The Moment Our Privacy Disappeared Into Dotcom’s Ego.

Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald – I have had big problems with Assange from the get-go - could not have picked a worse vehicle to deliver their important message about mass surveillance than last night’s circus The Moment of Truth, paid for and planned by a man both men should have had the nouse to keep a great distance from. Instead of journalistically delivering their data in a non-partisan forum called New Zealand’s free press, they both used their judgement to nonsensically get involved in the partisan hard-Left politics of our tiny country, in a political hit event designed to disrupt a democratic election with dirty politics, so making me suspect the judgement of both men over all: I'm gutted, disgusted and appalled.

 

And that’s all I have to say on that fiasco, because I’m on holiday trying to pull together a private project that has nothing to do with this blog. Though that said, I will never let the below hypocrisy pass unchallenged, being the contradiction over privacy of a Left whose authoritarian model of the state necessitates mass surveillance with penalties for non-compliance, and has set up the most ruthless secret police forces in history to enforce the destruction of the private lives of every individual. Of every Left MP and blogger I’ve pressed to respond to this, not one has:

 

With all this talk of mass surveillance, spare a thought for those whose private lives are intricately monitored by the state: beneficiaries
— Sue Bradford (@suebr) September 15, 2014

@suebr And what of the taxpayers whose lives are intruded in daily, massively, by a department in no way bound by our Privacy Act?
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) September 15, 2014

@suebr But welcome to Orwell's 1984. We call it a welfare state, funded coercively by the tax surveillance state. GCSB have nothing on IRD.
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) September 15, 2014

@suebr But hope u note the Left's glaring contradiction: spying 2 save us from terrorism, bad: to take our income/property, fine, apparently
— Mark Hubbard (@MarkHubbard33) September 15, 2014

 

To be frank, Sue, mass surveillance is despicable in any guise, albeit I’m happier being protected from terrorists, than being protected from use of my own income or property by the irrational cult of redistribution – irrational because welfare begets poverty, and law aimed at forcing the common good on a people, leads to an embittered, barbaric society, not a better one.

 

 

Further Reading:

 

The Left’s Glaring Contradiction:  IRD, GCSB,FATCA.

 

The Police State Powers of IRD.

 

How the Green’s Child Poverty Policy will Grow Child Poverty.

 

Rise of the Warrior Cop … Evidence Says Culture Well Established in New Zealand Too.

I’m sadly succumbing to a theory, or rather, to the weight of history, that once the state gets to a certain size, and a certain penetration into our lives, it starts to subconsciously militarise its police against its own citizenry, who become cast as the enemy in a necessary Orwellian forever-war, and thus the justification for use of force and pan-population surveillance for no other purpose than the state's own continuation. We’re there, I think. By this ‘theoretical’ stage enough proles have been brain-washed into thinking in terms of a state theocracy to be obeyed in all things, or at least are reliant on the state for their living, therefore the government law enforcement agencies begin to leave a secular peace keeping role and take about them a religious fervour protecting mindlessly all things in the name of the state. Nihilism trumps philosophy; there’s no going back to a free, peaceful classical liberalism. Following so many of my other posts, it’s paradise lost, again.

When I see some of what is happening – much of it farcical, but deadly serious – in the United Police States of America, and cast my mind over recent happenings in New Zealand, the above conclusion is inescapable. The below quotations are from a piece largely behind the pay-wall at The Times:

 AT DAWN a dozen masked police officers, grenades strapped to their hips, smashed through the gates of the designated “crime zone” in rural Pennsylvania in an armoured car. 

A helicopter hovered 300ft overhead, packed with more officers ready to abseil down and swamp the enemy. 

Their target, Daniel Allgyer, an Amish farmer, was surrounded before he could reach for his deadliest weapon — a pitchfork. 

His crime: selling unpasteurised milk across the border to customers in the Washington suburbs, illegal under federal law. 

Fearful of being “Swatted” again, the farmer promised to desist. “These big guys in black, with weapons he had never seen before, terrified him,” said a friend. “Dan always thought the police were on his side, but they behaved like an occupying army.”

