good discussion of the actual possibility of leaving Echelon over here. It's worth a read, particularly since it's the kind of area were he's absolutely an expert.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Quite possibly, but I haven't engaged with him sufficiently to find out. The mutual acquaintance was bitching about how she's over so many people complaining about the GCSB legislation, and voicing the suspicion that most won't have read the law or understood it. She at least had the grace to concede that I would have done both when I objected to being caught by such a blanket statement.
"Nothing to hide, nothing to fear" seems to strike a chord with that group. I'm waiting for someone to try and invoke Godwin after I pointed out that it's pretty much quoting Himmler, with all the associated badness of the quality of the justification that that entails.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Stephen R,
John Key saying that the people who oppose the bill just don’t understand it
Friend of an acquaintance on FB said, quote, "typical [political left], all noise and hype and misinformation ... [opposing forces don't understand the law]" after I talked about the potential for GCSB to spy on the likes of Greenpeace as a group, before going on to say that the GCSB will have to get a warrant through a judge before conducting interceptions. So not only was he parrotting Key, he also doesn't understand the law he's defending as not being as bad as portrayed.
Fuck I get sick of low-applied-intellect voters.
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Hard News: The GCSB Bill: eleventh-hour arguments, in reply to Amanda Wreckonwith,
Why all the concentration on Dunne?
Because he’s his own party whip. He’s answerable only to himself, what with being leader of a party of one, and having been stripped of his ministerial warrants there’s nothing Key can do as punishment other than withholding return of any ministerial warrants for the remainder of the term.
The odds of a National MP crossing the floor are vanishingly tiny. This lot lack the moral integrity to consider standing up for civil liberties rather than following the party line.ETA: And Banks is just a National MP wearing a different shade of blue. He's an affront to pretty much everything Act supposedly stands for.
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Hard News: The GCSB Bill: eleventh-hour arguments, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
newbie ACT MPs
uh, what? Act's only MP is Banks, who's about as likely to vote against these bills as he is to announce his impending nuptials to his secret gay lover. Prosser is NZ First, and NZ First are voting agin.
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Hard News: Fluency, ease of manner - and…, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Epic fail
Made more epic by being personnel from GCHQ.