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Monday, March 26, 2012

NZ - now one nation under CCTV (10 reasons to hate new Search & Surveillance Bill)

You stupid cop worshipping authority sluts.

We are a nation of sleepy hobbits easily manipulated by Shire Volk into handing over vast unchecked powers to the State. With the passing of the draconian Search and Surveillance Bill last week, a little part of progressive NZ died as the Police managed to get a wet dream wish list of spying powers through without any real safe guards whatsoever. Effectively we've just handed the eye of Mordor over to the state.

This isn't a left wing or right wing issue, this is about freedom from an all pervasive state. It is about the very values of a progressive democracy, and to allow the State such powers with no judicial over sight and no checks and balances is more proof that we are sliding further and further into Authoritarian Capitalism with every passing week. The saddest thing is that we all just let John Key do it.

The irony here is that NZers are the first to rear up on their hind legs and bleat 'NANNY STATE' when a Government attempts to remove the legal loop hole that allows abusive parents to get away with bashing their kids, yet not a whimper from them when the State allows 70 agencies the ability to break into our homes and spy on us with all of the 'authority' of a fucking Justice of the Peace.

This is Nanny State on meth. We are becoming a functional police state, not a liberal democracy.

This legislation represents the largest erosion of civil liberties since the 1951 lockout, we should all be deeply ashamed at the way we've allowed our rights to simply be taken from us in this manner. The blood we've spilt on foreign beaches defending our democracy and freedom has been squandered and wasted. Why bother paying such a steep price for freedom and democracy when we so willingly hand its fruits over without a word?

We deserve contempt for this. For the slower members of the herd, here are the 10 reasons we should never have accepted the Search and Surveillance Bill.

1: These spying powers are not just for the police - they can be extended to 70 other Government agencies. Why the hell should the Pork Board be allowed to break into your home and plant spy cameras?

2: The so called safe guards for the other Government agencies is that to use these powers will require the signature of the Minister. Seeing as John Key signed off on the new BMW's 4 separate times and claimed he still had no idea what he had agreed to, a Minister's signature as a safe guard is as flimsy as an umbrella is at protecting you from tsunamis.

3: The ONLY submission received in support of these dizzying new powers was from the Police, EVERY OTHER SUBMISSION was against it. How can we formulate public policy as sensitive as the power to spy on one another when the only support is from the ones gaining these new powers?

4: NZers have lost their right to silence, the Police can force you to answer questions on mere suspicion of you committing a crime now.

5: NZers now have to hand over any information to the Police not if they prove you are guilty of anything, but based on suspicion and if you refuse to provide this information, you can be jailed for 12 months.

6: The Police no longer have to get a search warrant based on evidence to spy on you, they only have to get a surveillance device warrant which can be obtained by any officer of any of the 70 Government agencies who can now ask for it based on no evidence at all, just their 'suspicion' that you might be involved in a crime. This surveillance device warrant can be obtained from just a bloody JP.

7: The Police and 70 other state agencies won't even need a warrant of any kind once you are arrested if they think further evidence is at another address. So you could be arrested on suspicion, and your car, workplace, friends homes etc etc can be searched without any warrant.

8: The powers are sold as being used against 'organized crime' but the definition by the Police of 'organized crime' is 3 people who know each other.

9: Even if the agency doesn't find what they are looking for as outlined in their suspicions, any evidence they do find can still be used. This means the spying is pure fishing expedition, the 'suspicion' used to obtain the spying warrant doesn't even need to match what they find.

10: These NZ spying powers by every Government agency go well beyond anything in Europe, Canada, Australia or even the US.


I've watched the progress of this Bill from the very start and with hand on heart would have sworn there was no way this would have advanced as far as it has. I thought the fiasco of the so called Urewera terrorism trial would have put a screaming halt to these new spying powers. To my genuine shock it was used to ram through retrospective legislation legalizing illegal Police spying tactics.

I honestly don't think most NZers have any idea what they've given away and that if there had been a real attempt to educate NZers of the ramifications of just allowing these powers to be available to 70 agencies then there is no way it would have passed.

This abomination that erodes so many of our civil rights should never have been allowed to pass. The history books will be far more damning of our collective apathy on this than the current entertainment driven media are.

Sleepy hobbits reap what they sow.

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7 Comments:

At 26/3/12 10:34 am, Blogger DebsisDead said...

There's no doubt that thinking Kiwis have to make a choice, one that is difficult at the best of times and nigh impossible to make an objective answer to in an economic depression.

The question is "Will I stay or will I go". Last time I asked myself that was in the beginning of the Muldoon years when it became obvious to most of us that not only had we been educated well beyond the requirements of any potential employment, we were going to be further frustrated by living in an authoritarian state where a decision on the colour of Air NZ seat coverings warranted a full meeting of Cabinet.
I bolted early on in the piece and by the mid-80's a stroll around the corridors of power in Melbourne, Sydney or Canberra felt like a scene from "The Big Chill" one was constantly bumping into people you went to school and Uni with, most of the interesting ones anyway.

