I get sooooo cross when I read anything that Key says.
"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.
>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."
I guess one could argue this isn't Mass" surveillance since it was targeting specific nations. I don't agree, just that words can be twisted in hindsight to alter meaning.
"Look, it's not Mass Surveilance, we are only spying on all communications of a few of our neighbour countries. It's not like we were spying on the whole world"
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.
There were and are many people calling it for what it is. Defenders of the bill would sometimes respond sarcastically with what they thought was hyperbole.
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.
No I mean you said that "because it turned out to be true, the original argument wasn't a fallacy", which is kind of "reversed fallacy fallacy" I guess, but I don't think it matters which "direction" it goes for the name of the phenomena. I might be wrong, obviously. I'll ask around...
The more I think about it the worse headache I get, so I'll leave it at that and hope for the best.
As a wannabe-kiwi, I'm hardly surprised. PM Key has been 'cooperative' with the US in most things so it's not surprising Five Eyes are being used to its/their fullest potential. Good thing GCSB has been talked about a lot even before this revelation... And about TPPA.
Hey there, wannabe Kiwi. Look me up if you want to hit the ground running with connections to the startup/tech world. I'm "Nat Torkington" and google finds my contact details. Always happy to help Kiwis and wannabe Kiwis :)
Snowden leaked a huge number of classified documents to journalists, and ever since, those journalists have been sorting through the material and publishing stories based on what they find.
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.
By all means, if New Zealand is worried about Fiji military coups, then it's the duty of New Zealand's intelligence service to monitor the Fiji military.
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.
"a foreign intelligence service that wasn't gathering some foreign intelligence, I'd ask him 'what the hell are we paying the money for?"
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.
intelligence services should operate the same way as the police do. The police job is to find out who commit crimes, but that doesn't mean they should invade peoples home at random in order to find out who the criminals are. Their start position is one where they suspect a specific crime is committed by specific people, and then go after those people using methods approved by society.
The comment has so little substance that it's not promoting any meaningful discussion. I don't think the problem is your opinion or that you are outraged, it's how you chose to express it.
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.
Welcome to HN, where your comments aren't censored, but insead they are 'groomed' by those who consistently cherish 'valuable' conversations by pandering to 'karma' points.
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.
pastas, your account is hell-banned so you need not worry about being downvoted anymore. As for your -10, you have your own narrative but let me give you the perspective of someone who had little interest in the "disassociating woman" article and no personal stake in it. Your first two comments on HN ever are a single word discounting the post, with nothing to back it up. To many (including myself) that's a waste of electrons. Your more eloquent responses amount to the same thing, just with more words. You can write that off as "just <my> opinion" (to which I add "duh"), but ask yourself what it was you said that has more substance than just being contrarian.
In summary, if you come into a thread shitting all over things with nothing to back up what you say, you'll get downvoted.
Sorry, can't reply to dead posts so I highjacked your reply. If you don't have showdead turned on, you won't see the dead post from user pastas that I replied to. pastas has a theory on his -10 karma, a theory with which I disagree. The unrelated article was referenced because his comments there make a better example.
I don't comment here to necessarily disagree with your assertion... only to say that the same is true for the rest of the world. ALL nations... are corrupt and unworthy of trust.
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".
Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objecti...