Posts by Dylan Reeve
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Joe Wylie,
So the police are to be given the full benefit of the doubt while the hacker(s) receive none. This is exactly the kind of beardstroking apologist nonsense that blighted mainstream media coverage of the Urewera raids and their dismal aftermath.
What doubt is there for the hacker(s) to benefit from? I suppose they could have had information that would lead them to believe there was public interest information to be had, but that seems unlikely.
The benefit of the doubt I'm giving they police is that they know better than we armchair critics how to manage there resources. I really don't see anything here that screams of excess in their approach to the case. So far as I'm aware the case hasn't been allocated a nifty sounding operation name, and I doubt there's a room full of officers working the case 24/7... Someone's computer security was breached, a lot of private communications between them and other were taken and distributed. That seems pretty clearly worthy of police investigation.
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How can we be sure? Given this Govts history with this stuff, I would think it's highly likely they'll be angling for a conviction.
Against who? The police have said they are not investing Hager in relation to any crime, no one has suggested he'll face any charges (I think someone argued that "receiving stolen goods" may count) - but so far as I can see Hager faces no criminal sanction for his writing.
The hacker, on the other hand, definitively broke the law and clearly knew he was doing it. The police will investigate as they should and if they identify him (which I highly doubt) then he'll face charges as you'd expect.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to william blake,
Dylan this is stoopid. Exposing corrupt practice of government is in the public interest, its not something to ‘like’ in a gossipy vicarious way. You seem to be bending over backwards to be balanced but seem to have lost the bigger picture in the process.
I would absolutely decry any attempt to criminalise Hager for his writing. But that is not what's being investigated.
There's clearly no way that Rawshark (or Whaledump, or whatever) knew that he was acting in the public interest when he targeted Slater's communications. That it turned out to be that later is interesting, but ultimately the crime that the police are investigating is a crime regardless of the public interest in the content involved.
Also this is not a case of whistleblowing either - that's usually applied to someone with privileged access to information who then breaks confidence for the public interest. If we start ignoring criminal actions that somehow can be seen after the face to have been in the public interest, what sort of precedent would that set?
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Luke Williamson,
However, following your line of reasoning, if certain police actions do not compromise the execution of others, then they are theoretically capable of investigating every complaint, with no budget constraints. What appears to have happened, in reality, is that they have chosen to send FIVE officers to Nicky's house as their chosen priority.
There are obviously practical limits. But I don't think we're in any position, from hundreds of kilometres away with almost literally no information at all, to be making assertions about what the police should and should not be focusing on, or how they should be doing it.
As for the five officers at the scene - I suspect that's probably about standard for a search of that sort. Likely only one or two were actually working on the Rawshark case, the others are probably evidence collection specialists or similar. Searches are what they do.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Russell Brown,
Six weeks, actually, with an election intervening.
That seems like a fairly long time to me? I'm saying it hardly seems likely that there's a taskforce on this. I expect it's one case among a number for a couple of detectives or something.
And you need to stop pretending this is standard conduct. It isn’t. It’s an unwarranted fishing expedition involving the seizure of a wide range of material.
I'm not pretending that - I don't think we really know. It's not a situation that comes up often.
I think that if we knew a non-journalist had, for some reason, received a lot of stolen data from a criminal hacker then it wouldn't be surprising to see the same action taken, would it? Search warrants are often issued to collect evidence from material witnesses.
I don't think that the law prevents the police from considering Hager a witness. It seems that they have made some consideration of his rights and appeal by sealing the seized items until a court can rule. Although I'm not sure if that was on their initiative, or because of actions taken by Hager's lawyers.
I have no idea how long it should take to serve such a search warrant - I've never been party to one.
They’ve almost certainly taken a large quantity of unrelated material, along with Hager’s tools of trade and family possessions, and are now saying it’s up to Hager to take costly legal action to get it back. It’s outrageous.
I don't disagree, but I'm not sure that there's a simple answer to this? Should any self-professed journalist (even if a court may have ruled that they are not considered such for the purposes of law) be somehow immune to police actions that any of the rest of us wouldn't be?