Funnily enough, by which I mean sadly, again, I’ve blogged before on this heavy-handed authoritarian approach to milk sales; in that post regarding milk sales in Australia. Apparently we must be saved from ourselves, even if that means the state intimidating, raiding, and locking up adults for wanting to drink unpasteurised milk. In some type of state-mad state-made parody, what is happening is the war on drugs is morphing into the war on milk, pets, and organic vegetables. The Times article continues:

Radley Balko, … author of a new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, says President Obama has revived funding schemes that encourage the police to militarise – plans that were abandoned by his predecessor, George W Bush.

“For some it’s now easier to get Pentagon military surplus … than conventional policing tools like up to date computers, so obviously police chiefs grab them,” Balko said. “Then they have to use them.” He said that many federal agencies were using powers originally granted for the war on drugs to launch armed assaults on organic farmers, firms that breach environmental laws and to clamp down on illegal immigrants.

The first move by Swat teams is to ‘clear’ buildings of people and their pets: they routinely shoot not just guard dogs but poodles, lapdogs and, in a raid in Missouri that netted a single marijuana cigarette, a family’s corgi.’

Sounds like too many ‘boys’ in the police force. And look at New Zealand. We already have the entire infrastructure of the surveillance state in place; the sanction first legislated via the Tax Administration Act. The broadening of that to total population surveillance happens very soon when National and its muppet, that ‘willing seller’ of our right to be left alone, Peter Dunne, put the GCSB Bill into law. And noting while I support the principle of intellectual property, there was yet that ridiculous show of inappropriate force called the raid on Kim Dotcom, and the more I read of Tame Iti and the Urewera raids, the more I grow uncomfortable with that whole episode also. But the Dotcom raid especially: from the very first when watching the news footage my mind leaped to boys and their toys having a great day out, even getting to fly in the choppers. Remembering that raid was essentially at the behest of the United Police States of America, there must have been many boys-own fantasies fulfilled in the months planning up to that one. The manner and over-reach of that raid was an insult, and a wake-up, to all of us. Again from the article:

In 2008 Swat officers raided the home of Cheye Calvo, the mayor of Berwyn Heights, a Washington suburb, after a political rival posted a bag of marijuana to his house and tipped them off. During the raid they shot dead his two Labradors. The Washington Post called it ‘a Keystone Kops operation from start to finish.’     

Yeah. We’re there alright. What was the Dotcom raid other than Keystone Kops? So New Zealand organic farmers, you had better hold onto your private parts, or at least encrypt your private conversations, ‘they’re coming for ya’. Buggered if I know why, trafficking in vegetables or some damned thing, though I suspect it’s more because you dare to live your own lives, think for yourselves, you’re often a bit ‘out there’ aren’t you, a bit ‘alternative; definitely seditious. We can’t have difference in the bland, creamy and homogenous society, a GCSB spook in every computer and phone. What did you think this was? The free society?

And lock up your pets: the West isn't safe for them anymore; if we're not shooting them we're applying pain to them. Re that last, to Minister McClay who would not front up to the 'stop animal testing for party pills' protests yesterday: that's not good enough. In fact it was gutless, and I still want answers to my questions please.

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?]

Of Comedy, @Whaleoil @KimDotcom Freedom of Speech & Bounded Liberty.

Like nothing else, comedy - and for me, stand-up comedy - can light a fire that warms the coldest, darkest nights of the mind – but should there be boundaries placed on it?

Kim Dotcom, of whom I'm no acolyte, because I support IP, tweeted Saturday night to the effect of 'what would his political enemies try next, perhaps besmirching him with a rape claim?’ (I’m assuming, referencing Assange). In truth, it wasn't funny, and I'm not even sure he meant it as a joke: but that's beside the point, being the reaction to that tweet which has overtaken it.