I still remember the horrible shock of what some of these bright minds departure had done to NZ when I returned to NZ for god knows why, I found myself at a party that apart from myself was almost completely peopled by members of the legal profession.
Nowadays I would to anything to avoid a situation where lawyers outnumbered citizens, but I had just returned from a town where such a gathering was likely to provide a great deal of humour plus the occasional insight.

So many lawyers I met in Oz claimed to be wanna-be actors, so give em a couple cold ones and the bullshit would really start to flow.
Fleeing the main area to the kitchen was risky as drunken barristers could be bailing-up members of the judiciary about some rank injustice that had been allowed to occur because of a mixture of bureaucratic incompetence and fear of upsetting large policemen.

The living area of this 'party' in NZ was so dull, full of superficial saws about that year's current "best school" in Auckland, I fled to the kitchen, where the briefs were drunk, to be sure, but they weren't stressing themselves over some issue where the process had failed to deliver for a citizen, no, not likely. The converstation was centered on the best way to poison a tree without being detected.

The lawyers pre-occupation was with maximising returns on the overheating property market.
I left that party as soon as I could and have never considered a gathering of NZ legal minds as being a suitable spot for any normal human to occupy.

This is the dilemma that concerned kiwis must confront.
If thinking kiwis leave, giving the joint over to the greedy & half smart as they did in the 1970's and 80's, this society will get much worse. iredeemably worse. In effect it would be leaving those who are already most likely to suffer the most from these assholes, in an awful situation.
Next time we came back to check out the rellies we would find thousands of families living out rough under bridges etc, while NZ's housing stock was being slapped up with a coat a paint ready to be flogged off to any passing foreigner with more money than sense.

There would be the housing NZ act before parliament which gave wormald guards the power to round up homeless people and throw them in derelict wool storage sheds, 1 per square meter. The 'radical left' would be caught up in a discusion over whether that should in fact be 1 per 1.5 sq meters.

Dystopia rules OK.

 
At 26/3/12 1:27 pm, Blogger Lord Psymon said...

Let me ask a question...
What happened to the bill of human rights? The UN Declaration to be exact?
Aren't we one of the nations who are meant to be following this?
Yet it took me under 10 seconds to spot the article in that declaration that this bill is a blatant violation of.
If I ever get pulled up at court, I will demand to read out the UN Declaration of Human Rights and then remind them that the Government has been blatantly violating it with no regard.

 
At 26/3/12 7:27 pm, Blogger Nitrium said...

Well, we might not agree on everything Bomber, I 110% agree with you on this. This totalitarian shit needs to stop. Now.

 
At 26/3/12 9:39 pm, Blogger David. P said...

Meh. I got all upset and righteous about this... when was it? Must be at least two years ago now. Constantly talked to people about it, sent in a submission, everything I could think of. Now, to be really honest, I don't care anymore. People who are lazy enough to let this happen to them deserve to have it happen to them. Maybe when things get bad enough people might start to take notice.

 
At 27/3/12 8:52 pm, Blogger frances jane said...

I have read this Children of the Corn meets Minority Report act. It means any bitch can kick not just your door but also you head in at the whiff of a law which could be going to be broken. Any computer can be hacked, you can be tracked, smacked and cracked for a password to your files. Where is this leading? DNA is your personal information, computers are now built with single atoms welcome to the Singularity, courtesy Norbert Weiner, Jose Delgado et al

 
At 28/3/12 6:32 am, Blogger frances jane said...

ps..while I totally understand your contempt for the sleepy sheepley hobbits, Bomber, I must point out that because of the way the lawmaking process is randomly and incoherently reported on by msm (not you)a lot of laws seem to have already been amended when they are still at the reading stage, eg:http://www.3news.co.nz/Welfare-bill-passes-first-reading/tabid/1607/articleID/248292/Default.aspx ..now I read the news often and yet I believed this bill had already passed under the kind of urgency demanded by needing to change one's undies or whatever it is they do after lunch at Bellamys. My point is that, after reading this article and seeing that the bill has not actually passed, I can now lobby my MP regarding the issue. Same with the search & surveill..I was totally gutted to discover the timeline on this crapulous piece of porcine swill

 
At 28/3/12 7:23 am, Blogger colinfisher said...

it's so amaizingly awesome to watch this NWO 1984 world unfold before my eyes I was 18 & Reading "The fine print" in 1988 there were so many of us trying to awake people even now it's kind the new trend to use words like sheeple but truth is people like Bomber only make such topics a trendy interest while even darker legislation is past.

 

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