New Zealand spying on Pacific islands, Snowden leaks say
bbc.com
bbc.com
Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...
"If I wholesale blatantly flout the law as Prime Minister I'm never going to survive anyway."
That's such a twisted (and effective, it seems) way of convincing people that he hasn't been involved in any wrong-doing.
Let us not forget his statement on the GCSB bill that allowed sweeping powers for the spy agency (under his control) [1].
"All they can do is protect you, so it's against malware or a virus. ... On your computer at home you almost certainly have Norton Antivirus...that is exactly what that is, at a much higher level."
Slippery doesn't even begin to describe the character of John Key.
[1] http://www.3news.co.nz/tvshows/campbelllive/john-key-defends... (from 8:00 in the video)
>Last month, Auckland man Shane Warbrooke put in an OIA request to the prime minister's office, asking for "any evidence to disprove the theory that Mr John Key is in fact a David Icke style shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering humanity towards enslavement".
>"To the best of my knowledge, no. Having been asked that question directly, I've taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both have confirmed I'm not a reptile," a smiling Mr Key said today.
>"So I'm certainly not a reptile. I've never been in a spaceship, never been in outer space, and my tongue's not overly long either."
http://www.3news.co.nz/politics/john-key-im-not-a-reptile-20...
I hope I'm not the only one who thinks that excuse would sound ridiculous. You can always say "I didn't do A because from now on I'm defining A so narrow that it doesn't include what I did", but that's not how language works.
All kidding aside, any minister worth his or her salt would just keep bending the definition of 'mass surveillance' until it no longer applies.
I never thought I'd see the day where a sarcastic slippery slope argument about the Patriot Act made in 2004 would manifest into our reality.
I think many people were non-sarcastically making these slippery slope arguments, at least in part because they feared these exact sorts of scenarios.
The reveal about warrantless wiretaps slowly encroached on their retorts, but the FISA courts, NSLs and the mass collection of everyone's communications and whereabouts is really when we came full circle.
(Or, as it usually works over the Internet, "it pattern-matches some random fallacy list I vaguely remember, so it's wrong!!111".)
The more I think about it the worse headache I get, so I'll leave it at that and hope for the best.
In this case, the leak came by way of The Intercept, which employs Glenn Greenwald as an editor, who got the documents from Snowden in person in Hong Kong before Snowden went into hiding. So I don't see any reason to assume they're lying about where the material is coming from.
The problem isn't that some nation is spying on some other nation, it's a problem of scale and scope. Fearing a military coup does not warrant "intercepting and storing content and metadata of all communications" happening on that island.
The ye old argument of a defensive force. Why should we spend all this money on a army that just sit at home and wait for others to attack?
This is of course different from when you have a defined target which threatens the country in a specific way. At that point, a defensive force and intelligence service should be deployed as it is appropriate to address that target.
Add details like who should go to prison, why, where did they cross the line, are they actually violating a law or do we need a new law, is it a problem with the system or with the individuals. All of these would be interesting things to discuss and would make your comment more meaningful. Right now I'm not even sure who you would like to see in prison.
Your comment is useless and contributes nothing towards a discussion, so there's that.
The 'correct' dialog is to discuss how it's natural for our systems of governance to want to spy on everyone, and the 'correct' actions fall between accepting this or petitioning our masters to roll back 'some' of these advances.
Your individual outrage is of no value to the collective.
In summary, if you come into a thread shitting all over things with nothing to back up what you say, you'll get downvoted.
#edit then in that case you'd think the post would be judged as having no value and be downvoted.... oh wait, that would require a lack of hypocrisy.
It probably doesn't even make sense to say that this or that group of nations is "worse" than the others at this point in mankind's history. That would be like walking into a room full of pregnant high school girls... and picking the one you feel is the "most virgin".