On this Saturday night, all I wanted to do was watch a movie, not lose my play-time, and a good bottle of wine, to defending Kim Dotcom, but as he doesn't follow anyone else on Twitter, other than Obama, and he probably doesn’t know he’s upset anyone until the MSM, or his lawyer, tell him so - I've stopped following people (self-styled celebrities) that do this, for all they must want to do is shout at me: I’m interested in dialogue – and despite, when the PC brigade, of all people led by Whaleoil, instantly fell upon his pate, I originally held out by saying:

Stopped myself making a tweet that would've brought on me unjustified grief owing to how context-less stupid people can be. #BeProudOfMeMum

I was within fourteen minutes, of course, stupidly embroiled in it anyway.

Whaleoil’s tweets were of the following oeuvre:

Not cool making rape jokes Kim...very poor taste...what next gas bill jokes?

Yeah; really funny subject rape, eh Kim. Not! Sometimes it's just better to keep your mouth shut..

Bullshit...there is no parallel and jokes about rape NEVER have context

What next jokes about gas bills and ovens? He is already making Jewish jokes too #toofar

Intuitively - that is, without thinking - he’s right isn’t he? It is bad taste, and perhaps something else … well, for us decent folk. Regardless, I really wanted to stop my mind for a night so I ignored it; ignored it; ignored it: then couldn’t. My following three insomniac tweets in the early hours of Sunday morning give my thinking on this (some clarified now I’m not restricted to Twitter’s 140 characters):

Actually, I'm getting fidgety on this. Would I make a rape joke: no! But ...

Whale says no Jewish jokes (so there goes Seinfeld’s stock in trade); so what of disabled jokes (there goes Ricky Gervais's routine); is there a list someone would like to give of forbidden topics for comedy?

Jimmy Carr says there can be no topic outside comedy, that is the point of it ... Give me a reasoned argument against?

And I mean it: give me an argument against?

Because where do we stop nannying other people’s judgement for them? Regarding jokes about the disabled, I remember a Gervais DVD that starts with him sparring lines with a man in a wheelchair that had me in stitches, and then there’s poor Frankie Boyle who, due to the preciousness surrounding the Paralympics, is, I suspect, guilty only of bad comedic timing, but could lose his job anyway, though he's holding his ground bravely.Who is willing to show me the line at which we stop other’s offending us, or not? Irish jokes in Christchurch are apparently wearing a bit thin, so do we pronounce all who do Irish jokes as bad blokes? Are blond jokes okay, Whaleoil? Baby jokes: I don't think I've seen one of those that doesn't offend me. What about cartoons about God, which I know would deeply, deeply offend all of my family, other than just two of us who somehow fell out of the familial mind and became atheists. And for the record, enjoining my last tweet to his, I've heard Jimmy Carr do a Holocaust joke, deliberately, to test this very point, and his audience laughed, as I did, because it was funny. Didn’t mean he, or I, ever thought the Holocaust wasn’t anything other than pure, inhuman evil: indeed, that was the point of his joke (and much of the point of this blog against statism, for that matter).

Perhaps I’ve lost my judgement, of a sudden. Though what I know for certain is I'd rather live in a world where there was freewheeling, albeit risqué, anarchic, comedy, and people weren't scared to write their minds, or out their prejudices, rather than a dour Old Testament world where good taste is shouted down at me from on high, by decree, tweet, or blog, by the self-anointed, whether that be God or Whaleoil, with the concomitant threat always implied in that (by which I mean the tone of Whaleoil’s tweets). Especially when these decrees are judged against the man, or the other Big Guy - see, testing comedic limits again - and might thereby be seen as sanctimonious hypocrisy. And respectful of what Whaleoil has done with his blog, trying as much to play the issue, here, as the man, as is this blog's raison d'être, just a question for you Whale; when you tweeted up this storm of outrage last night - and I know part of your problem is you just don't like Dotcom; got it - but when tweeting, were you wearing your y-fronts or, a term you use often on your own blog, your panty-waisters on this one?

So, returning to my question. I'm prepared to keep a slightly open, if sceptical, mind; at least until it closes in on the truth again. Notwithstanding at this stage my mind warms only to a sodality of comedians, whom I hope never feel forced to 'shut their mouths', as some would have them, rather than the morose, piously preached sanctions of those who would seek to capture me mid-laugh, and tear my tongue out. The fires of freedom must not be extinguished to the darkness, again: no to the humourless, humour Taliban.