Life Behind the IRon Drape: Privacy: Kim Dotcom and New Zealand's GCSB

Blog description.

Accentuating the Liberal in Classical Liberal: Advocating Ascendency of the Individual & a Politick & Literature to Fight the Rise & Rise of the Tax Surveillance State. 'Illigitum non carborundum'.

Liberty and freedom are two proud words that have been executed from the political lexicon: they were frog marched and stood before a wall of blank minds, then forcibly blindfolded, and shot, with the whimpering staccato of ‘equality’ and ‘fairness’ resounding over and over. And not only did this atrocity go unreported by journalists in the mainstream media, they were in the firing squad.

The premise of this blog is simple: the Soviets thought they had equality, and welfare from cradle to grave, until the illusory free lunch of redistribution took its inevitable course, and cost them everything they had. First to go was their privacy, after that their freedom, then on being ground down to an equality of poverty only, for many of them their lives as they tried to escape a life behind the Iron Curtain. In the state-enforced common good, was found only slavery to the prison of each other's mind; instead of the caring state, they had imposed the surveillance state to keep them in line. So why are we accumulating a national debt to build the slave state again in the West? Where is the contrarian, uncomfortable literature to put the state experiment finally to rest?

Comments Policy: I'm not moderating comments, so keep it sane and go away with the spam. Government officials please read disclaimer at bottom of page.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Privacy: Kim Dotcom and New Zealand's GCSB

So as part of the ‘fiasco of officials’ that has been the Dotcom raid and its aftermath, we now find that New Zealand’s central intelligence agency, the Government Communications Security Bureau, has mucked up its part in the raid also, in what must be a perfect fail mark for the State now, with every government department involved having overridden its powers; itself an admittance of the semi-police state we live under. But for me, there is something all the reportage on this is so far missing. As stated in the NBR piece:

GCSB had acted unlawfully while assisting the Police to locate certain individuals subject to arrest warrants issued in the case. The Bureau had acquired communications in some instances without statutory authority.

I thought we had separation of powers for a reason. I don’t know what the limitations on the GCSB are, but I just assumed their jurisdiction only concerned matters of national security, such as foreign terror risk, a function which I’m quite comfortable with. But do I take from this that police can routinely use the frightening privacy busting powers of GCSB to augment their own powers, once exceeded, to prosecute routine 'domestic' criminal cases: copyright, theft, drugs, etc? And what other departments can do this also? IRD already have more powers of snooping, search and seizure than the police, so I assume they’re linked in to GCSB as well?

I support IP, and so if Dotcom is found to have breached same, then that is a legitimate matter for state sanction, but damn I’m fed up with government departments that already have police state powers - when viewed against the civilised classical liberal society - casually ignoring even those few boundaries they have, and thumbing their nose at process in a way you or I as individuals would be crucified over. And it's easy to fall into the assumption that it's only Dotcom's notoriety, in this instance, that has brought to light what is routine behaviour occurring here, and the inferences that has for whether we have the rule of law, or not, in New Zealand.

[Listening to a snippet on National Radio, that news broadcast ran that the problem was they were spying on New Zealand nationals and they aren't allowed to do that. If Wiki is to be believed, that would seem to be in line with their governing purpose ... but, the question remains: are they spying on other New Zealand nationals? What linkages do other government departments have with them?]