If I had been sent the contents of Slater's computer and the police were aware of that I'm not sure I'd be surprised to see the same thing happen to me.
Are you now happy for the police to similarly descend in force on the homes and offices of, say, Matt Nippert and David Fisher and take whatever they fancy? Can you conceive of the chilling implications of this?
Happy? No. But as I say, I'm not sure they are or should be somehow inherently immune to it either. They should have recourse and an opportunity to defend the position and the privileged position of their information, but isn't that ultimately a decision for a court anyway?
My position is two fold:
1) I think it's ridiculous to suggest that the theft of Slater's documents isn't worthy of investigation (either on it's face, or because the Dirty Politics allegations haven't been) -- Although that's clearly an argument you've made2) I'm not convinced that journalists are entirely off limits to a police investigation, provided proper process is followed.
There are obviously fair questions to be raised about the validity or method of the search (was it a fishing expedition? was the length and extent of the search unreasonable) but I'm certainly not convinced it's outright unacceptable.
And yes of course there is some chilling effect, but I don't know where the balance for that should lie.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Presumably you’re speaking for yourself and your pointscoring ‘leftie friends’, because that kind of condescension seems pretty superfluous around here.
There are literally people in this thread (and many around Twitter and elsewhere) saying that the police should not bother investigating this (very evident) crime, but should be investigating the much less obvious crimes disclosed in the book instead.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Luke Williamson,
If we were discussing the corresponding raids on Cameron Slater’s home, Jason Ede’s home and Judith Collin’s home, then I would be more comfortable with it.
There's definitely nothing to suggest they may be in possession of evidence relating to this crime, whereas Hager very clearly is (although as many people have observed, the police stand very little chance of getting anything useful even if a judge allows search of the collected items).
> I realise that they have not been accused of a crime thus far, but, in a sense, that is also part of the problem – the resources are being sent elsewhere.
Ultimately we don't know what resources within the police are being spent on what. It's taken them months to even get to Hager who is very clearly a key point of the investigation so it's not unreasonable to assume it's not a super high priority.
To say that one police action is preventing another is silly. It's silly now and it's silly when people complain that police issuing speeding tickets is stopping them from investigating assaults, or whatever.
The police have to be able to investigate all manner of things. We can't just demand that things we don't think are important be ignored in favour of much less evident crimes that align better with our political preference. We complain when we thing politicians are doing that, but think we should be able to instead?
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to CJM,
Once equipment has been seized it can then be appraised for tracking or snoop implants. From the report they seem to have confiscated a wide range of Hagers gear.
If that were really going to happen they could just as easily break into Hagers house and do it without his knowledge.
If he's truly cautious about data security, and I believe he is, then he'll consider the hardware compromised on return anyway and any intelligence gathering that had been hoped for would be fruitless.
If you want to tamper with someone's hardware, you don't let them know you've had the opportunity to do so.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to CJM,
They’re being called ‘police’ but the SIS will be closely involved with this, dredging Hagers data for correspondence around Snowden and Speargun
I'm choosing to believe that the intelligence agencies will be operating more properly and that won't be the case.
But even if it is, there's no chance that Hager, Snowden et al will have made getting at the content of any of their communications simple. Everyone involved knows very well what they're doing.
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Hard News: Doing over the witness, in reply to Luke Williamson,
Of all the potential avenues of investigation available from the material Nicky published, the one that gets followed up is ‘shooting the messenger’. Nice. I imagine that the PM is ‘comfortable’ with that.
This is the sort of statement that I have a problem with.
They are exclusive of one another. There was definitely a crime committed against Slater, and he is entirely justified in expecting the police to investigate that crime given the nature of it.
Just because we like the end result we shouldn't excuse the original crime.
The fact that the police are investigating that crime doesn't mean other things from the book can't be investigated.
That said, while many things in the book and subsequent are very troubling, I'm not sure many are so clearly criminal. Although those that are may still be investigated.